Investing in GitHub

Today we are partnering with Andreessen Horowitz and announcing our first ever outside investment.

Why now?

In four short years we’ve done a lot we’re really proud of. We’ve shipped great native apps like GitHub for Mac and GitHub for Windows. We’ve made using GitHub from within Eclipse even easier. We’ve contributed to killer open source projects like libgit2 and git. We’ve thrown hundreds of drinkups, sponsored tons of conferences, drawn a bunch of octocats, and, of course, made building software even better with github.com and GitHub Enterprise.

We’ve done all this without any outside investment. Our company has been profitable for years, is growing fast, and doesn’t need money. So why bother?

Because we want to be better. We want to build the best products. We want to solve harder problems. We want to make life easier for more people. The experience and resources of Andreessen Horowitz can help us do that.

Why Andreessen Horowitz?

We loved it when Marc Andreessen proclaimed, “Software is eating the world.”

Marc’s venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is younger than GitHub. And like GitHub, they’re trying to do things differently. They believe in software as the future of everything. They want to help founders build great companies. They clearly have no interest in the status quo of venture capital.

Over the past few months we’ve gotten to know Marc and one of his partners, Peter Levine, and we really like them. We wish we could hire them both, but they already have jobs. So instead we’re going to work with them through their firm.

What’s next?

We want GitHub to be even easier for beginners and more powerful for experts. We want GitHub everywhere—whether you use Windows or Mac or Linux or some futuristic computer phone that hasn’t been invented yet—we want GitHub to be an awesome experience. We want to make it easier to work together than alone. We want to keep changing the way software is developed for the better by making collaborating easier and sharing a no-brainer.

We will continue to focus on making software development even better. And we’re excited to partner with Andreessen Horowitz to help us make it happen.

Written by

Tom Preston-Werner

@mojombo