Chris Wanstrath

You may not have heard of GitHub, but you’ve likely used technology that was birthed, built, or tweaked on its network. The ultra-geeky tech platform is the world’s largest collection of public code and the de facto place where developers now collaborate. Wanstrath describes it for a layperson as Facebook for tech projects. (“You log in, you’re connected to people, but instead of seeing photos of their baby, you see their code.”) Facebook itself has used GitHub. So have SAP, NASA and the White House. Wanstrath launched GitHub in 2008 with Tom Preston-Werner and P.J. Hyett, mostly as a way to see and tweak each other’s ongoing projects. Now it has $350 million in funding, a $2 billion valuation, and 11 million active users. (It has also weathered a sexual harassment claim that led Preston-Werner to step down.) Wanstrath, who was the company’s initial CEO and returned to the role in January 2014, aims to “lower the barrier to entry” and make the site more accessible to those just learning how to code. After all, he says, the future of the world is software, and “that’s what GitHub is all about.”