One, the maker of the world's most powerful software-development tool is growing at a stunning rate. Two, your next business will be built on it.
Photographs by Robyn Twomey
Fork, Yeah Chris Wanstrath (left) and Tom Preston-Werner. Their little side project is now worth $750 million.
Photographs by Robyn Twomey
The De-Nerding Wanstrath and Preston-Werner want GitHub to be used for collaborations that have nothing to do with software.
It's "Beer:30," and Tom Preston-Werner is standing at a lectern in the vast San Francisco loft where GitHub makes its home. Before him, arrayed on a mashed-up assortment of chairs and couches or topping up a glass of whiskey at the overstocked house bar, are maybe 40 GitHub employees; another 44 around the world are watching a live feed. Preston-Werner has the tired eyes and untended facial hair of a new father, and the low-def biceps of a software engineer. Atop his head sits a mammoth banana-yellow foam-rubber cowboy hat.
The weekly gathering begins with Preston-Werner welcoming a few new employees. The co-founder and CEO then runs through a series of shout-outs to folks who have finished off pieces of code designed either to improve the GitHub site or to make it work better for clients. Then Preston-Werner takes a few minutes to wax philosophical. Taking a page from science writer Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From, he invokes the importance of "serendipitous interactions," the way powerful ideas can emerge from the most random collisions of people, thoughts, and artifacts. He urges his people--many of them recent hires, most of them in their early 30s, tops--to go out and cultivate new experience, to engage with the unknown. To underline his point, Preston-Werner reminds them that out of the investment the company received in July from Andreessen Horowitz, "about half of a percent" was picked up by Ron Conway, known in these parts as the godfather of Silicon Valley. Preston-Werner met Conway at a Y Combinator conference. Serendipity, indeed.
That venture round was worth $100 million. It valued this little five-year-old company at $750 million. As Preston-Werner speaks, between pulls on a beer, his giant foam chapeau jiggles gently.
As nerd endeavors go, GitHub is pretty much at the top of the food chain. What began as a private project with zero commercial intent has since emerged as one of the world's most--if not the most--powerful development tools for software. In just a few years, it has inserted itself at the center of the developer universe by making it easy for coders around the world to work together. If "software is eating the world," as Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen put it not long ago, GitHub is where much of that software gets its teeth.
The Andreessen Horowitz bet was the "biggest investment we've ever made," says Peter Levine, the partner who now sits on GitHub's board. It's not hard to see why the VC firm went for it: GitHub's momentum is astonishing. The company says it took 38 months to host its millionth project on the site; the five millionth came in just two months and 21 days. "I don't know a start-up that's not on GitHub," says Jay Sullivan, VP of products at Mozilla, maker of the Firefox Web browser. In other words, your next company, or parts of it, will be built here.
GitHub started as an effort by Preston-Werner and co-founder Chris Wanstrath to solve what Preston-Werner calls a "pain-in-the-ass problem": using something called Git, a version control system developed by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. A version control system is a tool that allows multiple coders to work on the same piece of software without losing track of the various changes made in each version or allowing the source code to be corrupted with lots of contradictory fixes. Torvalds built Git in reaction to the centralized structure of previous version control tools, which made it all but impossible for developers to work together independently. And though Torvalds's system "makes collaboration possible, it doesn't make it easy," says Preston-Werner. He sensed that Git could be "this superpowerful thing if only you could understand it."
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