Andreessen Horowitz is investing an eye-popping $100 million into GitHub, the ever popular repository for developers to post code and collaborate.
It’s GitHub’s first infusion of venture capital.Co- founder Tom Preston-Werner said the round will go to developing GitHub Enterprise, a server side version of GitHub.com. Reports state GitHub has been valued at $750 million.
Since its debut in 2008, GitHub has become an astonishingly popular Web destination, emerging as the social network for developers.
Werner said a search has been underway for a venture round. Andreessen Horowitz was just the right fit. In our interview today, Werner specifically referred to a post written by Marc Andreessen in the pages of the Wall Street Journal titled: Why Software is Eating the World. Andreessen argues that entire industries are getting eaten up by software. From movies to agriculture to national defense, the word is getting eaten by technology companies, most of which are from San Francisco and the Silicon Valley.
“These guys fit as what we see as a future vision for GitHub,” Werner said.
As part of the deal, GitHub will bring on Andreessen Horowitz Partner Peter Levine as a board member. Levine was the founder of XenSource, the virtualization technology company acquired by Citrix in 2007. Levine brings intimate knowledge of the role virtualization plays in the enterprise.
In a blog post, Levine says the team at GitHub rise comes through its focus on people not repositories:
They took an old technology category and turned it on its head. Source Code Management (SCM) is the second most fundamental tool for a programmer after compiler and development tools. It stores, versions and branches source code being developed by teams of programmers. At scale, these systems become highly complex and often difficult to manage. In addition, historically SCMs have been anti-social. The No. 1 conversation they generate is referred to as: “Who broke the build?” GitHub solves these two problems and dramatically expands the category by changing the old model in two important ways:
Rather than forcing every development team in the world to deploy their own SCM, GitHub runs one big SCM in the cloud and the management issues vanish.GitHub organizes projects around people rather than code.
Werner said his team built GitHub.com. Now it’s time to build a vibrant on-premise technology that developers can easily use to deploy code and collaborate with other developers. GitHub will integrate with any open virtualization format (OVF). According to Wikipedia, OVF is “an open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for the packaging and distribution of software to be run in virtual machines.”
GitHub’s package system will make it easy for developers to upgrade from current version up to latest version of the software. Upgrades will be made weekly and quarterly.
“We are disrupting how software is written in the enterprise,” Werner said. He said he sees his competitors as IBM Rational software, Perforce and Clearcase.
With such a whopping round, there has to be more to this than just building an enterprise technology. Listening to Werner he talk about GitHub Everywhere, a concept that permeates into all aspects of the business. It’s clear the company wants to build an organization with a great culture and technology that can be used universally in an enjoyable and collaborative way.