Nothing like a handgrenade of doubt to cause the venture capitalists to scuttle for cover. Is the investment in open source a bubble? Fuck no. $144 million into open source based companies is nothing at all. A drop in the bucket compared to the amount of venture money out there right now. Unfortunately something like this ends up causing doubt, and putting pressure on the open source folks to post immediate returns when their venture backers start getting nervous that they bought into open source and now others are pausing before dipping their fingers into the pot. As for any open source company requiring a community, sure it’s a good base metric. If all you’re doing is cookie cutter matching of investment profiles, sure, put that in there as a checkbox. But I’m sure there’s someone else who’s going to come up and prove that wrong at some point. A company with a strong internal development team and an open source product that uses the open nature of their offering as more of a risk management lever for their customers than a development technique for including outside resources. There are other models out there I’m sure. I thought venture was supposed to help find those other models, not just pile on the one that’s already there.