Tom Preston-Werner

Tom Preston-Werner co-founded GitHub in 2008 and turned it into the world's largest developer platform before Microsoft acquired it for $7.5 billion. Beyond GitHub, he created Gravatar, Jekyll, TOML, and the Semantic Versioning spec — tools used by tens of millions of developers daily. He dropped out of Harvey Mudd College, declined a $300,000 Microsoft bonus to bet on GitHub, angel-invested in over 175 startups including early checks in Stripe and Cursor, and in 2025 launched Preston-Werner Ventures (PWV) targeting a $100M fund. He and his wife signed The Giving Pledge in 2023.