GitHub’s VP on the New Era of No-Code + AI

0:01 Georgie Healy: Founders scale faster on Deel.

0:04 Sharryn Napier: Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, get visas handled fast, and get back to building. Visit deel.com/dayone. That's D-E-E-L dot com slash day one.

0:19 Georgie Healy: Globally, we've got 180 million developers on the platform and one joins every second.

0:27 Sharryn Napier: Whoa.

0:28 Georgie Healy: The actual gravity of GitHub is the community, right? That's the heart and soul, and that's the heartbeat of the platform. Things like Copilot and also Spark, the barrier to entry is lowering. The agent chaos is starting to be created, right? So they've got lots of agents all over the place. They're unsecured, unorganized, and they're uncontrolled. So in an enterprise, that's a little bit scary. So when you think about AgentHQ, this is our vision to say that we are gonna provide you an environment, an ecosystem, and partners of the platform of where you can actually control these agents in a much more secure and sort of collaborative way.

1:07 Sharryn Napier: How GitHub will monetize in the future, can you tell he's from a startup? Especially in this era where software is increasingly like pay-to-play and GitHub's very, like, it feels like a very generous platform. How do you see the future of monetization?

1:23 Georgie Healy: It's a good question and this comes up quite a lot and I think Hello and welcome to In the Blink of AI.

1:32 Sharryn Napier: We're going to dive right in today. We've got Sharon Napier. She's the VP of Asia Pacific, India, Japan, and China for the one and only GitHub. I know how beloved this brand is in the developer ecosystem, and increasingly those of us that call ourselves non-technical and then accidentally build an app in under an hour. More of that on the show. We had some of my favorite developers ask questions directly for Sharon. Including why is GitHub Copilot better than Cursor? If one engineer is now doing the job of three, what does that mean for the workforce? And you guys are still obsessed with the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub back in 2018. We dive into how it maintained its culture, its beloved and unique brand, even despite that acquisition. We do a lot more than that, and I just wanna dive right into the show. Thank you for listening. See you next time. Send me a comment, send me your thoughts, and I will see you on the other side. You're listening to a Day One FM show. I'm thrilled to be partnered with Stripe for today's episode. Did you know that Stripe Startups offers early-stage venture-backed startups access to Stripe fee credits, expert insights, and a focused community of builders? We love builders on In the Blink of AI. Apply today at dayone.fm/Stripe. So, hi Sharon, thank you so much for joining In the Blink of AI. I've been looking forward to this episode so much with you. To kick off the show, we always start with an AI hack of the week. What would you like to share that kind of delighted you around AI recently?

3:20 Georgie Healy: Okay, so thank you for having me on. I think it's a great opportunity to talk to your listeners. an AI hack. I'm not a technical person, so I've been running software companies for about 25 years, and I'm not technical at all. One of the things that I've recently done is use Copilot Spark. So GitHub Spark, and Spark is a natural language interface, if you like, that you can just sort of say, build me this. I spend a lot of time writing lists. So I've got Post-it notes and I've got notepads and I've got all these lists all over my desk. And so I created an app that was just to collect my to-do list. I've got some area for things that I've got to talk to my leaders about. I've got another area that I have to talk to my manager about or my boss about. But I built that in less than an hour.

4:14 Sharryn Napier: Wow.

4:15 Georgie Healy: And I use it every day. And so that's, for someone that doesn't code and doesn't know how to code—

4:20 Sharryn Napier: Yes.

4:21 Georgie Healy: It's a game changer for me.

4:24 Sharryn Napier: That's huge. I'm also a big list person. I'm looking over at my desk over there. I've got an A4 size list. I've got the little list, I've got the Post-its like you do. I am gonna actually maybe steal that off you. That sounds awesome.

4:38 Georgie Healy: Absolutely, spice it up.

4:39 Sharryn Napier: Okay, amazing. I'm sure it's, you know, top secret notes, but maybe it's something worth taking a photo of and showing us the before and after. That'd be super cool. Incredible, my hack, again, I'm not a technical person either. I actually have an undergraduate in engineering, but I can't code like you can't code, and often, you know, compare myself to engineers. You work with engineers, I work with engineers, and I often am like, yeah, I'm not that. However, I was really surprised and delighted by what I could do with the no-code tools like Lovable in creating a new website. I used to use Wix and WordPress, and it was kind of ready-made templates, low-code, no-code tools, but they always looked the same. You could always tell a Wix website, a WordPress website. And by starting with just a blank page and prompting your way through, it kind of feels unique and different. And I've got custom buttons and things like that.

5:43 Georgie Healy: Yeah.

5:43 Sharryn Napier: But, yeah.

5:44 Georgie Healy: It's been fun, you know, like I got to a point where I was like, I don't like a blue background. I actually want a pink background. Then I went, oh, I don't like the pink. So, it actually, I think it makes it less daunting to get into software development. And I think that that's one of the things that from a GitHub perspective, we're trying to lower the barrier of entry so that people aren't daunted or scared to actually jump into software development. And then once they do, it is fun.

6:13 Sharryn Napier: I couldn't agree more. It's so overwhelming when you see lines of code and you're like, I don't deserve to play in this space. And I'm really excited to talk to you, Sharon, about this because GitHub in my mind, it was often software engineer and the two were completely like the Venn diagram was overlapped and there was no other community or no other group. But with AI, I'm very interested to dive into whether that is evolving and changing. But to start with, you're the VP of Asia Pacific at GitHub since 2022. I want to know about the adoption of AI and how that has maybe impacted the number of developers at GitHub and whether the groups that you're seeing that use GitHub, how they've changed over time.

7:03 Georgie Healy: Yeah, that's actually a really good way to start because when I arrived at GitHub, it was just GitHub, right? We were the platform. We had, you know, sort of CI/CD through Actions and we had security. Now, fundamentally, AI has basically changed everything. So, we have Copilot, which wasn't around when I first joined, and that has really amplified the ability of the developer. The growth that we've seen. So, In 2022, when I arrived, I think Australia had around about 1.4, 1.5 million developers on the GitHub platform. And now we have 2 million developers or just over 2 million developers.

7:46 Speaker C: Wow.

7:46 Georgie Healy: So, and if you look at it, I think it's about like 360,000 of those joined in the last year. Now that is ridiculous growth. That's like 22% year on year. And we're not just seeing that in Australia. We're seeing it across Asia Pacific as a whole. You know, when I joined, India was around about 8.5 million developers. It's just hitting about 22 now.

8:11 Sharryn Napier: Whoa.

8:12 Georgie Healy: Yeah, like it's crazy. And we think that that's going to exceed the US market in the next few years. So Asia Pacific as a whole has an incredible growth story. We've never seen growth in across all the countries ever like this before. Including Australia. And I think that the reason for that is this is where the ecosystem lives. This is the developer ecosystem. You know, globally we've got 180 million developers on the platform and one joins every second.

8:41 Sharryn Napier: Whoa.

8:42 Georgie Healy: That's just like, that's incredible.

8:44 Sharryn Napier: It is incredible. And how much do you attribute this to the rise in AI and these kind of start with play and then start playing with the code and getting more and more proficient technically, or other external factors that I'm not aware of?

9:01 Georgie Healy: I think AI is driving the growth. You know, unprecedented growth over the last 12 months is a direct reaction to AI. But it's also, you know, if you look at AI, how, how that sort of lowering the barrier of entry like we talked about with Spark and things like that. Yes. More people are getting onto the platform because it's actually on the platform where the rest of the AI kicks in. When a developer's coding, they probably only spend 20% of their time in their IDE actually coding. The rest of the software development lifecycle is in the platform. So, it's 80% of their time, they're actually infused with AI across the entire software development lifecycle. So, I think that AI is actually— Yeah. Not just drawing people into being coders or developers, it's actually drawing them into the platform to experience the rest of the journey.

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11:14 Sharryn Napier: Incredible. I read somewhere that within the first week, 80% of new developers on GitHub are using Copilot. Can you talk to me about that? And I mean, I've been guilty of using a new tool and then churning out the next month? Like, perhaps tell me about the way that they interact with it.

11:36 Georgie Healy: I think, you know, like if you look at it 100%, like people are using Copilot as they join the platform, but it's sort of like an expectation. So you think about AI now, developers come to any sort of environment or any sort of ecosystem, they expect AI to be there. Copilot, you know, they might use it at school, they'll use it at university. They go to an enterprise or to a large customer company and they expect to have the tools that they have grown up with through their, you know, sort of education journey, if you like, to be available to them. And, you know, I think that that's sort of like one of the things that they expect AI to be there. They get onto the platform within the first week, they're using Copilot. Now, from a churn perspective, just to address that word, I think that we build a platform that works the way developers want to work. We don't give them tools and say, "This is the way the tool works." And I think that that's a fundamental difference with GitHub from an entire platform perspective is that we're constantly evolving this platform in the way that developers work. And a good sort of direction of that is Agent HQ. So if you think about it, the developers now are at a point where the agent chaos is starting to be created, right? So they've got lots of agents all over the place running around doing different things. They're unsecured, they're unorganized, and they're uncontrolled. So in an enterprise, that's a little bit scary. So when you think about Agent HQ, this is our vision to say that we're going to provide you an environment, an ecosystem, and part of the platform of where you can actually control these agents in a much more sort of secure and sort of collaborative way. The good thing about this is that we provide like a mission control where developers can invite or bring in all the other agents from third-party organizations. So Anthropic's Claude, we've got—

13:45 Sharryn Napier: Claude.

13:45 Georgie Healy: Google Jewel, and we've got, um—

13:48 Sharryn Napier: I saw OpenAI on the list. Wow.

13:52 Georgie Healy: Yeah. We're starting to bring the third-party agents into the platform to allow the developer to basically manage and orchestrate that. They're able to stop the, you know, sort of the agent mid-flow. So if they sort of like want to redirect it, they can do that. But then if you look at Agent HQ, you then have permission, you have, um, control plane, which is the second sort of piece which allows the developers and the organization to put in some guardrails, you know, what the agents can do, what they can't do, what models they can use, what models they can't use, and allow the organization to audit what the agents actually do. And those sorts of things are things that, you know, as this chaos increases, you want to make sure that you're controlling some of those aspects. And last but not least, we provide visibility and metrics into, you know, what models are being used, used, how frequently, what's the adoption rate, all of those sorts of things. So Agent HQ sort of takes all of that, you know, chaos, um, and sort of puts a, a boundary around it and provides great security, control, governance.

15:00 Sharryn Napier: I'm so glad you brought this up because the headlines constantly talk about the chaos of agents and the fear around anything multi-step that we're not fully overseeing. Um, it sounds super risky, right? Like, what if, uh, it just drains my bank account? Like, I ask it to buy one something on Amazon and then it's bought 60 million of that one-unit item. Uh, tell me about Copilot coding agent and like, are enterprises a bit freaked out by this multi-step agent HQ ecosystem, or how they've responded?

15:35 Georgie Healy: I, I don't think they're freaked out anymore. I think when we sort of like, when Copilot came out, I think that that was the level of, you know, wow, What does this mean and how does this work? And I think that organizations that are really forward-thinking, like CBA, right? So Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

15:51 Sharryn Napier: Biggest bank in Australia.

15:53 Georgie Healy: Yeah. 100%, right? The very first customer globally to adopt coding agent.

15:58 Sharryn Napier: Huh.

15:59 Georgie Healy: So regulated industry, highly, you know, controlled by the regulators, by APRA and all that sort of stuff. And, you know, they embrace technology in a safe, secure, and a very controlled manner. And they're just— they're absolutely getting massive value out of it. And we see this now starting to happen globally with much larger customers as well around the world.

16:23 Sharryn Napier: That is fascinating. If you ask me one institution or even industry that would like freak me out from an agent perspective, it would be banking, right? So that's fascinating. And they've really adopted it and enjoyed it. Yeah, was not on my bingo card this year, Sharon, very interesting. Look, let's talk about one more headline before we move on to the GitHub community itself. An engineer being able to do the, like be as productive as 3 engineers, amazing. You know, that they're, it's easier to be productive, but is it too productive, Sharon? If one engineer is doing 3 engineers' job, well then like what happens to those other 2 engineers, right? Yeah.

17:04 Georgie Healy: It's a good question, and this comes up quite a lot. And I think what we've seen, you know, if you look at the growth in the market that we've seen over the last 12 months, there's no indication that that's slowing down anytime soon. We've had unprecedented growth in this region, but globally as well. So that, that's one sort of thing. What I actually think is that, you know, when I talk to large customers, they're sort of saying, oh, you know, now I'm at least able to burn down that technical debt. We've got a lot of backlog that we just don't get to do or we don't get to sort of go through or prioritize because we just don't have the time. So now we can start looking at that sort of stuff. And the other thing is that I don't know any company that ever goes to their development engineers or their business and says, "Don't give me any more features. Don't give me any more capability. We don't want to put a new product into market. We don't want to—" Yeah. Take on a new country or anything like that. Those needs are going to continue. And I think the faster that the engineering organization is delivering, the faster that the business is starting to go, "Great, we're doing these amazing things. Let's go do it here and let's do more of it." So, I don't think either of those two things are going to go away very soon. And I think that the productivity benefits that the developers are getting now is being able to address some of those things that really have been hanging around for a long time or help an organization break into new markets.

18:32 Sharryn Napier: Yeah, that headline frankly pisses me off a little bit because what I see every day is founders out there fighting for their lives to get more engineers. It's not the opposite. Okay, let's talk about the GitHub community. I'm not a developer and I already feel like I wanna be part of this cool group that is just really, really, really passionate. You know, it's the biggest developer community, right, is on GitHub. Yeah, incredible. Tell me about, you touched upon it before, you're noticing more developers entering the community. Are they coming from the software engineering channels or are they coming from all over? And, you know, can I join? Like, tell me about how it's evolving.

19:17 Georgie Healy: Yeah, yeah, no, I think, you know, the actual gravity of GitHub is the community, right? That's sort of the heart and soul, and that's the heartbeat of the platform. I think with AI and things like Copilot and also Spark, as we just talked about before, the barrier to entry is lowering. I had an example where one of the— a lady engineer in Asia said to me that she doesn't feel so stupid because she, she can ask Copilot things. And Copilot's not a judge, right? Like, no, you can ask Copilot as many things you want and it'll help you.

20:01 Sharryn Napier: But Copilot's not going to come to a dinner party and be like, you won't believe the dumb technical question she asked me.

20:07 Georgie Healy: I didn't. I thought for, you know, a lot of women that may feel a little bit intimidated walking into an environment which is very male-dominated. You know, unfortunately.

20:16 Sharryn Napier: Yeah.

20:17 Georgie Healy: We're trying to change that, obviously.

20:19 Sharryn Napier: Yeah.

20:19 Georgie Healy: But, you know, like asking too many questions and, you know, distracting other developers away from their work and stuff like that. I think we've been able to take away the barrier of, and the daunting nature of actually doing something technical, right? So I think that that's one thing. So we are seeing a lot of people that are non-developers coming into the platform. I had someone else say to me that they keep their recipes on GitHub and they share them with their family and stuff like that.

20:51 Sharryn Napier: Oh my gosh.

20:52 Georgie Healy: So it's sort of like, you know, it may not be exclusive code, but it's, you know, it sort of personifies the ecosystem is all about, is all about collaboration and sharing and building something together. You know, different sort of personas bring different sort of skill sets. To an open-source project. You might have someone that is more architectural. You might have someone else that might be really, really sort of like scrappy and hacky sort of thing, and they get things done fast. But I think that all of that, those skills and those sort of wonderful personas all sort of complement each other. And in the open-source community, building projects together is sort of like, you know. So I think we've lowered the barrier to entry with AI. I think anyone can get onto GitHub. We run a lot of our stuff internally through GitHub as a process sort of platform. And, you know, like, I think that we use it in really unique ways as well.

21:48 Sharryn Napier: I'm really thrilled to hear it because even when you said earlier today, I did clock it when you said, you know, I'm non-technical. I bet you are technical, but we like sometimes women or the non-developers quickly kind of say, I'm not an engineer, but, but we're using the tools and we're passionate about it. And I'm just really, I'm really passionate, Sharon, about seeing more and more of us, uh, you know, like, okay, I don't have a PhD in computer science, but I'm here and I'm loving it, and this is the best way for me to share recipes with my family. So great.

22:23 Georgie Healy: Yeah, well, I actually think that bringing more people from other channels into the platform is a real positive because I think that it's, it prevents that I can't do a degree in engineering because it's so much coding or it's, I don't know code or whatever. And that, that sort of obstacle can somewhat be removed. I think more people are going to go back to do, you know, engineering degrees or because the fear is sort of a little bit less. you know, real for them.

22:57 Sharryn Napier: I couldn't agree more. I was, um, talking to someone who also non-technical background. She has an art history degree from Oxford, right? But she started with no-code and then there was one feature she couldn't figure out how to change with the prompt. She went into the code, had, you know, split screen and said like, I'm trying to change this one particular thing. It showed her where in the code she changed it and she was like, I'm coding. I accidentally started coding.

23:26 Georgie Healy: Yeah, yeah. I think that's what everyone's experiencing, which is great.

23:29 Sharryn Napier: I love it. It's kind of accidentally becoming more and more technical through play or through just curiosity, which I love. You touched upon some personas or archetypes. I love doing this kind of thing. I think I'm one of those Myers-Briggs girlies that love of like classifying people. I'm curious if you see any of these developer personas on the platform and if you've got any thoughts on them. So number one is the Architect, they're big picture design thinkers. The Hacker builds quick but might create some tech debt in the process, but they're hacking away. There's a Lone Wolf, works autonomously, prefers to be alone with the headphones and the blinkers on. And finally, the Domain Expert. Expert. They're like really deep on security or machine learning or something of the like. Do you see these little pockets of personas on the platform? And tell me what you see.

24:26 Georgie Healy: I think, I think we do, but I think that, um, you know, like if you look at the open source projects, um, those are those sort of skill sets, I'll say, rather than archetypes. Um, we needed in one project, right? You need someone that has that longer view and that more system-orientated architectural sort of view. You need someone that can go and sort of like experiment and sort of hack a little bit and fail fast and all that sort of stuff. And then you need people that are expertise in whether it's a security lane or whether it's a machine learning lane or something like that. So, I think that in each of these projects you get that combination and I think that that's a natural thing and I think that that's very much a GitHub thing. We've always had a real community and that collaboration is the thing that makes it really special and it allows those people to then lean into those really specific skills that they've got. It's not that they don't have other skills, but they might be stronger in one area than another and they can sort of complement each other in building these projects.

25:32 Sharryn Napier: Yeah, I can't wait to get to some questions from the developer ecosystem because that definitely seems Seems to be a bit of a trend that I'm noticing. Last question on this, I keep hearing about open source, right? Being, you know, an ability to see the code, see behind the scenes and have like full autonomy seems to attract engineers a lot more. We're seeing it even in the Chinese companies that as soon as they closed up their source, they lost their engineers. I've noticed that being an open source software company, it might be attracting developers. Do you think that's the case? Do you think that that's a big appeal about GitHub?

26:15 Georgie Healy: Yeah, I absolutely. You know, as I said before, GitHub is sort of the gravity, right? It brings people together. I think we've been built on the premise that we are open source, we're open for everyone to collaborate, but we've also been built for the developer. So, we attract by nature those people that want to be creative and work together. So, it doesn't matter where people are based or where they're located or whether they're working for a big company or an independent, you know, sort of freelancer, they come together to build things together. And I think that that's really what the open-source community is. I think that, you know, the way that we're evolving the GitHub platform, we're creating an environment where developers can code, without limits, right? So they can actually build software without limits. And AgentHQ, you know, is a good example of that, how we've actually provided now the ecosystem and the controls around that ecosystem to make sure that they can ship, you know, secure code, better quality, and do it at acceleration.

27:19 Sharryn Napier: I do love that. I've noticed with the founders I speak to in AI, they might use a little bit of AWS over here or GCP over there, and they're looking up the best tooling for the specific use case they have. And to confine them to one specific thing would be very frustrating, I'm sure. Look, I'm really, really excited to get into questions from developers that were dying to ask you, big GitHub fans. My AI engineer mate, Hazik Norden, wanted to know, with developers reading and writing less code through, you know, AI taking this on for them, how does that change maybe the interface of GitHub and how they use GitHub?

28:02 Georgie Healy: I think I sort of, I talked about it a little bit before, is that we build with the developer at the center of everything we do, right? And that the way that they are evolving themselves and the needs that they have, we're evolving the platform.

28:19 Sharryn Napier: Yeah.

28:19 Georgie Healy: I think I did say it before too that, you know, like, we build the platform of the way the developers want to work, not the way we think that they should be working. Agent HQ is a good example of that. We've actually built an environment where it gives the developer more control and more visibility and an organization as well, more control and governance and security around what they do. So, as the industry sort of evolves and the developer need and skill sets change, you know, like GitHub will continue to evolve the platform to to do what the developers want, not what we want them to do.

28:53 Sharryn Napier: I've got a great example of this. Friends at Google have a side hustle. It's not a side hustle, it's a full-blown business. It's called Toasty. It's like a healthcare AI app. And anyway, they shared on TikTok this hilarious skit where they shared how they accidentally pushed an API key to GitHub, which they shouldn't have. And then I asked them about that because I knew I was interviewing you for the show and I was like, oh, tell me about what went wrong. And they said to me, well, actually there's now checks in place that prevent that from happening. So this, this iteration of the platform that you're talking about to suit the developers is quite interesting. How, how does that work? Like, how often can you— like, obviously you're not just doing it for Toasty as much as I'm sure you'd love to. Like, how does that work? How does feedback happen and that kind of thing? Yeah.

29:45 Georgie Healy: Yeah. Well, again, you know, like being open source, we take a lot of feedback from the developer ecosystem, but security is at the center of everything we do. So if you think about it, when a developer pushes code, if they have secrets in that code, then as soon as you get that into a production environment, that is a big exposure.

30:06 Sharryn Napier: Yeah.

30:06 Georgie Healy: So we have secret detection. So before a developer commits the code, it gets scanned, right?

30:13 Speaker C: Mm-hmm.

30:13 Georgie Healy: So you can actually put those checks and balances in to make sure that things don't get pushed into production or could get committed. And then we're the really, I think they're the things that based on the cybercrime and the cyber incidents that are sort of like filling the world, they're the sorts of things that we are doing to make sure that things are prevented rather than having to be remediated.

30:37 Sharryn Napier: Yeah, prevention better than the cure, right? Look, I've got two more questions from developers. One is, Haziku, I mentioned before, said a big part of the appeal of GitHub is discovering these new projects, you know, that are all published. Models don't have a deep understanding of that yet, but he said, you know, LLMs are starting to boost productivity. How do you see this evolving? Do you see the, this is going to remain the same, or will LLMs disrupt that?

31:08 Georgie Healy: I, well, I think there's two perspectives. I think the first one is that the developers get the power out of the LLMs to do the things that they want them to do. But we believe that the developer should always have choice, right? So we give them choice in models, we give them choice in the agents that they want to use and all of that sort of stuff. So we continue sort of with that choice. So if a developer is doing a particular project and they're sort of like, you know what, that's a bit mundane and I'm just gonna get some of my teammates to go and do that while I go and get curious and discover and learn and, you know, sort of just explore, that it sort of gives them a bit more time to do that sort of work. Mm-hmm. And I think that they appreciate that a lot more than just, you know, sending something to a model and saying, you know, or an agent and saying, go and do that.

31:59 Sharryn Napier: Yeah, it gives them more control. Quite a common thread amongst developers is, you know, they wanna own what they're building. Okay, last question on this. My good friend Dom from Relevance, he said, oh, and by the way, this was a topic that kept coming up. Back in 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub, but they're still talking about it. They're still obsessed with this topic. Developers seem really fascinated about that relationship between Microsoft and GitHub and GitHub maintaining this sense that they really love this independence, this ecosystem play. How does GitHub maintain that independence and that brand, Sharon?

32:41 Georgie Healy: Yeah. Well, I think that's one of the major things. The brand is so strong and we are quite a unique sort of organization in the way we work and operate. You sort of said it before, is that, you know, that was 7 years ago we got acquired. GitHub is still GitHub. Yeah, I've been with GitHub since 2022. Yeah, and GitHub is still GitHub, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

33:07 Sharryn Napier: It's got quite a playful brand, doesn't it? It feels quite— yeah, it's funny. I was listening to an audiobook which was around like DeepMind and Google, and Google eventually acquired DeepMind, but DeepMind being very independent and all the rest of it and how to maintain that, I feel like they've been able to do that as well. So it's interesting when you see that happen.

33:29 Georgie Healy: Yeah. And I think that that's the main purpose of when you have such a unique environment like we do. And we, we're, you know, sort of like we're agnostic in a lot of ways. So I think having that identity and that, that strong independence is actually a really good thing.

33:46 Sharryn Napier: Yes, I agree. Look, you've done so well thus far, but I'm gonna reward you by giving you even spicier questions at the end. Are you ready? Yeah, I felt like you, you were up for it. Okay, so I'm such a gossip, okay? But I know that you know the coolest people in tech, Sharon. Who's the coolest one you've met and why?

34:10 Georgie Healy: I actually thinking about this. I've met a lot of tech people and—

34:17 Sharryn Napier: I bet.

34:18 Georgie Healy: All people. And I'm going to actually use our previous CEO, Thomas Domcke.

34:25 Sharryn Napier: Yeah.

34:26 Georgie Healy: So Thomas, I joined GitHub in '22 in February and he became CEO in the November just before. And I think that the stuff that he has navigated this organization into, like the world of AI, you know, sort of driven software development and now into the agentic era, you know, it was really cool seeing and watching, you know, his leadership all through those stages. And I think that, you know, I see him, I used to see him in front of customers and the way he just lights up when he talks about AI and technology and software development and developers generally. you know, that was a pretty cool thing to be part of. And the journey that we've been on has been pretty cool. And, you know, I think that, yeah, watching him sort of navigate the company through that has been really, really quite humbling. Yeah, really nice.

35:20 Sharryn Napier: Yes. I wish I was a fly on the wall during that time. Like, it'll be a Netflix movie one day, Sharon, for sure. Maybe you'll be in it. Who would cast— who would you cast as yourself?

35:31 Georgie Healy: Oh, dear. Nicole Kidman. There you go.

35:34 Sharryn Napier: Oh, of course. Yeah, no. Aussie, amazing, smart, you know, icon. I could see that for you. I could see that for you. What is GitHub's approach to attracting developers notoriously sticky with what they like? Like, I work at Google, you know, the ones, the startups that prefer AWS, there's nothing we can do to convince them otherwise. They love AWS, right? What about you guys? How do you, how do you attract? Developers?

36:04 Georgie Healy: Yeah, I think, as I said before, you know, like, when kids start coding at a really young age, they use GitHub. You know, you can use GitHub for free, you can join GitHub for free, and you can use Copilot for free. So those are the sorts of things that I think get them really hooked, and it's an exciting thing and it's a fun thing for them. And then as they go into university, They use GitHub because, you know, the universities, you know, mostly use GitHub. And then when they go into their jobs, they also expect to have GitHub there. And I think that through that journey, as the platform evolves and things like Agent HQ has allowed them to then, you know, embrace agents better and easier and all of those sorts of things, we retain a very sticky audience. Sort of engagement with the developer. You know, like our platform is really the substance of what they do in a day. The coding is only 20%. So, if they're coding 20% of the time and the rest of their time they're iterating and doing other things on the platform, you know, that is a very sticky environment. And the way that we've built GitHub and, you know, more recently the AgentHQ stuff, it has allowed them to stay in their flow and stay on one platform so that they're not constantly you know, switching tools and all that sort of stuff. So reduces the toil, you know, the cognitive load and all that sort of stuff. And I think that actually keeps them very sticky.

37:34 Sharryn Napier: Yeah, I can't imagine coding like 9 hours a day, what that would do to the brain matter. Okay, so why is GitHub Copilot better than Cursor?

37:45 Georgie Healy: I think you get compared to competitors all the time, right? I think that once people use GitHub Copilot, and you say that, you know, like we have a new developer joining our platform every second, and in the first week, 80% of them use Copilot. So I think that that's sort of like a bit of an indication of the value that they actually get out of it, but also the enjoyment, you know, the experience that we give them as an overall platform in the software development lifecycle, I think is the thing that a developer wants. They can stay in their flow, they can concentrate, they can iterate, they can be much more more creative in the entire software development sort of process rather than just in a coding sort of completion sort of space.

38:29 Sharryn Napier: It's within their flow, they're not jumping in and out of platforms. Love that. Let's talk about Australia's Online Safety Act. You know, was it all across the headlines? But GitHub got lumped into this age-restricted social media ban for under-16s along with YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, X. Where, where are we at now with GitHub and that ban?

38:53 Georgie Healy: Yeah, well, we're really pleased that the Australian E-Safety Commission has said that GitHub is not a social media platform. So we've been removed from that sort of categorization.

39:03 Sharryn Napier: Can't say I was using it as social media personally.

39:07 Georgie Healy: If you think about collaboration, you know, like it's a collaborative platform in a different way.

39:12 Sharryn Napier: So Slack though, right? And you're not like uploading imagery and stuff like that, right?

39:17 Georgie Healy: Yeah. Yeah. So I think that, you know, like we really welcome the ability to work with policymakers. I think learning to understand, you know, what GitHub is and what it isn't sort of thing is really helpful for people to be more informed going forward. But yeah, I mean, you know, like we, we welcome an opportunity to talk to people more about GitHub.

39:36 Sharryn Napier: Amazing. Increasingly, people in tech are sending their GitHub profiles for job applications, right? This is, this is my original work instead of like just some, you know, uh, CV, probably AI-generated, all the rest of it. Literally, like, they do a better job sometimes. Um, but do you see this trend continuing, and how do you feel about that?

40:04 Georgie Healy: Uh, you know, like, I think that I think so many things are changing, right? Like talk about hiring people. When I hire new people, I want them to be using AI. Like I would expect that if they're, you know, sort of gonna join a company like this or even, you know, even the bank, they expect people to be using AI in their day-to-day. So I think that that trend is gonna continue to sort of become more relevant or more, frequent because it's sort of like, why wouldn't you? And I also believe that it allows people to not focus on the things that are mundane or like building a CV. Not everyone always gets all the words right, like when we hire in different countries and stuff like that. So being able to use AI to do those sorts of things I think is more beneficial. It doesn't look badly on that person because they can't speak English. Yeah. Language. So I think that those sorts of things are really helpful.

41:07 Sharryn Napier: I agree with you. It's also just like some, some of that stuff's just busy work, like remembering which year exactly I did this versus that, whereas actual proof of work that I've done, I feel like having that portfolio is quite, quite impressive actually. Last question from me, you're nearly off the hook. Dom that I mentioned before from Relevance, he is really interested into how GitHub will monetize in the future. Can you tell he's from a startup? Especially in this era where software is increasingly like pay-to-play and GitHub's very, like, it feels like a very generous platform. How do you see the future of monetization?

41:51 Georgie Healy: Yeah, well, I think as you know, like, we provide GitHub, you can join it for free, you can use Copilot for free. And, you know, that's sort of a commitment and an investment we make to make sure that people of all backgrounds and all different sort of age groups and everything like that get the opportunity. You know, like when we work with enterprises, they have quite different needs to what open source community does. And so our enterprise plans that we work with our customers on are a little bit different, and that's the monetization of it.

42:24 Sharryn Napier: Amazing. This has been such a joy. But before I let you go, what would you like to shout out to the listeners? Where can they find you? Where can they find GitHub? How can they join Copilot? Tell us, tell us everything, please.

42:38 Georgie Healy: Well, a couple of things. I think that the unprecedented growth that GitHub is seeing, not just over the couple of years, but this year particularly, is really being fueled by AI. And I think that that's a really great sort of, a great perspective to have as people think about what they're going to do for their career goals or whatever. I think also that being able to be part of a software development sort of project and program without being technical is also a really massive opportunity. And I think that those sorts of things are the things that we've seen, the amplification of developers onto the platform. The other thing that I think that I'd like people to remember is that, you know, we build a platform to allow developers to code and to develop software without limits. AgentHQ is that next iteration of being able to do that, but it provides them an environment where they can do things securely, they can do it with compliance, and they can do it in a controlled way, but they can still be accelerating. Yeah. And I think that that's really exciting and that's going to continue to get better.

43:50 Sharryn Napier: I am going to see you on the GitHub platform. I can't wait. And you'll see me and all my other non-engineering friends. Thank you so much, Sharon. This has been an absolute delight. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye.

44:04 Georgie Healy: Really appreciate it.

44:07 Sharryn Napier: Thank you for listening to In the Blink of AI. You can check out the show notes for anything discussed in this week's episode, and we will be back next week. This podcast was produced by Day One with music by Dan Hansen and visual artwork by Sophie Tyrell. If you loved the episode, please tell your mates, and I love AI news. Please share your thoughts and suggestions to georginarosehealy@gmail.com.