Chris Wanstrath

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Chris Wanstrath (born March 13, 1985) is an American tech entrepreneur and programmer best known for co-founding GitHub and later selling it to Microsoft in 2018. He started GitHub in 2008 with P. J. Hyett and Tom Preston-Werner. He was CEO until 2012, then served as president, and returned to the CEO role until the company was acquired. At the time of the sale, GitHub had about 1,000 employees, more than 20 million users, and roughly $300 million in annual revenue.

Wanstrath grew up in Ohio and graduated from St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati in 2003. He briefly studied English at the University of Cincinnati but left to work in San Francisco, starting at CNET on GameSpot and Chowhound. He was largely self-taught and also ran a Ruby on Rails consulting shop with Hyett before GitHub.

Besides GitHub, he created several popular tools, including the Atom text editor, the Resque Ruby job queue, the Mustache templating language, and the pjax JavaScript library.

For his achievements, Forbes lists him among America’s Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40, and Fortune includes him on its 40 under 40 list as well as CNBC’s Disruptor 50. He serves on the board of trustees for the Computer History Museum.

In 2023, Wanstrath announced Void, a new game developer platform planned for 2024. In 2024 he and Andreas Kling launched the Ladybird Browser Initiative, aiming to build a web browser not tied to big-tech ads, with a release targeted for 2026. He also started Null Games in 2023, a publishing studio to help indie developers; its first title, Tape to Tape, sold over 34,000 copies in its first week. Wanstrath is active in giving talks at major conferences and events, including NASA’s open source summit and GitHub and Rails-related conferences.