pjhyett

If those projects are looking for a new home, we'd be happy to welcome them at GitHub.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "only vaguely." The fact that passionate developers are building developer tools has a lot to do with why we've been successful.

Chris, the CEO, has spoken at length about this topic. He and I built another site prior to GitHub where there was very little correlation between our interests and the product we were building. Not surprisingly, our hearts weren't in it and we threw in the towel.

All of this said, just because you're working on something you're passionate about doesn't immediately mean you're bound for success; it just helps tremendously.

Not for nothing, but full fare economy can often be more expensive than discounted biz tickets. Having an actual conversation telling the VC to cool it might have ended up saving you more money.

That is certainly not the case at GitHub. We don't care where or when you work as long as the work gets done. If you're being guilted into staying later, then the hours aren't actually flexible.

This is poor advice. We've met dozens of VC's since GitHub launched to 1) meet interesting people 2) learn as much as possible 3) figure out who we like if we ever decide to go that route. Folks like Satish Dharmaraj at Redpoint have loads of information gleaned from successful ventures and I'd have a drink with him any day.

We're trying to fundamentally change how people write, collaborate, and discover code and the sooner people stop thinking of us as just a repo depository, the better, because we've never been about that.

Ask yourself what kind of markup we'd have to charge on storage space and still be able to grow our business when most of the repos we host are less than 1 MB.

We charge what we do because it makes money. Money that allows us to continue hiring really talented people that are all focused on building an even better service.

Doing things like including private repos with our free plan would eat into our margins and only satisfy the people that are likely to never convert to a paid plan. Frankly, I think being able to use all of the tools we provide for the price of a pint of Guinness every month is a damn good deal.

Just like there are diminishing returns coding for many hours without resting, trying to build a business without having a social life will ultimately have damaging effects. Knowing how to communicate is half the battle and you're not going to learn how to do that sitting in front of a screen all day.

I think we've all read the stories of founders not sleeping for days and ruining their personal lives in the process and I just don't see how any of that is necessary.

San Francisco's distractions should be seen as a benefit, not a hindrance.

I interned at a 1.0 bubble company the summer prior to my freshman year of high school. I built a website for the church I attended for no particular reason, the CEO happened to be a member, and he thought it would be fun for me to come work for him. I couldn't agree more, because the alternative was carrying around heavy golf bags for another summer.

I had a really great summer working long hours writing ASP all day, befriending the college interns that also worked there (whom I still keep in touch with), and generally feeling all grown up and respected even at age 14. The only real disappointment was when I found out my boss made $70k/yr for doing more or less the same thing I did, but I was making minimum wage. That may have been the same moment I realized I needed to be my own boss.

We're well aware that Windows support needs improvement. Rest assured we will be addressing that issue.