Name: GitHub CEO: The hardest part of my job
Uploaded: 2015-10-09
Duration: 1 min 37 s
Description: Chris Wanstrath says the biggest challenge in running a company is sales.

[ MUSIC ] You are a developer, and now you're a CEO. So what has been the hardest part about making that transition and the hardest part about being a CEO? Writing email is pretty difficult. [ LAUGH ] Probably for all of us. [ LAUGH ] Figuring out what your weaknesses are, what you're not good at, and then trying to augment them I think. When you're an engineer, you're thinking about your weaknesses and your strengths in the context of development but suddenly you're managing a company, you're working with people in all sorts of different types of departments, sales, marketing So you're willing to be a student I think and learn about these different groups. Learn what you can contribute and what you can't, and just figure out where your own boundaries are and then take a concentrated effort to get better at them. So what would you say is your weakness? Well, I, you know starting out, sales was. I didn't know anything about a sales team or building that out. And so we spent a lot of time working with, I spent a lot of working with advisors and mentors, other CEOs and when we hired our head of sales Spent a lot of time with him. He's actually taught me a lot. Which is probably one of my favorite parts of the job, is learning from the amazing people that we have in the building. So, the weakness thing is always ongoing, right? And I'm always trying to figure out what they are, and how I can get better at them. So now that you're in this seat, is there another CEO not in your specific industry that you would say that you admire most? Not in, well, I really liked Jeff Weiner from LinkedIn. I think he's done a really great job. He wasn't the founder, but he certainly seems to do a lot of great work around the culture of that company, and so I really admire a lot of his philosophies. He blogs about it and talks about it a lot, yeah.

GitHub CEO: The hardest part of my job

Chris Wanstrath says the biggest challenge in running a company is sales.