After nearly four years at the helm, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke has resigned to focus on other projects.
Since its acquisition by Microsoft in 2018, for the sum of $7.5bn, GitHub has been at the centre of the organisation’s coding strategy and ambitions while still operating as a separate company. That could be set to change as the platform becomes more integrated with Microsoft amid the resignation of GitHub’s CEO Thomas Dohmke.
After nearly four years in the role, having replaced Nat Friedman as GitHub CEO, Dohmke announced via a public statement that he feels the tugging of his start-up roots and has made the decision to leave GitHub in order to work on other projects as a founder once again.
Reportedly, the platform is set to become less independent, as there is as of yet, no move to replace Dohmke. Instead, GitHub’s leadership team will now report directly to Microsoft’s current CoreAI team, which is under the leadership of former meta engineering chief Jay Parikh.
Commenting on his departure and the future of the organisation over the coming months, Dohmke said, “GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organisation, with more details shared soon.
“I’ll be staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition and am leaving with a deep sense of pride in everything we’ve built as a remote-first organisation spread around the world.”
The news comes at a time when organisations globally are struggling to pull ahead in the AI race. In 2021, prior to Dohmke’s takeover, GitHub launched Copilot in collaboration with Microsoft and OpenAI. Since then companies such as Google, among others, have created competition with their own innovative, AI-powered tools.
Dohmke said, “While I’m certainly proud of our hard-earned business growth, technology built for its own sake means nothing but vanity unless it serves a greater purpose. We only succeed when the world succeeds, too.
“By launching this new age of developer AI, we’ve made it possible for anyone, no matter what language they speak at home or how fluent they are in programming, to take their spark of creativity and transform it into something real.”
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