GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke announced Tuesday that he plans to step down later this year, and Microsoft does not intend to search for a replacement. Dohmke is leaving the Microsoft-owned platform to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors.
“With more than 1B repos and forks, and over 150 million developers, GitHub has never been stronger than it is today,” Dohmke wrote in a blog post. “We have seen more open-source projects with more contributions every year. AI projects have doubled in the last year alone. And our presence in companies of any size is unmatched in the market.”
GitHub, which Microsoft acquired in 2018 for $7.5 billion, has largely operated independently. However, with Dohmke stepping down, GitHub will now operate as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI group. In a separate memo, Microsoft CoreAI head Jay Parikh outlined a new structure in which GitHub leadership will report to several Microsoft executives, according to Axios. Julia Liuson, head of Microsoft’s Developer Division, will oversee GitHub’s revenue, engineering, and support. Earlier this year, Microsoft formed the CoreAI group, led by Jay Parikh, Facebook’s former head of engineering, whom CEO Satya Nadella added to Microsoft’s senior leadership team in October.
Dohmke has been the CEO of GitHub since 2021. He joined Microsoft in 2015 through the acquisition of his previous startup, HockeyApp. After Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018, Dohmke became GitHub’s Chief Product Officer in mid-2021, and a few months later, he succeeded Nat Friedman as CEO.
In a memo to employees, Dohmke said he’s leaving GitHub to “become a founder again,” though he will remain at Microsoft until the end of the year “to help guide the transition.”
Dohmke is leaving GitHub at a time when Microsoft is investing billions of dollars in high-profile artificial intelligence projects. GitHub is one of the most popular platforms for developers to share code and collaborate on projects. It’s free, easy to use, and has become central to the open-source software movement.
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The platform is important to Microsoft’s overall strategy, as it provides direct access to developers, crucial to the success of Windows, Azure, and its expanding suite of AI tools. In fact, GitHub is more important than ever due to the boom in generative artificial intelligence. Microsoft now faces stiff competition from companies like Google, Cursor, Replit, and Windsurf in the race to build leading AI tools for programmers, especially amid the rise of “vibe coding,” where programs are written with just a few words of human direction.
Under Dohmke’s leadership, GitHub has doubled its user base. Over the years, the Microsoft-owned unit launched GitHub Copilot, an assistant that suggests code for developers to add to their projects. In January, GitHub introduced a Copilot artificial intelligence agent capable of handling specific programming tasks and notifying users once the work is completed.
GitHub generates over $2 billion in annualised revenue as of last summer.
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