SUMMARY
GitHub CEO Nat Freidman said India is its third largest community
GitHub saw nearly 70% increase in traffic from India in 2018
General Manager will help GitHub set up base in India and grow community
Microsoft-owned software development platform and community, Github is getting serious about the India market, and is now looking to hire a General Manager (GM) for the India operations, according to a job vacancy listed on its website.
GitHub CEO Nat Freidman said in a tweet that India is the company’s third largest community and it is making major investments there “starting with a GM to build our office from the ground up. We’re looking for an entrepreneurial, experienced leader who understands developers.”
GitHub’s Rise in India
Founded in 2008, GitHub was developed by Chris Wanstrath, P. J. Hyett, Tom Preston-Werner and Scott Chacon. It is mostly used for coding. It offers all of the distributed version control and source code management functionality of Git as well as adding its own features
The company was acquired by Microsoft in October 2018 in a deal worth $7.5 Bn. At the time, GitHub CEO said that his firm will operate independently as a community, platform and business, and will retain its developer-first ethos in its India operations.
At present, more than 31 Mn people use GitHub across 100 Mn repositories or codebases. It is largely a developer-focussed platform, meant for programmers and engineers to collaborate, address bugs and issues, make changes to open source code and show off their work to the world. In India, GitHub saw desktop web traffic shoot up by nearly 70% last year, when Microsoft acquired it, compared to the traffic in 2017. In terms of increase in traffic, India had the highest growth for GitHub from 2017 to 2018, which highlights how important the market is.
What Is GitHub Looking For?
On the job description page, Github said the General Manager will drive adoption of the platform, engage with the developer community and global enterprise customers in India.
“This leader will have the opportunity to create a vision for market expansion, building community and adoption within the software developer industry, understanding the partner and SI landscape and develop deep partnerships with enterprise customers to support their business goals,” the post said.
The company is seeking a candidate with relevant experience in international business. Interestingly, the company emphasised that there’s no specific background that is an ideal fit, so candidates are encouraged to apply from a variety of different industries, and job experiences.
GitHub states the General Manager would have to engage the developer and student communities in India to understand their needs, provide opportunities to learn and collaborate and expand access to GitHub. Further, they will build, lead, and help manage a strategic sales organization focused on growing revenue and market share.
Further the GM will be tasked with improving sales and market growth by working with the company’s Marketing, Support, Human Resources, and Community teams in the country and the US.
