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GitHub’s CEO has quit and the coding company looks set to be fully swallowed up by Microsoft.
Microsoft bought code repository GitHub back in 2018 for $7.5 billion. GitHub Co-Founder and CEO Chris Wanstrath stuck around until the acquisition closed, and then departed to be replaced with Microsoft Vice President Nat Friedman, who himself came onboard via the acquisition of Xamarin a few years before.
When Friedman left in 2021, Thomas Dohmke took over the reins. Dohmke joined Microsoft back in 2014 when Microsoft bought his own coding tools startup, HockeyApp – for much less than GitHub, probably around the $100 million mark. That app was shut down and bundled up into Visual Studio App Center in 2018.
Now, Dohmke is also on the way out – and GitHub looks set to be integrated into Microsoft’s mothership rather than kept at arm’s length any longer. Instead of replacing Dohmke, GitHub will no longer have its own CEO. It will come under Microsoft’s CoreAI, the now ex-CEO said in a blog post about his departure.
Why leave now? Dohmke said that his “startup roots have begun tugging” on him again: “I’ve decided to leave GitHub to become a founder again.” Dohmke said he’d stay on until the end of the year to “help guide the transition”.
Dohmke hasn’t yet disclosed any details of his new startup, but it must be one heck of an idea given the momentum behind GitHub, in part driven by Microsoft’s push into AI-assisted coding with Copilot.
“With more than 1B repos and forks, and over 150 million developers, GitHub has never been stronger than it is today,” Dohmke wrote. “We have seen more open-source projects with more contributions every year. AI projects have doubled in the last year alone. And our presence in companies of any size is unmatched in the market. The GitHub platform has continued to lead with incredible momentum.”
GitHub was already part of CoreAI, but now the team will report directly to CoreAI head Jay Parikh.
CoreAI was unveiled back in January as a new engineering organisation within Microsoft, focused on platform and tools development – naturally using AI. Beyond GitHub, CoreAI also pulled in aspects of Microsoft’s Developer Division (DevDiv), the AI platform team and even aspects from the CTO’s office, including AI supercomputers.
The mission, the company said at the time in a blog post attributed to CEO Satya Nadella, was to “build the end-to-end Copilot and AI stack for both our first-party and third-party customers to build and run AI apps and agents”.
Nadella added: “This group will also build out GitHub Copilot, thus having a tight feedback loop between the leading AI-first product and the AI platform to motivate the stack and its roadmap.”
That said, the whole point is results. “Ultimately, we must remember that our internal organizational boundaries are meaningless to both our customers and to our competitors,” stated the blog post.
The move is being widely reported as Microsoft absorbing GitHub. The milestone marks the end of GitHub operating as its own company, which it has done since 2018 – indeed, Microsoft said at the time of the acquisition that GitHub would “operate independently” and remain open to developers regardless of software or platform.
Of course, the GitHub that Microsoft bought is not the same company that Dohmke is departing. Beyond the huge number of users it’s added, GitHub has become a major player in the rise of AI coding – and that’s big business for Microsoft.
Indeed, one consultant told CRN that more tightly combining existing programming tools with GitHub’s offering could help Microsoft’s earnings “skyrocket”.
It’s clear that AI will be at the heart of the new entity, regardless of who is or isn’t CEO. In June, Microsoft made waves with an internal memo that made it clear that using AI is no longer optional.
Days ago, Dohmke defended that, saying it was “part of our company culture that everybody at GitHub uses GitHub,” and that given Microsoft’s focus on AI, it was no surprise it wanted the same from its employees.
In short, expect GitHub to become increasingly AI-first like everything else at Microsoft – and perhaps for Dohmke’s next startup to be AI focused too.
But other analysts warned that tying GitHub too closely to Microsoft and its Azure cloud platform could “alienate” developers who have long favoured GitHub’s independence, saying it was worth monitoring how well Microsoft can maintain GitHub’s open-source ethos.
After all, while the Redmond behemoth has managed to find success with acquisitions such as LinkedIn and Mojang – where the acquired company maintains its brand and some independence – being subsumed into Microsoft isn’t always good news for a technology. Just ask Skype and Nokia.
