Taking On Explosive Scaleup With GitHub

With great success comes great challenges, and GitHub has learned that lesson during the company’s explosive growth. TechPortfolio talked to GitHub Project Manager Daniel Hwang about tackling growth challenges with strategy, long-range thinking, partnerships, and product “superfans.”

Where GitHub Stood in 2017

By early 2017, GitHub had become the default place for developers to host code and work on it together. It started as a tool built by developers for developers, and its popularity with individual programmers and open-source projects later turned into a business selling tools to companies.

That kind of growth brings its own problems: more staff to hire, more infrastructure to run, bigger customers with bigger demands, and the risk of losing the qualities that made the product popular in the first place. Those are the challenges Hwang spoke about.

Growing Smart With Superfans

TechPortfolio: GitHub has scaled up massively in just a few years. As a startup dealing with large-scale success, what have been some of the key takeaway lessons for smart growth?

Daniel Hwang: Nine years ago, GitHub was started as a side project for developers looking for a better way to collaborate on code together. As we grew, we kept our focus on building something people loved, and that we loved.

We thought about what it meant to have not just fans, but “superfans.” For us, creating superfans meant growing smart. To do that, we approached our product with a lot of thought around design and utility. We want GitHub to be an accurate representation of our developers, our peers, and ourselves each and every day.

A superfan is more than a satisfied user. It’s someone who recommends the product, teaches others to use it and brings it into their workplace. For a developer tool, that matters a great deal: when developers already know and like a product, they’re the ones who push their employers to buy it.

Remote Work as a Growth Strategy

TechPortfolio: About half of GitHub’s employees are remote—and GitHub’s product, of course, facilitates remote work. How important is factoring in remote work for startups making a growth plan?

Daniel Hwang: Remote work is extremely important when making a growth plan. Especially if a startup aims to build a well-rounded, global company.

When you limit recruiting to a single region, or even just one country, you limit the talent pool that’s available for you to hire from. I’ve been very fortunate to work with a distributed engineering team—from the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, and the U.S.—that brings their naturally different perspectives to our technical discussions.

Hwang’s point looks even stronger now. Remote and hybrid work became normal for many tech companies in the years that followed, and GitHub still describes itself as having a remote-first culture, with remote work listed among the benefits it offers staff.

Partnerships With Big Companies

TechPortfolio: Last year saw the debut of GitHub Enterprise on IBM Bluemix. How important have collaborations with established corporations been in GitHub’s scaleup?

Daniel Hwang: Our partners are incredibly important to us. Millions of developers already use GitHub to build software; partnerships—like the one with IBM Bluemix—make GitHub available to even more companies and developers across the globe, allowing them to tap into the power of social coding while building the best software, faster.

Bluemix was IBM’s cloud platform at the time, and has since been folded into the IBM Cloud brand. Deals like this one let large companies use GitHub on infrastructure they already trusted, which made it easier for enterprise customers to sign on.

What Happened Next

The biggest partnership of all came a year later. On June 4, 2018, Microsoft announced it would acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock, describing it as the world’s leading software development platform with more than 28 million developers. Microsoft said GitHub would keep its “developer-first ethos” and operate independently.

GitHub kept growing after the deal. In 2021, it launched a technical preview of GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer built with OpenAI. By October 2025, GitHub’s Octoverse report said more than 180 million developers were building on the platform.

The same report backs up Hwang’s case for hiring beyond one country. India alone added more than 5 million developers to GitHub in 2025, over 14% of all new accounts, and GitHub expects India to account for one in every three new developers on the platform by 2030. The global talent pool Hwang described is only getting bigger.

What It Means for Founders

Hwang’s three lessons still hold for any startup trying to grow fast. Build something people love enough to champion, because superfans do your selling for you. Hire wherever the talent is, not just where your office is. And use partnerships with established companies to reach customers you couldn’t reach alone. GitHub did all three, and less than two years after this interview Microsoft agreed to pay $7.5 billion for it.