May 18, 2020

Leading GitHub to a $7.5 billion acquisition (Changelog Interviews #395)

1 hour 32 minutes

Jason Warner (CTO at GitHub) joined the show to talk with us about the backstory of how he helped to lead GitHub to a $7.5 billion acquisition by Microsoft. Specifically how they trusted their gut not just the data, and how they understood the value they were bringing to market. We also talk about Jason’s focus on “horizon 3” for GitHub, and his thoughts on remote work and how they’re leading GitHub engineering today.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean’s developer cloud makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow. They have an intuitive control panel, predictable pricing, team accounts, worldwide availability with a 99.99% uptime SLA, and 24/7/365 world-class support to back that up. Get your $100 credit at do.co/changelog.

Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog

Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust! Head to squareup.com/go/changelog to learn more and create your Square Developer account. When you build with Square, you get to outsource all the payments complexity to them. They take care of maintaining PCI compliance, detecting fraud, and managing disputes on your behalf.

Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.

Featuring:

Jason Warner – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

GitHub’s CTO on architecting engineering teams that scale

Current stats – 40M+ developers with 100M+ repos

Go back in time to hear our reactions to Microsoft buying GitHub - “The news is true. Microsoft is acquiring GitHub.”

The Changelog #331: GitHub Actions is the next big thing with Kyle Daigle

Jason’s book recommendations:

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

Team of Teams by Gen. Stanley McChrystal

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

High Output Management by Andrew Grove

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

...more

View all episodes

By Changelog Media

4.4