GitHub grew from a bootstrapped side project to a billion code repositories
GitHub took no outside money for its first four years; its founders paid the bills from revenue. Today it hosts more than a hundred million developers, Microsoft owns it, and in June 2025 it passed one billion repositories. The billionth one, fittingly for the internet, contained a single rude word.
Work on the platform began on 19 October 2007, and after a few months in beta it launched in April 2008. Its four creators, Scott Chacon, P. J. Hyett, Chris Wanstrath and Tom Preston-Werner, built it with Ruby on Rails on top of Git, the distributed version control system, adding access control, bug tracking, task management, continuous integration and a wiki for every project. Early growth was quick: within its first year it held over 46,000 public repositories, and by 2010 it hosted a million.
The company ran on unusual lines. Originally it had no middle managers, and staff could pick the projects that interested them, though the chief executive set pay. That changed in 2014, when harassment allegations against Preston-Werner and his wife led him to resign; Wanstrath took over and a management layer was added.
Outside investors arrived in July 2012, when Andreessen Horowitz put in 100 million dollars at a 750 million valuation. A 250 million round led by Sequoia Capital followed in 2015, valuing the firm at about 2 billion. By 2011 GitHub had overtaken SourceForge and Google Code on commits, and in 2015 it opened its first office outside America, in Japan. Microsoft bought it in 2018, the same year it withstood one of the largest denial-of-service attacks yet recorded, peaking near 1.35 terabits per second.
Scale since has been enormous. By January 2023 it counted some 420 million repositories and a user base above 100 million developers, and it is the world's largest host of source code, estimated to bring in a billion dollars a year. In 2024 alone, developers made over five billion contributions to more than 500 million open-source projects.
Source: GitHub
