Nat Friedman is stepping down as the CEO of Microsoft-owned developer community and code repository GitHub. He’ll be replaced by Thomas Dohmke, GitHub’s chief product officer, effective Nov. 15.
Friedman will be chairman emeritus of GitHub, and the company said he’ll be returning to the startup world.
The announcement comes three years after Microsoft completed its $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub and named Friedman CEO. Friedman had originally joined in 2016 as part of its acquisition of Xamarin, the mobile app development platform.
As part of the changes, Microsoft said it’s promoting Julia Liuson, a 29-year veteran of the company, to president of its Developer Division. She was previously corporate vice president.
Dohmke will report to Liuison in her new role. Friedman had previously reported to Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud + AI Division.
“Under Julia’s leadership, the Developer Division team has undergone a significant cultural transformation and is guided by consistent cultural values: diversity & inclusion, customer obsession, data-driven, and quality-driven,” Guthrie wrote in an internal email. “The pervasiveness of these culture attributes is evident through the success of products like Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, which have experienced more than 16x usage growth since 2014 (and are now used by the majority of developers in the world).”
Dohmke led the engineering side of the GitHub acquisition for Microsoft before becoming GitHub’s vice president of strategic platforms and then chief product officer.
