Chris Wanstroth is the co-founder and former CEO of GitHub. He reflects on how GitHub's go-to-market strategy evolved from avoiding enterprise sales to actively building a sales team.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wanstrath: Cyberattacks on GitHub aimed to suppress speech, not steal data
“And it's not about hacking or stealing information or trying to get passwords from us. It's about suppressing Speech.”
Insight
Wanstrath: Communication is software's hardest problem; technical issues can wait
“The communication part is the hardest part and the most important part, and the technical part, you have unlimited amount of time to figure out later, and so we're really focused on the communication part”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wanstrath: GitHub will become less interesting as execution takes priority over storage
“GitHub is actually gonna get less interesting in the future, and it's gonna be less about, I can grab an open source project and run it, and more about where do I run it? What are the systems it integrates into? And so, GitHub is really awesome, I think, for m…”
Opinion
Wanstrath: Governments are 10 to 20 years behind on understanding online sharing
“So the idea that a state government or a state actor would be understanding the nuances of sharing information and what that means and what's harmful and not harmful It's ridiculous. They're at least 10 to 20 years behind on that.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wanstrath: Over 40 million people globally write software beyond full-time developers
“We think there are twenty million people employed that are writing code, but the idea of what a programmer is, someone who writes software in their free time, or even professionally, that's not counted in a programmer, it's way more than twenty million, it's w…”
Disclosure
Wanstrath: Non-technical teams like marketing are migrating from Jira to GitHub
“We also see our customers, people that used to use Jira, people that are in the marketing team that want to update just some copy on a website, they're increasingly moving to something like GitHub, and they're also giving us feature requests specifically for t…”