Code sharing service GitHub has a new President and CEO

Steven Loeb · January 21, 2014 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/347f

Github's new CEO is co-founder Chris Wanstrath, the new President is former CEO Tom Preston-Werner

The CEO is President. Long live the CEO!

There's been a bit of a shake-up in the executive ranks over at code sharing company GitHub. Although that kind of news is usually not a good sign for a company, it's actually more of a good thing.  

You see, the company now has itself both a new president and a new CEO, but these are both people who have been with the company since the very beginning. It's easier to think of this as them giving themselves new titles. 

The new CEO of GitHub is company co-founder Chris Wanstrath, while the new President is former CEO, and fellow GutHub co-founder, Tom Preston-Werner, it was announced in a blog post on Tuesday. 

The two men have been in these roles for a while now, at least a few months, Preston-Werner said, and are only telling people about it now. Not that they think it makes much of a different, anyway.

"We tend to do things differently here at GitHub, and remaining fluid in how we define our roles is a big part of that. In fact, Chris and I have stepped into these roles over the past few months and today we're simply acknowledging the change publicly," Preston-Werner wrote. 

"While we don't use titles heavily at GitHub, we think in this case they're useful to communicate areas of responsibility both internally and externally."

As CEO, Wanstrath will be, of course, the leader of the company, the one who defines its vision and works closely with its team in order to "establish and execute the strategies necessary to achieve our most ambitious goals."

Preston-Werner, meanwhile, will be in charge of research and development, as well as new growth opportunities within the company.

"I'll also be thinking deeply about how we can continue to optimize for happiness as we grow, and will remain the company's public champion and primary spokesperson," he said, while also noting that he will continue to work closely with Wanstrath to help shape where the company goes.

Founded in 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett, GitHub currently has 209 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 has four million users, and it hosts over 8 million software repositories.

After being bootstrapped for four years, the company raised a $100 million round in July of 2012, from Andreessen Horowitz and SV Angel.

(Image source: https://github.com/blog)

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