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| # This is the data for my blog | ||
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| It is automatically transformed by [Jekyll](http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll) | ||
| into a static site whenever I push this repository to GitHub. | ||
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| I was tired of having my blog posts end up in a database off on some remote | ||
| server. That is backwards. I've lost valuable posts that way. I want to author | ||
| my posts locally in Textile or Markdown. My blog should be easily stylable and | ||
| customizable any way I please. It should take care of creating a feed for me. | ||
| And most of all, my site should be stored on GitHub so that I never lose data | ||
| again. | ||
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|
||
| ## License | ||
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| The following directories and their contents are Copyright Tom Preston-Werner. | ||
| You may not reuse anything therein without my permission: | ||
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| * \_posts/ | ||
| * images/ | ||
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| All other directories and files are MIT Licensed. Feel free to use the HTML and | ||
| CSS as you please. If you do use them, a link back to | ||
| http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll would be appreciated, but is not required. |
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| --- | ||
| layout: post | ||
| title: How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub | ||
| --- | ||
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| {{ page.title }} | ||
| ================ | ||
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| <p class="meta">18 Oct 2008 - San Francisco</p> | ||
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| 2008 is a leap year. That means that three hundred and sixty six days ago, | ||
| almost to the minute, I was sitting alone in a booth at Zeke's Sports Bar and | ||
| Grill on 3rd Street in San Francisco. I wouldn't normally hang out at a sports | ||
| bar, let alone a sports bar in SOMA, but back then Thursday was "I Can Has Ruby" | ||
| night. I guess back then "I can has _______" was also a reasonable moniker to | ||
| attach to pretty much anything. ICHR was a semi-private meeting of like minded | ||
| Ruby Hackers that generally and willingly devolved into late night drinking | ||
| sessions. Normally these nights would fade away like my hangover the next | ||
| morning, but this night was different. This was the night that | ||
| [GitHub](http://github.com/) was born. | ||
|
|
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| I think I was sitting at the booth alone because I'd just ordered a fresh Fat | ||
| Tire and needed a short break from the socializing that was happening over at | ||
| the long tables in the dimly lit aft portion of the bar. On the fifth or sixth | ||
| sip, Chris Wanstrath walked in. I have trouble remembering now if I'd even | ||
| classify Chris and I as "friends" at the time. We knew each other through Ruby | ||
| meetups and conferences, but only casually. Like a mutual "hey, I think your | ||
| code is awesome" kind of thing. I'm not sure what made me do it, but I gestured | ||
| him over to the booth and said "dude, check this out." About a week earlier I'd | ||
| started work on a project called [Grit](http://github.com/mojombo/grit) that | ||
| allowed me to access Git repositories in an object oriented manner via Ruby | ||
| code. Chris was one of only a handful of Rubyists at the time that was starting | ||
| to become serious about Git. He sat down and I started showing him what I had. | ||
| It wasn't much, but it was enough to see that it had sparked something in Chris. | ||
| Sensing this, I launched into my half-baked idea for some sort of website that | ||
| acted as hub for coders to share their Git repositories. I even had a name: | ||
| GitHub. I may be paraphrasing, but his response was along the lines of a very | ||
| emphatic "I'm in. Let's do it!" | ||
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| The next night, Friday, October 19, 2007 at 10:24pm Chris made the first commit | ||
| to the GitHub repository and sealed in digital stone the beginning of our joint | ||
| venture. There were, so far, no agreements of any kind regarding how things | ||
| would proceed. Just two guys that decided to hack together on something that | ||
| sounded cool. | ||
|
|
||
| Remember those amazing few minutes in Karate Kid where Daniel is training to | ||
| become a martial arts expert? Remember the music? Well, you should probably go | ||
| buy and listen to [You're The | ||
| Best](http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?i=260417864&id=260417040&s=143441) | ||
| by Joe Esposito in iTunes because I'm about to hit you with a montage. | ||
|
|
||
| For the next three months Chris and I spent ridiculous hours planning and coding | ||
| GitHub. I kept going with Grit and designed the UI. Chris built out the Rails | ||
| app. We met in person every Saturday to make design decisions and try to figure | ||
| out what the hell our pricing plan would look like. I remember one very rainy | ||
| day we talked for a good two hours about various pricing strategies over some of | ||
| the best Vietnamese egg rolls in the city. All of this we did while holding | ||
| other engagements. I, for one, was employed full time at Powerset as a tools | ||
| developer for the Ranking and Relevance team. | ||
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| In mid January, after three months of nights and weekends, we launched into | ||
| private beta mode, sending invites to our friends. In mid February PJ Hyett | ||
| joined in and made us three-strong. We publicly launched the site on April 10th. | ||
| TechCrunch was not invited. At this point it was still just three 20-somethings | ||
| without a single penny of outside investment. | ||
|
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| I was still working full time at Powerset on July 1, 2008 when we learned that | ||
| Powerset had just been acquired by Microsoft for around $100 million. This was | ||
| interesting timing. With the acquisition, I was going to be faced with a choice | ||
| sooner than I had anticipated. I could either sign on as a Microsoft employee or | ||
| quit and go GitHub full time. At 29 years old, I was the oldest of the three | ||
| GitHubbers, and had accumulated a proportionally larger amount of debt and | ||
| monthly expenditure. I was used to my six digit lifestyle. Further confounding | ||
| the issue was the imminent return of my wife, Theresa, from her PhD fieldwork in | ||
| Costa Rica. I would soon be transitioning from make-believe bachelor back to | ||
| married man. | ||
|
|
||
| To muddy the waters of decision even more, the Microsoft employment offer was | ||
| juicy. Salary + $300k over three years juicy. That's enough money to make | ||
| anybody think twice about anything. So I was faced with this: a safe job with | ||
| lots of guaranteed money as a Microsoft man –or– a risky job with | ||
| unknown amounts of money as an entrepreneur. I knew things with the other GitHub | ||
| guys would become extremely strained if I stayed on at Powerset much longer. | ||
| Having saved up some money and become freelancers some time ago, they had both | ||
| started dedicating full time effort to GitHub. It was do or die time. Either | ||
| pick GitHub and go for it, or make the safe choice and quit GitHub to make | ||
| wheelbarrows full of cash at Microsoft. | ||
|
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||
| If you want a recipe for restless sleep, I can give you one. Add one part "what | ||
| will my wife think" with 3,000 parts Benjamin Franklin; stir in a "beer anytime | ||
| you damn well please" and top with a chance at financial independence. | ||
|
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| I've become pretty good at giving my employers the bad news that I'm leaving the | ||
| company to go do something cooler. I broke the news to my boss at Powerset on | ||
| the day the employment offer was due. I told him I was quitting to go work full | ||
| time on GitHub. Like any great boss, he was bummed, but understanding. He didn't | ||
| try to tempt me with a bigger bonus or anything. I think deep down he knew I was | ||
| going to leave. I may have even received a larger incentive to stay than others, | ||
| on account of my being a flight risk. Those Microsoft managers are crafty, I | ||
| tell you. They've got retention bonuses down to a science. Well, except when you | ||
| throw an entrepreneur, the singularity of the business world, into the mix. | ||
| Everything goes wacky when you've got one of those around. | ||
|
|
||
| In the end, just as Indiana Jones could never turn down the opportunity to | ||
| search for the Holy Grail, I could no less turn down the chance to work for | ||
| myself on something I truly love, no matter how safe the alternative might be. | ||
| When I'm old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say "wow, that was an | ||
| adventure," not "wow, I sure felt safe." |
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