I, first of all, I strongly believe that every kid, every child should learn coding. We should actually teach them coding in school, the same way we teach them physics and geography and literacy and math and whatnot. Those are all fundamental skills. Coding is one such skill because software is everywhere. And in fact, our day to day is dominated by software already. You can't really live your life, travel, wake up in the morning without software anymore. And I think as humans, it is crucial to not only be in read-only mode, but also be able to create things ourselves or at least understand how operation is done on these devices.
My name is Thomas and I'm a developer. I've been developing software since the early 1990s. And today, my role is mostly being the GitHub CEO leading the largest developer platform on this planet. I was born in 1978 in East Berlin when Germany was divided into two countries. So I was on the Eastern side in Berlin in a suburb called Mazzan. I had a normal childhood, but I was fascinated by technology, remote control cars, little computer games in 1989, the Wall fell. And that opened up a whole new world to me as an 11-year-old, obviously from a toy perspective, getting access to Lego and Mickey Mouse, but also to computers.
And so in the early 1990s, I bought my first computer, Commodore 64. And after university event to technical university in Berlin, I actually went into the automotive industry and started working at Mercedes. Back then it was called a damler Chrysler working on driver assistance system for the S-Class. And I did that for a while and then switched to the supplier side to Bosch, which is large automotive supplier amongst other things and there worked on parking systems.
And it was in 2008 that two things happened. One is I finished my PhD thesis, but also Steve Jobs showed the iPhone SDK. Everybody wanted to build apps and at the time only Apple could build native apps. And I thought this is cool. I got to build apps myself and I got to get into that space. And so I quit my job at Bosch at the height of the financial crisis amongst all things in late 2008 and reconnected with the front from university.
And we just became two freelance developers building apps for the German markets, mostly agency work or subcontractor for larger app projects. I think in 2009 and 10 we built around 30 apps. That work on building apps for mostly German customers, German enterprise customers, media and automotive and so on. I got us the idea of building a platform for mobile app developers. And so we together with three friends Stefan Andreas and Michael we founded a company called HockeyApp which was a platform for mobile app developers.
You could distribute your beta builds and collect error reports, crash reports and feedback on those kind of things. And so we built that startup, you know, the platform for our own freelance business because we had that pain point that we wanted to solve for ourselves because it was before that you would send, you know, a build over email, you know, to project manager and Berlin or so. And then the project manager would take that build and send it to the customer and explain to them, or you have to, you know, drag and drop that into iTunes and connect, you know, the dock cable and all these kind of things.
And so we made that very easier which made our own life easier. And I think those are some of the greatest startup ideas when you're using it yourself day in day out and then improving it based on the feedback that you're getting from your own customers. So we basically started building out the HockeyApp business while we had the contracting business and they were companies both about the same size.
And when Microsoft came in 2014, we thought they would only buy the HockeyApp platform at the product business and leave the contracting business alone given there were existing customer contracts and what have you. But in fact, Microsoft bought both companies, the subsidiary, the product company and the mothership, the contracting company because the contracting company had a number of iOS and Android developers that were hot commodity in 2014 and hard to hire.
Certainly, you know, at startup rates. And so Microsoft actually took over both of those companies and funny story is today of these 11 employees, seven including myself, I've worked for GitHub and so different paths, they all got to Microsoft and then for Microsoft into GitHub. You know, coming from a small company of our size based in Germany and Stuttgart, Germany, South-South Germany, moving halfway around the world, I moved with my wife and back then two very young kids to Seattle that alone was a big change and looking back now 10 years later and we moved in early 2015, it feels all like a blur, like things moved so fast and sometimes I don't even realize how we did all that.
Our startup was very small and bootstrapped for the whole time so we never took any outside investment until Microsoft acquired us and at the point in time, I think it was about 11 or 12 employees, still very small team, all of engineers you know, building the product together and in some ways, you know, my role today as GitHub CEO is very similar in that, you know, my developer skills, my understanding of code, my, you know, empathy for how software developers work helped me both with my, you know, internal team of about a thousand engineers and with our customer base, which are also all software developers or those that aspire to become software developer and so I think, you know, a lot of the, you know, my passion for software development is actually perfect, you know, for me being the GitHub CEO.
I don't think I've seen anything more exciting and changing how we think about software development in my, in my 30 plus year career as a software developer. You know, when I started coding in the early 1990s, there wasn't even the internet or I certainly had no internet access and so I had to figure it out all by myself with books and with magazines, going to a computer club in the community center kind of hoping that somebody will be there. And if we fast forward to where we are now is that it's so much easier to get into software development, you can, you know, just write a prompt into a co-pilot or chat GPT or similar tools and it will likely write you, you know, a basic web page or a small application game in Python and so AI makes software development so much more accessible for anyone who wants to learn coding.
And on the other side of the spectrum it makes developers so much more productive, developers that work on a project have way too much work to do. They have long backlogs of their own ideas of customer feedback, you know, things that they're hearing from their managers or from the market or seeing it competitive and so almost any software project that has a certain, you know, age has way too much work on the innovation side but they also have what we call technical debt, you know, legacy code, things that have, you know, been created over months or years that need a cleanup that need what we call refactoring.
And so engineers constantly balance those two backlogs so having something that brings the effort down and makes them, you know, 10%, 20%, maybe even 50% more productive is completely changing how software developers work. The role of GitHub, you know, in this, in the first, let's say, you know, five years of the age of AI, given that we started working on GitHub co-pilot in June 2020, right after GP3 was first shown to the world, is that we want to be, you know, on the forefront of AI code generation.
We want to provide tools to the developer to be more productive and more happy than writing code because the reality is the dream, I think, for most developers that start their journey as a programmer is that they have an idea in their hand and they're trying to find a way how they can get the fastest from that idea to an app or webpage or service, right? Like the challenge is not that developers don't have enough ideas. The challenge is that you take that big idea and you have to break it down into small building blocks and as you're working on the first block or the first module or the first class or microservice, whatever it is, you're realizing that this idea that you have is so much more complex to implement than your thought and so from what became a vegan project, it becomes a month long or sometimes year long project.
Many, you know, apps that I've wrote as a teenager and I know, you know, many of my friends and my employees' wrote never get anywhere because you ultimately realize it's much more complex than your thought and it's not worth spending the time on it and in the world that we live today, you can always, you know, download an app from the App Store or find, you know, some online services, that's the same thing. So I think AI helps us, you know, to realize the dream of taking an idea and implementing it much faster and you see some of the early signs of that where very small startups sometimes, you know, five developers and some of them actually only one developers believe they can become million, if not billion, dollar businesses by leveraging all the AI agents that are available to them and maybe building their own to write code to write software much faster.
Now the flip side of that is I don't think we're anywhere close to world where you can just write a single prompt and say, build GitHub and then an AI agent builds all of the features of GitHub or even just the very basic primitives like repository storage, you know, git storage and issue tracking and because the decisions that we as developers, as engineers, as product managers have to make to build a complex system like GitHub, you know, thousands, if not tens of thousands, decisions.
There's the simple one, sorry, like which programming language, which open source framework, which cloud to use or do we even use a cloud, which operating system and so on, but there's the much more complex decisions of how you architect the system, you know, are you building a model of and are you by building microservices and getting to a point where agents can make all these decisions and write an app that actually is a viable business, you know, Finds product market fit has a great user experience and ultimately generates both revenue and profit because any business at some point has to get to the place where they're making profit and return that profit to the founders of shareholders.
That I think we're quite far away and so we need engineers to do engineering stuff. They need to exercise their craft and apply systems thinking and design and build really great applications. I think the unique thing about GitHub is its size and both the love that developers have for, you know, our brand for our mascot, the octoket, or we call it internally Mona, and the reputation that GitHub has created for itself since the very early days, since I remember the early launch of GitHub and meeting or seeing Chris, one of the founders speaking at RailsConf in Las Vegas in 2009 and then signing up for my own account and started using it.
I was excited about using GitHub and now we are in 2025 and there's still many people that love GitHub but you know what comes with love is also that you're not holding back your criticism and that we have 150 million users on the platform and so there's at least a million opinions of what other things we should invest on and what's working well and what's not working well and what's the one feature that is important, you know, to that set of users, but it's not important to me and my product leadership team because we have our own astrology and decisions to make so filtering out the signal from the noise and I don't mean noise in any negative way, there's just so much feedback that we're getting.
I remember when we did the acquisition in 2018 and I joined GitHub and afterwards we sent an email to 10 GitHub users and say, hey, we are looking into a new project, we would love your feedback. I think we got nine responses of exciting users saying we want to provide feedback. If you do that in many other companies and start up, you get one response and the one response is kind of like, well, I have 10 minutes time to give you some feedback. There's just so much information that's coming back to us on social media and our platform and email and support tickets and so on.
The second piece that comes to mind is that GitHub for the longest time has been a company with a very strong remote culture. Like long before COVID, the GitHub founders started hiring developers, sales folks, support folks all over the world and today I think with one of the largest remote-only companies, we all work from our homes, hotel and so on, from wherever we are. A lot of our culture is focused around GitHub as a platform, which obviously through open source encourages asynchronous collaboration and tools like Slack and video calls that we use much more heavily internally than we're using email like old-school companies do.
When I wake up in the morning, especially here in Seoul, which is like lots of time zones away from the US, where about 80% of our employee population is that I wake up to 30, 40 Slack messages, plus, hundreds of channels with conversation and then figuring out what is actually important for me as CEO, what to react to, what can I snooze for a while and what can I just ignore. That's the big part of my job, but it's also so exciting because I can be here in South Korea at this event and still run the company and a lot of what we do on a day-to-day basis doesn't actually matter whether I'm here in Seoul or whether I'm in Berlin or whether I'm in New York or anywhere else in the world.
I think that's for many Hubbers how we call our employees a really strong part of our culture. That we are a remote company, it's not related to the pandemic, it's a choice that we made of how we want to run the company, how we select GitHub as an employer, and ultimately how we believe we can be successful. I first of all, I strongly believe that every kid, every child should learn coding. We should actually teach them coding in schools and the same way that we teach them physics and geography and literacy and math and whatnot.
Those are all fundamental skills. Coding is one such skill and it just has taken us too long to actually realize that because software is everywhere. Hardware is also everywhere. We carry both software and hardware with us through our day and in fact our day-to-day is dominated by software already. You can't really live your life travel, wake up in the morning without software anymore and I think as humans it is crucial to not only be in read-only mode but also be able to create things ourselves or at least understand how creation is done on these devices. That doesn't mean that every 18, 19 year old when their leaf high school becomes a software developer. In the same way that not every kid that learns physics or chemistry in school becomes a physicist.
Just because you learn the fundamental skills doesn't mean that you decide for yourself that that's the career path to take. That's number one, you've got to learn coding. Number two is you've got to use AI to do that. Whether it's here in Korea or in Germany, most kids, in fact most people don't speak fluent English, which is the primary language of software development and so it democratizes access to technology and that's true for many other things in the world. Having an agent available that answers to any question but also lets you realize your dream and building your dream as incredibly exciting.
Then the third thing for anyone who is already a software developer or wants to develop their craft is you've got to keep rehearsing. You've got to keep training. You've got to keep learning. You've never done with learning if I look back 30 years of what development looked like then and what it looks like now. I would have been very behind if I hadn't constantly read blog posts, literature and tried out things myself. I think those are as crucial as they were in the 90s. There are still crucial in 2025. We just have so much more access to information to become top of the field.
The obvious answer is that I most enjoy using GitHub CoPi. That's our product. It's our baby. We're working on this day and day out. I often see features long before the world sees that and the flip side is also true that they often don't actually know what's shipped, what is in preview or in internal ships. I'm daily excited about what we're building there. I'm using a lot of that myself as I am at heart a developer. Something is very simple. I'm asking it to write me a quick script that downloads IDs of all our repositories from our API.
In the past, I would have gotten to our API documentation and figured out all of myself and probably would have taken me half an hour to get to a shell script that does that. Today, I just asked CoPi and invited me to script when it works within minutes. I think that's one of the true superpowers of the AI, but that's learning to code or exploring the world. You have an assistant available to you that has infinite patience. It doesn't judge you. It will, you know, chat GPT or CoPi never tells you what a stupid question it is. It always gives you an answer.
It even accepts when you tell it it's wrong or it needs to explore the topic a little bit further. You know, you have seen the prompt examples where by telling it to outline its thought process, it actually gets to a better answer. I love using it for my blog posts and a PowerPoint presentation to just generate some images and play with that. I'm really bad at using Photoshop and drawing myself, but I'm really creative and I can't write prompts and figure out how to rewrite the prompt to make the image look more closely to what I had in my hand.
There's tools that we're using like Teams CoPi to summarize meetings, especially when I am on business trips like that, where I miss a lot of the meetings that happen on the west coast and west coast time zone, just getting a summary, figuring out other action items for me, same for summarizing emails, you know, using something like Rikle and AI to manage my calendar. Those things are making me more productive and I think the really exciting thing is that there's always a new tool to try out and see is that how far along that journey is AI and how much more do we still have to do as an industry to actually get to that dream of having an orchestra of agent that you're controlling during our personal and our professional lives.