Turning Open Source Developers Into Superfans

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:18)
Hi, welcome to the a16z Podcast, I'm Zorin. So this week, we're continuing our community series with a recent discussion that applies to many kinds of community building. You can find past community pieces at a16z.com/community. Today's topic, how do you create a platform that people not only use, but tell their friends about? One that goes beyond just being useful and actually connects deeply with the user. In this episode recorded at our Crypto Startup School in April, 2020, a16z General Partner, Chris Dixon, talked about building communities with GitHub co-founder, Tom Preston-Werner. They discussed how to engage early users, how to turn them into your biggest advocates, how to create super fans and more.
Today GitHub is the leading community for open source developers and others.
They also discuss in-person communities versus distributed communities, a topic that's very top of mind today. So here's Chris and Tom, starting with the beginnings of GitHub.

**Chris Dixon** (1:12)
And so how did the idea for GitHub come about?

**Tom Preston-Werner** (1:14)
That was while I was at PowerSet and we were using Git internally a little bit. I was working on an internal project with Erlang and a coworker that I was working with, Dave Farum, introduced me to Git. He was like, this is the greatest thing. Like the Linux kernel uses this. It has this really nice branching and merging model.
And he showed it to me and I was like, this is pretty awesome. It's, you know, the command line stuff is a little hard to use. And like, you have to have an account on a Linux server somewhere and pushing and pulling from repository to repository is a bit awkward, but I definitely saw the potential. And so we started using it internally at PowerSet.
And going to the Ruby Meetups in San Francisco, I just started thinking about how great Git was, but nobody was using it. Nobody could really harness the power of it.

**Chris Dixon** (2:02)
What was the dominant, what were you using it for? What were most people using then?

**Tom Preston-Werner** (2:05)
Subversion was the most prominent open source. Some people would be using CVS, some people were using Perforce.
But it was really about trying to make it possible for people to harness the power that I saw in Git. And being a web developer, I was like, I know how to make websites, I know how to write code that can read from a disk and pull Git objects off of disk and get them into Ruby so that they can be exposed in a Ruby on Rails website. And I thought that would be a cool project that I could work on, that I could then use to share open source projects with people that I knew. And just started showing it around the community.

**Chris Dixon** (2:41)
And so you built this website and then you put it up and did it immediately kind of get popular or did it take a long time or how did it go?

**Tom Preston-Werner** (2:50)
We did a thing that we stole from Google, a marketing trick that they did with Gmail where you had some invites. So we gave people five invites and then they could invite, they could send invites to their friends. And so there was this kind of artificial scarcity. I mean, it was real scarcity too, because we had some very small server that we were running this thing on.
And so it was sort of a dual effort to leverage some of that artificial scarcity that makes people wanna, they're like, I want in, everyone could see it, but not everyone could have an account. And so we managed the accounts that way early on.

**Chris Dixon** (3:26)
So anyone could read?

**Tom Preston-Werner** (3:28)
Anyone could, yeah, anyone could see it and pull the repositories, but you couldn't necessarily sign up, right? You had to have an invite to sign up. So that worked. I don't know if that works anymore. I haven't seen people do too much of that anymore, but at the time it was quite successful. Like it created a lot of buzz, people just talking around. I think Twitter was quite early then, but people were talking about it on Twitter.
And people really seemed to like it. And it was, I don't know, just people started signing up for it, pushing up random bits of code here and there. And it immediately, I think, struck a chord with people as far as the capabilities of version control and what you could do once you realized that you had easy branching and merging, offline capabilities. It was super, super fast.