Chris Wanstrath

Wanstrath was born on March 13, 1985. From a young age, he loved video games, and wanted to create his own.^[6] He graduated from St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati in 2003 and briefly studied English at the University of Cincinnati.^[6][7] He left the university after getting a job in San Francisco at CNET Networks.^[6]

Before the success of GitHub, Wanstrath ran a Ruby on Rails consulting shop with PJ Hyett (a GitHub co-founder). Prior to this, Wanstrath was at CNET Networks, where he worked on GameSpot and the launch of Chowhound.^{[8][6][9][10]} He was a completely self-taught programmer until his job with CNET.^[8][6][10]

In 2008, Wanstrath co-founded GitHub and the service had 100,000 users by July 2009.^[11][12] It was named to CNBC's Disruptor List five times between 2008 and 2018.^[11] While at GitHub he created the Electron Software Framework.^[13] Wanstrath served as its CEO until the Series A round of funding in 2012^[14] and then president until 2014 at which time he returned to the CEO role.^[11][15] He was CEO until October 2018.^[12] At the time, GitHub had close to 1000 employees, over 20 million users, and $300 million in annualized recurring revenue.^[16]

In June 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion (~$8.96 billion in 2023) in an all-stock deal.^[17][3] At the time, GitHub was the world's largest host service for software code.^[10] In addition to GitHub, Wanstrath created the job queue program Resque,^[6][18] the Mustache templating language,^[19] and the Atom text editor.^[20][21][22] He's also created the pjax JavaScript library.^[23]

Wanstrath is on the board of trustees for the Computer History Museum.^[24]

In 2023 Wanstrath announced the development of a new game developer platform called Void, scheduled to launch in 2024.^[25]

In February 2023, announced a new games publishing studio, Null Games.^[26] Null helps developers with marketing, development costs, porting, and publishing.^[27] The company's first released title was a hockey-based rogue-lite called Tape to Tape, developed by Excellent Rectangle.^[28][29][30] In its first week, 34,020 units of the game were sold.^[30] Null Games states on its website that it will not “publish mobile games or games with gambling, loot boxes, or any other player-hostile behavior.”^[31][28][29]

Wanstrath was a speaker at NASA’s open source summit.^[8] He has given keynote talks at the International RailsConf, Startup Riot Atlanta, Rails Summit Latin America, and different regional and international conferences.^[8] He gave the keynote addresses at the Esri Developer Summit in 2014, at the GitHub Universe Conference from 2015 to 2017 and the GitHub Satellite Conference in 2016 and 2017.^[32][33]