We’re hearing from sources that GitHub CFO Vlado Herman, who joined in December 2012, is no longer at the company.
Herman was a high-profile hire at the time, and prior to GitHub, he was the CFO of Yelp.We’re also hearing that David McJannet, VP of marketing at GitHub, has also left the company. (His LinkedIn profile shows that he left in September.) Herman had been at the company for around three years, while McJannet was there for about seven months, according to his LinkedIn profile.
GitHub has essentially become one of the go-to project hosts for developers, where code is published not only by independent developers, but also by larger companies open sourcing their projects. The service enables developers to favorite and rate various projects, as well as suggest changes — and, of course, use that code for their own services. The company even hosted its first developer conference in October this year.
But the company also faces some competition from other companies like Atlassian. So as the company grows, it has to ensure that it continues organizing itself in such a way that it is able to fend off the competition — which typically can include a changeup at the management layer.
(Still, when learning to program for the first time, I can’t count the number of times that GitHub saved me from getting stuck on various problems.)
GitHub in particular is unique in that it’s a highly decentralized organization. As my colleague Ron Miller pointed out, employees have to be highly independent and work outside the operational norms of most other companies. Employees are encouraged to work wherever they want at whatever time they want, as long as they get things done. GitHub is able to stay organized with a sophisticated set of online chat rooms and chat bots that help coordinate activity without having to plan meetings.
But the company still does have a formal management layer — as you get larger, you have to ensure that things run smoothly — and often that requires change as companies continue to grow larger and the needs of the company change.
In July, GitHub raised $250 million at a reported $2 billion valuation, and the company has raised a total of around $350 million.