Very simply, you need to see VCs as branding companies who give people with many followers brand deals. VCs think that if you have a lot of stars, you must have hit product-market fit — or something close — because many developers have started using your open-source tool. This isn’t necessarily always the case. Every weekend project from Andrej Karpathy gets loads of stars because he is the most famous person on GitHub. What I’ve noticed a lot is that the repos with the most stars most of the time already came from big companies open-sourcing their tools, or people building free versions of paid software.