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GitHub CEO: We're helping software eat the world

GitHub CEO Tom Preston-Werner explains GitHub's appeal and what it means to 'optimize for happiness'

By Eric Knorr, InfoWorld, 11/05/12

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Knorr: It's my understanding that you've built quite a successful business.

Preston-Werner: That's correct.

Knorr: So why would you need such a big influx of capital? You have a successful company; you seem to have a company culture that everyone likes.

Preston-Werner: The biggest answer is that github.com and GitHub as a product are just the beginning of what we want to do. Step one is really doubling down on enterprise and pushing forward in enterprise and pushing forward in ways that the enterprise world hasn't seen before. That means the way that we sell it, the sales process. The way that you install it, we built from scratch technology that allows you to upgrade your enterprise installations very easily and we have releases very often, more often than most enterprise companies.

That's critical because we want people in enterprises using essentially the same version of GitHub they're using online. A lot of those enterprise users are also going to be github.com users, and they don't want to be switching back and forth and saying, "Oh, where are all the features? They're missing from my enterprise install and that makes me unhappy." Pushing for enterprise is huge. Also, there is some stuff we're going to be working on in the enterprise space that I can't really talk about, but some of the money will be going there.

Knorr: In this day and age lots of enterprises are subscribing to public cloud services. Why wouldn't you expect them to simply use the public cloud version of GitHub?

Preston-Werner: Well, they will go that direction eventually. But the problem is that this is people's code. People see their code as their most valuable intellectual property. They're still going to be very hesitant to put that outside of their own firewalls due to either their perception of the Internet as a scary place or legal requirements, SOX compliance issues, HIPAA compliance-type things.

Knorr: Obviously you still want it to be remotely accessible and collaborative, so when you install it, you're setting up a separate instance similar to what you're hosting, right?

Preston-Werner: That's exactly right. [The enterprise version] is a whole GitHub just for your company. But within a company you get those same benefits of having a social coding environment. People can see everything that's going on throughout all the projects they can access. You can follow and get updates when things happen to those projects. You can collaborate on the code through pull requests, where you create a branch, you do some development, you issue a pull request to that project -- which is where you can discuss the changes that you've made. Essentially it's a way to discuss what you've changed. That's huge because it allows for code reveal in a really natural way.

Knorr: Up until now your enterprise traction has been more or less organic?

Preston-Werner: We don't do a lot of external marketing. Really github.com is the marketing for GitHub Enterprise. All of the developers who are using github.com for open source or working on something with their friends, now they're working in an enterprise and they're using something terrible and to go their manager and say, "Hey, we need to get GitHub Enterprise."


For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.

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