Untitled

How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to Go Full-
      Time on GitHub
      by Tom Preston-Werner
      2008 is a leap year. That means that 366 days ago,
      almost to the minute, I was sitting alone in a booth at
      Zeke’s Sports Bar and Grill on Third Street in San Fran-
      cisco. I wouldn’t normally hang out at a sports bar,
      let alone a sports bar in SOMA, but back then Thurs-
      day was “I Can Has Ruby” night. I guess back then “I
      can has _” was also a reasonable moniker to attach
      to pretty much anything. ICHR was a semiprivate meet-
      ing of like-minded Ruby hackers that generally and will-
      ingly devolved into late-night drinking sessions. Normally
      these nights would fade away like my hangover the next
      morning, but this night was different. This was the night
      that GitHub was born.
      I think I was sitting at the booth alone because I’d just
      ordered a fresh Fat Tire and needed a short break from
      the socializing that was happening over at the long
      tables in the dimly lit back portion of the bar. On the
      fifth or sixth sip, Chris Wanstrath walked in. I have trou-
      ble remembering now if I’d even classify Chris and I
      as “friends” at the time. We knew each other through
      Ruby meet-ups and conferences but only casually. Like
      a mutual “Hey, I think your code is awesome” kind of
      thing. I’m not sure what made me do it, but I ges-
      tured him over to the booth and said, “Dude, check this
      out.” About a week earlier I’d started work on a project
      called Grit that allowed me to access Git repositories
      in an object-oriented manner via Ruby code. Chris was
      one of only a handful of Rubyists at the time who was
      starting to become serious about Git. He sat down, and
      I started showing him what I had. It wasn’t much, but
      it was enough to see that it had sparked something in
      Chris. Sensing this, I launched into my half-baked idea
      for some sort of website that acted as hub for coders to
      share their Git repositories. I even had a name: GitHub.
      I may be paraphrasing, but his response was along the
      lines of a very emphatic “I’m in. Let’s do it!”
      The next night—Friday, October 19, 2007, at 10:24 p.m.—
      Chris made the first commit to the GitHub repository
      and sealed in digital stone the beginning of our joint
      venture.
                                                                        Report erratum
Prepared exclusively for Marcelo de Moraes Serpa this copy is (P1.0 printing, April 2009)
                                D ON ’ T L ISTEN TO Y OUR PARENTS 44
How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft (continued)
There were, so far, no agreements of any kind regarding
how things would proceed. We were just two guys who
decided to hack together on something that sounded
cool.
Remember those amazing few minutes in Karate Kid
where Daniel is training to become a martial arts
expert? Remember the music? Well, you should proba-
bly go buy and listen to You’re the Best by Joe Esposito
in iTunes because I’m about to hit you with a montage.
For the next three months Chris and I spent ridiculous
hours planning and coding GitHub. I kept going with
Grit and designed the UI. Chris built out the Rails app.
We met in person every Saturday to make design deci-
sions and try to figure out what the hell our pricing
plan would look like. I remember one very rainy day we
talked for a good two hours about various pricing strate-
gies over some of the best Vietnamese egg rolls in the
city. All of this we did while holding other engagements.
I, for one, was employed full-time at Powerset as a tools
developer for the Ranking and Relevance team.
In mid-January, after three months of nights and week-
ends, we launched into private beta mode, sending
invites to our friends. In mid-February, P Hyett joined
                                                .J.
in and made us three-strong. We publicly launched the
site on April 10. TechCrunch was not invited. At this
point, it was still just three 20-somethings without a sin-
gle penny of outside investment.
I was still working full-time at Powerset on July 1, 2008,
when we learned that Powerset had just been acquired
by Microsoft for around $100 million. This was interesting
timing. With the acquisition, I was going to be faced
with a choice sooner than I had anticipated. I could
either sign on as a Microsoft employee or quit and go
GitHub full-time. At 29 years old, I was the oldest of the
three GitHubbers and had accumulated a proportion-
ally larger amount of debt and monthly expenditure.
I was used to my six-digit lifestyle. Further confounding
the issue was the imminent return of my wife, Theresa,
from her PhD fieldwork in Costa Rica. I would soon be
transitioning from make-believe bachelor back to mar-
ried man.