New Year, New CEO for GitHub
It’s a brand new year, and each year calls for reflection on where we’ve been, where we’re going, and how each of us here at GitHub can best focus our…
It’s a brand new year, and each year calls for reflection on where we’ve been, where we’re going, and how each of us here at GitHub can best focus our talents and energy. To kick off 2014 I’ve asked my long-time friend and GitHub cofounder, Chris Wanstrath, to take the role of CEO. In this role, Chris will be responsible for leading the company, defining our vision, and working with our amazing team to establish and execute the strategies necessary to achieve our most ambitious goals.
I’ll continue to work closely with Chris on vision, strategy, and execution in the role of President of GitHub. This shift will allow me to take responsibility for R&D and new growth opportunities within the company. I’ll also be thinking deeply about how we can continue to optimize for happiness as we grow, and will remain the company’s public champion and primary spokesperson.
We tend to do things differently here at GitHub, and remaining fluid in how we define our roles is a big part of that. In fact, Chris and I have stepped into these roles over the past few months and today we’re simply acknowledging the change publicly. While we don’t use titles heavily at GitHub, we think in this case they’re useful to communicate areas of responsibility both internally and externally.
2014 is going to be an exciting year. I, for one, can’t wait to see what happens!
Tom Preston-Werner
Cofounder & President, GitHub, Inc.

Written by
Related posts
Bringing more transparency to GitHub’s status page
Changes to the status page will provide more specific data, so you’ll have better insight into the overall health of the platform.
Developer policy update: Intermediary liability, copyright, and transparency
We’re sharing recent policy updates that developers should know about, updating our Transparency Center with the full year of 2025 data, and looking to what’s ahead.
GitHub availability report: March 2026
In March, we experienced four incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.