Github New CEO
GitHub CEO Nat Friedman is stepping down from his role on November 15 to become the Chairman Emeritus of the Microsoft-owned service. Thomas Dohmke, who only recently became GitHub’s chief product officer, will step into the CEO role.
When Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018, there was quite a bit of worry in the developer community that it would be an overbearing presence and turn the code sharing and collaboration service into a Microsoft-first platform. With Friedman, who thanks to his developer and open source background brought a lot of community goodwill with him when he took the job, GitHub remained independent and platform-neutral during his three-year tenure.
As Dohmke told me, that’s not going to change under his leadership. As he noted in an interview ahead of today’s announcement, Friedman had asked him to come on board after the acquisition. The German-born Dohmke is probably best known as the co-founder and CEO of HockeyApp, which Microsoft acquired in 2015.
“It was a really exciting time for me. It was kind of like getting back to my CEO roots even then because I was leading all the different deal functions. GitHub has a lot of aspects outside of the product and engineering world that needed to be figured out. And then Nat asked me to join GitHub with him, which I gladly accepted. I ran strategic programs and special projects at GitHub.”
One of his first projects was to make private repos free for all developers in early 2019. And while most developers are probably aware of that, Dohmke himself admits that he doesn’t have the public profile that Friedman had when he stepped into the CEO role, but he stressed that his background as a developer and open source advocate fits into the overall line of GitHub CEOs of the past.
Github New CEO