No. 026 · 2008 · San Francisco

GitHub

A sports-bar side project. Bootstrapped for four years.

Microsoft paid $7.5B

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Make my startup a legend
  1. 1 2007. A Ruby meetup at a sports bar.
  2. 2 One says: Git is great, but sharing is hell.
  3. 3 They build it on weekends.
  4. 4 The pull request becomes a verb.
  5. 5 Open source moves in.
  6. 6 No VC for four years. They were profitable.
  7. 7 Your green squares are your résumé.
  8. 8 Microsoft buys it. Devs brace.
Founders
Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett
Founded
2008, San Francisco
What they do
Where the world's developers keep their code.

The story

A conversation at a San Francisco sports bar turned into a weekend project to make Git easier to share. They ran it profitably without venture money for four years, and Microsoft bought it for $7.5B in 2018.