Back in July, collaborative code repository GitHub raised a whopping $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz to build out an enterprise version of the service, among other things. Until now, it’s been in need of someone to help the co-founders manage that cash and keep the fiscal ship from any nearby cliffs. Today, via a blog post, GitHub CEO and co-founder Tom Preston-Werner announced that the company had hired Vlado Herman as its new CFO to do just that.
Before joining GitHub, Herman was the CFO of Yelp, a position he took in July 2010 after initially joining the company in 2006 as the director of finance. Prior to Yelp, Herman was a director of finance at Yahoo and spent time at Ernst & Young and Intel.
Of Herman, GitHub’s first CFO, Preston-Werner says: “From the very first time I shook his hand, I knew I wanted to work with Vlado. He’s sharp, funny, patient, and believes in optimizing for happiness. Finding a proven financial expert that fit our culture wasn’t easy, but we were very lucky to find someone special, and now we’re incredibly proud to call Vlado a GitHubber.”
From what the GitHub CEO has said before — that GitHub is disrupting “how software is written in the enterprise” — there’s a big vision at play here. The company is the biggest name when it comes to code posting and sharing, but the co-founders want the company to play in a bigger arena, one occupied by the IBMs of the world, starting with GitHub Enterprise. But that, of course, is just the beginning. The real future road map hinges on the concept of GitHub Everywhere, bringing every coder, developer — everyone in software — onto the GitHub platform.
The key to creating that kind of stranglehold on the software industry is building a company on top of great social, collaborative technology — but also great culture. And the company clearly thinks it’s getting a solid upgrade in the cultural department by bringing Herman on board — someone, who we learn from Preston-Werner’s blog post, knows his way around a good whiskey. Could be that GitHub just found its Ron Swanson…