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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: The classic pull model for software as a service. Individuals discover it and they sell it to management. So part of the investment is going to be for selling directly to management?

Preston-Werner: That's part of it -- marketing efforts. Money will be going into marketing efforts to get in touch with the CTOs and CIOs of larger companies just so that they know GitHub exists. When developers come to a manager and say, "Hey, we need GitHub," the managers have seen the marketing and can say, "OK, I know what GitHub is, I know it's legitimate and let's have a discussion about it," instead of saying, "I don't know what GitHub is, get back to work."

Knorr: How do you plan on making that pitch to the enterprise?

Preston-Werner: If we can demonstrate to managers of large companies that we can help them build software more quickly and with greater developer happiness, then they will buy GitHub products. Simple, right?

One of the big reasons that we took the investment from Andreessen Horowitz is its belief in software as the future of the world. You've probably seen Marc Andreessen's article, "Why software is eating the world." That was really big for us. We're a company that allows software to be written more efficiently with greater developer happiness. And they believe that so much, and we believe our side so much, that you look and you say: What if we were to combine our forces, where we're building the software that's going to allow software to eat the world even more voraciously, more quickly, by being able to put more resources into things?

Knorr: I know Andreessen believes software is eating everything. I want to hear more of how you see the future.

Preston-Werner: The future of software?

Knorr: Yeah.

Preston-Werner: The future of the world?

Knorr: Yeah, right. Because you're talking about laying out what is potentially a huge infrastructure, an accelerator for the software-defined world.

Preston-Werner: The reason that people write software is to make a difference in the world, to change something, hopefully for the better. If we provide tools for people to create software better, faster, and with greater happiness, then we can hasten the arrival of the future, and that is essentially what the "software is eating the world" thing is saying.

Software is infiltrating basically everything that is done. You can point at anything in this room, and I can trace back how technology and software specifically allowed that thing to come into existence. If that's true and we can make it easier to write that software and make the future happen faster, then we've done something really powerful for the world. And people will pay because the future is going to be about who can write the best software first, essentially, to get that business advantage. So companies have a huge incentive to use the best tools. It's like -- are you going to use a power saw or are you going to use a hand saw? Well, if you have a power saw available to you and the pricing is reasonable, then you're going to buy the power saw. We want to be the power saw.


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

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