GitHub Tackles Growing Pains
The VC-Backed Unicorn Balances Expansion with Financial Losses

GitHub Inc., the web-based repository hosting service designed for developers to store, share, and collaborate on their work, has grown rapidly—and that comes with bottom-line costs. Most recently, as Bloomberg reports, GitHub took a $66 million hit in the first nine months of 2016.

While GitHub has always focused on catering to coders, it also sells more advanced programming tools to companies, both large and small, and striking the right balance between these two aspects of the business may well be the key to the company’s success. As competitors emerge, GitHub’s relationships and approach are crucial to making the company stand out.

“I want us to be judged on, ‘Are we making developers more productive?’” GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath tells Bloomberg. And with new features, new leadership, and an influx of fresh capital, Wanstrath is confident GitHub can remain a leader in the software category it essentially originated. “We’ve had a lot of ups and downs, and right now we’re definitely in an up.”