GitHub Co-Founder Thomas Preston-Werner coming to Shift conference in Split to talk about his experience in startup ventures.
Thomas Preston-Werner is a software developer, inventor and entrepreneur. He is most prominently known for his role as founder and former CEO of GitHub, a Git repository web-based hosting service, which he co-founded in 2008 with Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett, to simplify sharing code and make it easy to collaborate on building software. Today, GitHub is the largest code host in the world, with a community of four million people building software together.
Before founding GitHub, Tom worked as a Ruby developer for Powerset, a Wikipedia search engine that was acquired by Microsoft. Additionally, Tom invented Gravatar, a service for providing unique avatars that follow you from site to site, which he sold to Automattic in 2007.
In April 2014 Tom decided to continue his work outside GitHub and launched Codestarter, a non-profit startup that donates laptops to help kids learn to code. Cofounded with his wife, Theresa Preston-Werner, Codestarter is the first non-profit to join the TechStars startup incubator. The organization crowdfunds laptops, and then distributes them with Linux, coding tools, and programming guides.
