GitHub Founding Decision

Siqi Chen shares a story about meeting GitHub co-founder Chris Wanstrath before he became successful.

"Chris Wanstrath, he's co-founder and CEO at GitHub. He was a contractor at Powerset, which was this job I took when I first moved to the city. But he was actually a contractor for my first company. I had him build this translation layer between Facebook markup language and MySpace markup language.

He was really good at it, and I distinctly remember that we were at 21st Amendment or the Bear Brewery - it doesn't matter - but I gave him a full-time employment offer in early 2008, and he was considering it. The same night when we're talking about it, he said, 'You know, DHH just put Rails on GitHub, so I think I might work on GitHub full time.'

I was thinking in my head, 'The smartest thing for me to do is actually shut down my Facebook apps business and go work for you,' but I didn't say that. I was just thinking it."