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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 investment was characterized as a partnership. Would you agree with that?

Preston-Werner: Yeah, absolutely.

Knorr: What do the two partners do? It's an unusual sort of partnership, isn't it?

Preston-Werner: We didn't need money. We didn't have to raise money, so automatically you set the stage for it being more of a partnership than early-stage companies that raise money because it's the only way they can exist. What we did was grow the company to a place where we would only take money from an outside investor if they were going to be truly a partner and help us succeed. They want to help us succeed because it's in their best interest. We want to help them succeed because it's in our best interest. We both benefit from that relationship.

When Andreessen Horowitz came in to GitHub, it was to help us succeed in the direction that we're already going. That was the understanding. And you can see from their writing and their commitment to charity and just through their service-oriented package that they deliver, they have a bunch of people within Andreessen Horowitz that can help you do various things. They're building a different kind of venture firm, just like we're building a different kind of company. They're not just investment bankers.

Knorr: It seems like there's a kind of an underlying philosophy at work here that ties in to GitHub's company culture, which is kind of unique. Would you like to describe that a little bit? I mean you're CEO, yet not really CEO...

Preston-Werner: There are very few titles. CEO is one title we have because it's useful for communicating with the external world.

Knorr: Certainly with enterprises.

Preston-Werner: Yeah. It turns out people want to know who the CEO of GitHub is. The way we've built this company is very much like open source itself, in that in the open source world people work on the things they find most interesting because nobody's forcing them to do so. What we try to do is hire the kind of people who are going to act in the same way. We hire them to work on something they're interested in, then help them to work on those interests without having a management structure that is sitting above them forcing them to get work done, otherwise they're on the chopping block.

Knorr: You have to find self-motivated individuals who are going to do that.

Preston-Werner: But if you can do that, and you can maintain a population of people who operate that way, then you will continue to attract that same type of person to that environment. Because the people who work well in that environment are desperate to have an environment like that in which to work. If we can do that, which we've been doing since the very beginning, then you can have a company that's built around happiness instead of just profit motive.

I call it "optimizing for happiness," which means don't start with the dollar as the motivating reason for the company to exist. Start with increasing the happiness of everyone involved. That's the employees, that's the customers, and it's the shareholders -- and every full-time employee here has some equity. This is the grand experiment of GitHub.


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

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