GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke: 150M developers, 1B repos, and Copilot driving the next platform shift

from GitHub. Another little post earnings breakdown. Get the update from Microsoft and GitHub. Uh Nat Freiedman was running the organization. Thomas has taken over and they've been on absolute tear. Just cross to follow. Just crossed. Welcome to the show. 20 million users since growth is serving 90% of the Fortune 100.

Congratulations. Uh kick us off with an introduction. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Great to be here. Thanks so much for joining. And uh yeah, I'm Thomas and uh I've been running GitHub for the last four years.

Um I've been with GitHub for seven years uh since we acquired it in 2018 and it's been a tremendous run uh that GitHub had as part of Microsoft.

Is it fair to describe the run as as growth in overall users or growth in uh GitHub co-pilot revenue or uh you know this 90% of the Fortune 100's using the product now has that been the win case? Has it been a little bit of what's the other 10% doing?

Well% software I think software that's why they that's why this is the principle. The last 10% is going to take you 10 times as long to. I got to we got to figure out the 10% and short them.

That's that's I mean, but seriously, if you're a Fortune 500 company and you're not building some software in your organization, there are other companies that provide similar services that do well. You know, we're not going to talk too much trash about the competitors, but you know, we are we are big fans.

Um but yeah, what what uh over your tenure, what have been the big initiatives that you've shipped and then maybe opened a bottle of Don Peran champagne or or just had a pizza with the team to celebrate? Uh you know, we always keep pushing further. So there isn't um there's celebrations every now and then.

What's really like about what's next? What's next? What's next? Um if I look back to 2018 when we did the when we did the deal, we really had three principles. Put developers first. And I think we nailed that one. GitHub is still GitHub.

you know we are talking about developers we're building for developers we are you know uh meeting with them all the time and we have preserved you know that um spirit of what GitHub is all about the second one was that Microsoft helps us to accelerate Microsoft if you will as an investor into GitHub and I think that's you know the 150 million uh developers on the platform uh recently we we hit over a billion repositories both you know original repositories and forks um you mentioned the 20 million copilot users um Microsoft's visual studio family.

So VSE and VS Code together has 50 million active users. So you can also see how much room there is still for Copilot to grow its its market share.

Um and uh a year ago we we passed 2 billion in AR annual revenue runner aid and I think all these metrics show that both the business itself uh is healthy and and and keeps growing um the network effects that that GitHub as a platform has.

Then the third one was that GitH helps to accelerate Microsoft and the most obvious thing obvious is that uh you know Microsoft developers are using GitHub and are using copilot.

So Microsoft itself benefits from the same productivity gains that our customers benefit from and we're sharing a lot of the AI knowledge across uh Microsoft you know within the core AI division Azure AI foundry and all these tools. I'm hearing glimpses of self-improving artificial intelligence.

Microsoft is using GitHub to improve GitHub. I'd love to see it. Um what where else are people using GitHub Copilot? Um where are the what are what are the biggest like win conditions or win win use cases in those Fortune 100 companies? Where's the biggest value being derived right now?

Believe it or not, I think the biggest value is still the core scenario which is you have your IDE open, you know, VS Code or Jet Brains, um, uh, even Apple Xcode and you're writing code and instead of switching between the IDE and and the browser where you have, you know, all these tabs open and you watch the show and and there's all the distractions, you know, in in your browser and and you try to find the answer to problem you're trying to solve, you just have it right there, uh, where you're building.

So whether it's code completions that you know predicts to you something that you might have not not have even thought about in that moment or whether it's the ability to go into chat and and ask the question about that code and find a bug or I was working on my blog on on Sunday and I couldn't figure out how I couldn't remember the markdown syntax to to embed an image and it's just like give me that real quick right and then all the way to agentic scenarios and I know you talked with Anton right before it's this ability to give it a task and then watch it do these things and call tools and it figures out how to install this npm package and and then it looks at the error message and it sees that there's a test case missing.

So I think this end to end spectrum where I'm still the pilot and I'm still in charge because I think and I strongly believe that the majority of developers actually want to build something. They don't want to offload their job to somebody else like an agent or a set of agents.

They want to use these agents to do what they uh uh uh love doing most. Yeah. Can you talk to me about um like where the boundaries of uh GitHub or Microsoft's agnosticism land? Like you don't make everyone write C, you don't make everyone use uh VS Code.

Um but uh how are you thinking about integrating different models at at Microsoft Build? Sachi Nadella was talking about the importance of Azure being a place where you could get everything from GPT4 to DeepSeek to Llama to it sounds like XAI is coming on as well.

Um, how are you thinking about uh integration with a broad suite of new tools as they come up? Choice is crucial for any developer tool to win the market.

You can't you can't be in uh in the space of of selling developer tools and and not offer developers choice because if you don't do that they go somewhere else and they will find the choice uh somewhere else. So since last year we're offering what we call multimodel choice.

Um so we're not only having the open AI models which which are still great and and many people use um as their default. We also have anthropics models, we have um uh Google's models. Um we actually have you know bring your own model.

So you can connect from uh copilot uh to open router or lama and and and from there you can go to you know every model uh imaginable as long as it has an API and and a key that you have a um access to and so we think that is crucial and developers will not want us to tell them what model to use.

Like that's just like you know in intrusion in in in my my you know personal freedom.

um and they they know better what's what's best for them in the same way that at at GitHub we wouldn't tell you use this open source library or you know use this programming language like you wouldn't GitHub wouldn't be what it is today if it had only you know one ecosystem let's say JavaScript right and and all its libraries um now obviously there's boundaries there um because we have only so many people at GitHub at Microsoft that can integrate all these models and there's a new model every single day sometimes multiple times a day u yes yesterday there were two new models three I think two open source ones and all these models need GPU capacity and and you know responsible AI testing and and red teaming and and all that and so we believe it's a mix of we provide models out of the box and you bring your own model um uh uh through open router and what have you fantastic last question last question you have over 100 million developers on GitHub have you tried to estimate how many of them are not using any AI tools that just uh hanging back saying I I'll I'll I'll make my code by hand please handmade none of that AI for me it's over 150 million um I think it's still you know less than 50% that use AI on a daily basis and that's just the nature of things right if you look at what are these 150 million developers there's lots of students there uh where the professor may not allow the use of AI or they haven't make made that step because they're really just trying to solve that uh you know task from from their homework or from from the test but at the same time we see more and more developers making their jump software development has always been a spectrum right there's those that are still working on cobalt mainframes in Germany there are still companies I think the train system is looking for people that have Windows 95 experience in in 2025 right like that's the like any of you new grads know Windows 95 from when from when you were but believe it or not even if you you know are new grad or postgrad and you join a company and you have to work on a cobalt project as long as you can then also use, you know, GitHub and and and Copilot and and and AI tools.

That might not be the worst job in the world, right? Because you can combine modern technology and apply to that old stuff.

But what I was going to say is that we have this huge spectrum between the people that are most ahead on the curve, you know, those watching your show and or or talking on the show here and then those that are still having to maintain the systems that power the world.

And we our our mission at GitHub is to to cover all these developers and and enable them, you know, to collaborate between humans and humans and very soon uh uh uh between humans and agents and agents with each other, right? That's where that's where the platform is going.

Well, thank you for your service and congratulations on all the growth. It's been great chatting with you. We'll let you get back. Thank you for joining. Super insightful. Have a great day. Thanks so much for having me. Talk to you soon. Bye. Up next, we have Alex Jacobson from 137 Ventures.

We've had Christian Garrett on the show many times for 137 Ventures and