Code sharing company GitHub has never taken any outside money. Despite being a four-year-old company, it has been a bootstrapped companuy the entire time. On top of that, it has been profitable, growing 300% annually.
Now, GitHub is finally taking money from an outside investor, receiving $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz, the largest investment Andreessen has ever made. Ron Conway’s SV Angel investment firm also participated in the round.
So why did GitHub decide to start taking money now? And why did Andreessen give them so much?
Well, to read what the companies have to say about it, there seems to have been a connection between them that goes deeper than money.
Andreessen is different than other venture capital firms, GitHub wrote on its blog on Monday.
“They believe in software as the future of everything. They want to help founders build great companies. They clearly have no interest in the status quo of venture capital.”
Of Marc Andreessen and Peter Levine, partner at the firm, GitHub writes that they wish they “could hire them both, but they already have jobs. So instead we're going to work with them through their firm.”
Levine, who is also joining the board at GitHub, wrote on his blog that the reason his firm invested so much into a first round company was the vision of the founders.
“They had a vision for a new way to develop software and created a new kind of company to pursue it. With only a handful of people in sales and marketing, the four grew the company to over 100 people, while growing revenue at nearly 300% annually—and profitably nearly the entire way,” Levine wrote on his blog.
“Beyond the growth and great products is GitHub’s incredible culture. Tom, Chris, Scott and PJ constantly push the limits on the status quo and drive new thinking in terms of management, hiring and clarity of vision.”
GitHub says it plans to use the money to create a better experience for its users.
“We always want to be better. We want to build the best products. We want to solve harder problems. We want to make life easier for more people. Having resources from Andreessen Horowitz allows us to act quickly on new opportunities and continue to invest in making GitHub even better for everyone,” Brian Doll, who runs Marketing at GitHub, tells VatorNews.
Founded in 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett, GitHub currently has 96 employees, though the people that work there have no job titles or bosses. They are free to develop projects on their own.
The idea behind the website is for it to be tool for users to communicate with each other while organizing programming projects.
The site is currently used by 1.7 million developers, and it hosts over 3 million software repositories.
Some 4,000 people join GitHub daily, with 30,000 issues being created and 80,000 repositories updated.
(Image source: gregrickaby.com)
