A new CEO takes the helm at GitHub
Thomas Dohmke is set to become GitHub’s next CEO on November 15, following Nat Friedman’s announcement that he is stepping down. Friedman will remain with the company in a new role as Chairman Emeritus. Dohmke, who previously served as Chief Product Officer, will take over leadership of the platform as GitHub continues to expand its developer tools ecosystem.
Dohmke’s background spans decades of software development, beginning in the late 1980s with early programming on a Robotron KC 87 and a Commodore 64. His path into open source came while studying at the Technical University of Berlin, where he first encountered Linux. Before joining GitHub, he worked across industries—from insurance and automotive control systems to mobile apps—and founded HockeyApp in 2011 to address pain points for iOS and Android developers.
He joined GitHub in 2018 following the Microsoft acquisition, a process he helped lead alongside Friedman. In the years since, Dohmke oversaw several initiatives, including making private repositories free, the GitHub Archive Program, and the acquisitions of Dependabot, npm, and Semmle. As Chief Product Officer, he also shepherded the rollout of major features like Codespaces, Issues, and Copilot, which were part of the roughly 20,000 improvements GitHub shipped the previous year.
Staying independent, but focused on developers
In his new role, Dohmke says GitHub will maintain its independent operation as a community, platform, and business. That means preserving its developer-first values, distinctive culture, and open extensibility—while continuing to support any language, license, tool, platform, or cloud that developers choose. The roadmap, he notes, should reshape the developer experience for both open source maintainers and enterprise customers over the coming years.
Dohmke remains “customer obsessed,” aiming to support teams at every scale: students just starting to code, open source projects that span the globe, and the world’s largest companies. He believes the coming period represents a golden era for developer tools, and his focus will be on improving GitHub day by day for the developers who rely on it.
