GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke plans to leave the company and corporate parent Microsoft will not appoint a successor.
Dohmke assumed the position back in November 2021, replacing Nat Friedman, who helmed the code hosting biz since Microsoft acquired it for $7.5 billion in 2018.
In a public post of an internal memo sent to staff on Monday, Dohmke bid goodbye, citing the desire to work on founding another company.
“GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon,” he said. “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 organization spread around the world.”
The CoreAI group formed in January under EVP Jay Parikh.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, at the time, cited the need to build out Microsoft’s AI platform and tools for running AI apps and agents. He cited GitHub Copilot as one of the group’s areas of focus, but he didn’t make clear that this meant decapitating the subsidiary by leaving it without a chief executive.
Under the CoreAI group, GitHub will almost certainly operate with less independence, though Redmond has not made details public yet. The biz had an annual run rate of $2 billion per Microsoft’s 2024 Q4 results. That year, GitHub Copilot subscriptions accounted for 40 percent of the subsidiary’s revenue growth.
GitHub Copilot has 20 million users, Dohmke said, up from 15 million three months ago. That’s both paid and non-paying users. When the biz last reported paid Copilot subscribers in Q2 2024, just 1.3 million were paying customers.
According to Axios, Julia Liuson, who runs Microsoft’s developer division, will manage GitHub revenue, engineering, and support. And Mario Rodriguez, GitHub chief product officer, will report to Asha Sharma, VP of Microsoft AI platform.
Sharma in a post to LinkedIn praised Dohmke and said she’s excited to work with Parikh, Liuson, Rodriguez, and the GitHub leadership team to continue the work of delivering a great developer experience.
“Code is becoming the primary artifact of work in the digital economy — the blueprint for products, services, and experiences,” she said. “As AI agents take on more of the writing, reviewing, and committing of code, the role of developers – and the importance of coding itself – will only grow.”
Except at Microsoft, where the role of developers is somewhat diminished after 15,000 job cuts this year. We reached out to Microsoft for comment and will update this article if we receive a response. ®