GitHub

Why GitHub fired its Co-Founder and still win big?

What is GitHub?

A version control mechanism or team coordination mechanism that was developed by Linus Torvalds (Guy who developed Linux).

Founded by : Tom Preston-Werner and Chris Wanstrath

History

At 2009 they had 46,000 developers account and they bootstrapped their business till the user become 2 million. Mark Andreessen (Inventor of Nestscape browser) was the venture capitalist who invested 100 million$ for about 13% of stake. When they reached 10 million users something interesting happens first India decides to Block them because they had some documentation on there that was related to ISIS after that Russia blocked GitHub because there were like suicide manual that had been put online and Russia wanted to block access to it. China also blocked for a simple reason in 2015 they were presenting how to avoid internet censorship. After that they had raised about 250 million$ of investment from SEQUOIA capital of 12.5% of stake. That time the company have 75% of its own shares. After 9 months of 2016 they had the revenue of approx. 99 million$ and they had lost 68 million$ because to show that these million and millions of accounts was not cheap.

What was the matter?

Github co-founder Tom Preston-Werner and his wife Theresa came under in fire in March when a former GitHub employee, Julie Ann Horvath, accused them for harassment. After a week of research the board came to conclusion that you know what the wife wasn’t supposed to be working here. And Tom Preston Warner resigned with big stock.

Turning Point

Now after that Microsoft wrote a 7.5 billion$ check which is 3.75 times more value just three years later. Now the investors gets their percent home i.e 12.5% of SEQUOIA and 13% of Horowitz. The Distributed denial service traffic (1.35 TeraBit = 1/8 terabit == 0.16875 TB) attack happened in GitHub and they hit GitHub and brought it to its knees.

Microsoft give some additional rationale first all they said we need to be developer focused additionally they took NAT Freidman who’s the corporate VP of developer relation. He’s gonna be plugged in as the CEO.

Lessons to Learn

"You can raise Capital to late and miss out opportunities to invest in things or you can also raise capital too early and give away more of your company early when maybe you reached down deep and bootstrapped or used any of crowdsourcing opportunities that might be available for you so don’t be anxious to raise that capital but don’t pass up the opportunities to raise up capitals."

"Create a good culture early it doesn’t matter if you are co-founder or founder and firing a co-founder doesn’t mean it change the companies culture."