GitHub's CEO hands the reins to Thomas Dohmke

Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub since 2018, is stepping down to return to startup life, where he plans to support, advise, and invest in founders and developers. Effective November 15th, Thomas Dohmke—currently GitHub's Chief Product Officer—will take over as CEO. Friedman will stay on as Chairman Emeritus.

Three years of platform growth

Friedman's tenure saw GitHub stretch from a repository host into what he describes as a complete developer platform. Under his leadership, GitHub rolled out Actions, which has become the leading CI service; Codespaces and Copilot, point to cloud-native and AI-assisted development; and Discussions, now used by more than half of the top 100 open source communities on GitHub. Sponsors has also let maintainers collectively earn millions of dollars.

Security was another major push. GitHub Advanced Security, CodeQL code scanning, private repository secret scanning, Dependabot, and the public advisory database were all positioned to harden the software supply chain.

The numbers behind the story

GitHub today reports more than 73 million developers on the platform. Its business counts 84% of the Fortune 100 as customers, and revenue growth has accelerated in each of the last several years.

Why Dohmke

Friedman credits Dohmke with a central role in making the GitHub acquisition successful and with a long history of serving developers. Before joining GitHub, Dohmke co-founded HockeyApp in 2011, after building software across insurance and automotive industries. At GitHub, he led the effort to make private repositories free and shaped a roadmap built around the features customers actually need.

Closing thoughts

As Friedman exits, he leaves the future in Dohmke's hands, indicating that development itself is moving to the cloud, AI is altering how code is produced, and software security is now a global concern. He has offered his thanks to GitHub's team, its community, and Microsoft leadership and voiced confidence that the organization is well set up for the challenges ahead.