Microsoft has announced the stepping down of Nat Friedman – the CEO of its subsidiary company GitHub. The announcement came on Wednesday and a replacement has already been mentioned. Microsoft announced that Thomas Dohmke, GitHub’s Product Chief will be replacing Nat Friedman as CEO of the subsidiary company.
The announcement fits into the trend of top executives of tech companies stepping down from their top roles, with many of these executives stepping down to focus on the company’s long term strategy. For instance, ByteDance top executives stepped down from their roles recently. The company’s co-founder Zhang Yiming stepped down from his role as chairman and was replaced by Liang Rubo. ByteDance’s Shou Zi Chew also stepped down as CFO to focus on being subsidiary company TikTok’s CEO. TikTok’s rival Kuaishou saw its CEO step down from the role last week. Richard Liu, the founder of the e-commerce company JD.com also stepped down recently stepped down from his everyday duties to focus on the company’s long-term strategy.
Headquartered in California and acquired by Microsoft in 2018, GitHub Inc. is a provider of Internet hosting for software development and version control using Git. It offers the distributed version control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git, plus its own features. It provides access control and several collaboration features such as bug tracking, feature requests, task management, continuous integration and wikis for every project, according to Wikipedia.
In a blog post written by product Chief Thomas Dohmke, he spoke about his role as product chief and how he’s helped pushed the company to achieve its goals. “As Chief Product Officer, I’m proud of the work our teams have done to bring new capabilities to GitHub Codespaces, Issues, Copilot, and many of the 20,000 improvements that we shipped last year. Together, we’ve built a roadmap that will transform the developer experience for open source maintainers and enterprises using GitHub for years to come”, he wrote.
The announcement comes weeks after GitHub’s biggest rival went public on Nasdaq. Following its debut on Nasdaq, rival company GitLab is now worth $16.5 billion, which is twice more than what Microsoft paid to acquire GitHub back in 2018.
Thomas Dohmke officially takes on the role as GitHub’s CEO starting November 15th. Nat Friedman will remain as an advisor to both GitHub and Microsoft, according to what Microsoft’s Cloud and AI Vice President, Scott Guthrie, said in an email to employees.
Nat Friedman is rather excited to be stepping down from his position as CEO of GitHub. A tweet he shared read that he is “very excited to go back to my startup roots to support and invest in the builders who are creating the world of tomorrow”.
