GitHub

“I think probably 90% of the company at least was technical at the time.”

“Do we want to be in the business of building out our own applicant tracking system, which we had? Do we want to be in the building business of building our own HR tools? Is this the right HR? Like, what do we know about any of these things? And that in a lot o…”

“The next several million software developers and users of all of our technology are not coming from the same places as where the last several million people came from. They're not coming necessarily just from Menlo Park and from Stanford. They're coming from D…”

“If we had wanted to, and I'm not sure that we wanted to, we would have needed way more process, and way more bureaucracy than what we thought, ah, we had an appetite for. And that in some way, the lack of process, the lack of structure, leads to confusion with…”

“We've gone from two and a half, three million people maybe back in 2012 to 25, twenty-six million people, developers using the site today.”

“I think that for a while there we maybe were overly infatuated with how we were working as a company, As opposed to what we were doing, and why we were doing it, and who we were doing it for.”

“As we went to market outside of the United States, and maybe even outside of the Valley leading with a developer first kind of messaging, that wasn't always the right thing for your procurement, or your CIOs, or the CTOs, or the technical decision makers in In…”

“Where we were right around a hundred people, maybe a little bit over, no managers, Weren't going to have managers for another year and a half or close to two years, I think, from that point. And we didn't have titles. We didn't have managers. We didn't have re…”

“We didn't have, say, we didn't have a sales function at the time. We didn't have a marketing function. We were primarily developers”

“You're in a situation that, you know, that we found ourselves in where we built a billing engine that wasn't able to collect that in a particular jurisdiction, or you're not, you know, you're not creating, you're not collecting sales tax, whatever that happens…”

“Ah, I think that you end up having way more loss of productivity and confusion within your organization when people don't know where to go for answers. When people don't know who the ultimate decision rests on.”

“When you think about product driven growth, there are not many companies in the world that you can say a community has driven a company to a 7.5 billion dollar acquisition. More so than GitHub.”

“Developer community drove a company after 10 years to a 7.5 billion dollar acquisition based on sharing. There was a lot of sales motion. We had an incredible sales enterprise enterprise sales team but over half that growth was 100% developer driven with no sa…”

“At GitHub, I was in the last 18 months coming into acquisition, which is a nightmare. But I was one of five people running the company. The CEO publicly stepped down and left it to us to take care of.”

“If I had made every single one of the decisions on how to respond across every aspect of our business, it would have taken far too long to execute, and our customers and employees would have been left wondering where we were and what we were doing. We could ha…”

“It's also been quite a whirlwind, as on top of everything that we've had happening in the world in 2020, we've also doubled in size since I joined, to over 2300 employees spread all over the world.”

“It's really, really hard to take time off when you're building and growing a company, and I'll tell you that if you believe you'll have time someday when the company is larger and more established and has more employees, you're wrong. It's never the case.”

“Honestly, it's terrible advice. Saying no to most of what comes your way is key to maintaining control over your time and focus.”

“We have offices and co-working spaces worldwide that had to close, eight active real estate projects to put on hold and redesign, over 2000 employees working remotely, vendors who are important to our culture but could no longer come to our offices, customers …”

“We have about 1500 feature requests open on Postman today. I think we have solved and probably 2000 of them since we started as a company.”

“Step ahead to today, we have 77,000 organizations using GitHub Copilot and almost two million users.”

“We took all of our go-to-market motions and our conversations across the company and organized them through the lens of three revenue plays. And if you ask any hubber, not just a revenue hubber, any hubber, our three revenue plays, they're going to say land, s…”

“An assumption we had, for example, out the gate was that junior developers are going to love Copilot. Companies are going to want it to give it to all of their early in profession talent. It will make them more productive more quickly. Lo and behold, we start …”

“And especially from companies the size of Accenture, they can eat you alive with a POC. It could take a year. And so we had to get pretty opinionated about what we felt was a POC worth supporting and how we were going to measure the impact.”

“We brought that to market, and as we used it more, we realized we're going to need user administration features, better onboarding capabilities, SSO integration and the like. And so that wrapper became what is now the SKU we call Copilot for business.”

“And since those early days with 200 ish employees to today, we have thousands to now over two billion dollars in revenue.”

“Our semester planning process, which are these sprints where we decide what we're going to work on, used to be this Weeks long thing of passing documents around, lots of like really strongly held opinion, loosely backed by data. Now we pull up our project list…”

“Based on the success that team has realized, we estimate that we're deflecting about 60% of the tickets we would have expected to be created across our support services, which is incredible.”

“The other way we embody this is that we run six month compensation plans for those on variable plans. So six month plans, every six months you get a new exhibit.”

“We've had some customers name AI transformation officers or chief AI officers. That will be one of our buyer personas in the years to come.”

“Historically, the burden of customer feedback fell on our solutions engineers and our customer success architects, bless them. We would send them this incredibly long issue template and say, we're going to need a, you know, brief, 47 fields here on what the cu…”

“In the last fiscal year, our fiscal year ends in June, our AI products were 40% of our revenue growth during the period.”

“The solution was we ended up shipping a Copilot for business for non GitHub enterprise users. It's been remarkably successful commercially. It's also opened up relationships to net new customers for us”

“Copilot has 1.8 million paying users from 77,000 companies.”

“The right thing is not to say you need a bunch of applied science. I think you also need to grow the company to be AI engineers plus applied science. And that's what at the end might create the right product overall. Instead of just investing in the deep tech.”

“What I would say is it looks more AI native. One of the beauties of what we're living through right now is that these LLMs can actually understand natural language in a way that none of the other tools before could. So I think if we really lean into that and g…”

“In AI, you cannot have predictability. LLMs are not predictable even on that.”

“At GitHub we invest in this thing we call coffee, which is compiler offline evaluation, and that's one area that I have found to be a place that you have to over invest in AI if you will, if you need to experiment, because you could experiment all day in AI an…”

“What I would say is we try to not centralize it. There shouldn't be just one co-pilot team. There's a co-pilot intelligence platform team, and that's true, but I would say the repos team is a co-pilot team. The PR team is a co-pilot team. The issues team is a …”

“We worked out really hard in making the latency be a hundred milliseconds, a 150 milliseconds, no matter where you were in the world.”

“I don't want to talk about the green, right? The green means that we put the right targets in place and we're happy with them. I only actually want to talk about the yellow and the rest. And if there's no yellow or red, I, it makes me really uncomfortable. I g…”

“At GitHub, as I mentioned, the big need was how do you get people onto a software development platform, and that's why professional services was the orientation at the start. At Notion support, obviously, like technical support was an underpinning, but custome…”

“So, you know, for example, at GitHub, it was a functional structure. Yep. Still is. Still, it still is. Yes. At Notion for, in a pod structure and a GM structure, I think it's dependent on your, where you're at in terms of growth.”

“With Windsurf, I can legitimately, so I've got to get my GitHub repos and I've got it all set up so that I can actually do what I want to do. And so I'm pulling stuff out of the lever API to run analysis on how we're hiring.”

“There's a lot of stuff on social media about, Hey, you can just vibe code your own HubSpot or Salesforce. You can vibe code your own notion. It will take. 10 minutes. That's Sony baloney. And it is almost dangerous Sony baloney because it's not just startups t…”