GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke announced on Monday that he is resigning from his position. The announcement came nearly four years after he was elevated to the position following former CEO Nat Friedman’s departure. Dohmke said he was leaving the company to pursue his dream of becoming a startup founder again. As per a report, Microsoft will get more control of the company after the GitHub CEO leaves, and the company’s leadership team will directly report to the tech giant’s CoreAI division, which is being led by former Meta executive Jay Parikh.
GitHub CEO Sets Date for Departure
In a blog post, Dohmke revealed that on Monday, he sent an internal post to GitHub employees announcing that he will be stepping down. However, he will not be departing immediately, and instead, he plans to stay till the end of the year to help with the transition.
Dohmke first joined Microsoft in 2015 after the Redmond-based tech giant acquired his startup, HockeyApp, a DevOps (developer operations) solution. In 2018, after the Windows maker acquired GitHub, he became the Vice President of Strategic Programmes in the company. In 2021, he was elevated to the role of CEO after rising through the ranks.
According to an Axios report, Parikh sent a separate memo on Monday highlighting a new leadership structure for GitHub. Instead of serving under a single CEO, the leadership team will reportedly report to several Microsoft executives in the CoreAI division.
CoreAI is a new Microsoft division that is tasked with scaling the company’s existing AI tools and building newer ones. Before the division was created, Dohmke reported to Julia Liuson, the company’s President of the Developer division, The Verge reported. After CoreAI’s creation, Liuson reportedly began reporting to Parikh.
This existing structure and plans for future restructuring are intriguing since it appears that GitHub’s autonomy will be significantly reduced following Dohmke’s departure. With CoreAI’s focus on AI, the team could begin pushing more AI tools to developers using GitHub. Axios claims the tech giant’s strategy is to bring GitHub’s developer base to Windows and Azure, as well as Microsoft’s suite of AI tools.
In an interview with The Verge, Parikh said, “Just like how Bill [Gates] had this idea of Microsoft being a bunch of software developers building a bunch of software, I want our platform, for any enterprise or any organisation, to be able to be the thing they turn into their own agent factory.”
