'My Startup Roots Have Begun Tugging on Me': A Big Tech CEO Just Quit to Be an Entrepreneur Again GitHub's CEO says he stepped down on Monday to once again be a "startup founder."

By Erin Davis

Mustafa Yalcin/Anadolu | Getty Images
CEO of GitHub Thomas Dohmke speaks during the 9th edition of the VivaTech technology startup and innovation fair at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 12, 2025.

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke stepped down on Monday after four years with the company.

In a post on LinkedIn, he thanked Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and others while announcing he was leaving to get back to his entrepreneurial roots. (GitHub, a platform for software developers to store and share code, is owned by Microsoft).

"After nearly four years as CEO, I'm leaving GitHub to become a startup founder again," Dohmke wrote on LinkedIn.

Related: I Left the Corporate World to Start a Chicken Coop Business — Here Are 3 Valuable Lessons I Learned Along the Way

While Dohmke didn't elaborate on his future entrepreneurial plans, he did explain more about why he is leaving the day-to-day corporate world for entrepreneurship in a blog post.

"Over a decade ago, my family and I made the leap to move from Germany to the United States after the sale of my startup to Microsoft," he wrote. "After all this time, my startup roots have begun tugging on me, and I've decided to leave GitHub to become a founder again."

Dohmke also predicts that AI will enable software developers to create the "new gold rush of software."

"Because of your relentless work, GitHub Copilot has introduced the greatest change to software development since the advent of the personal computer," he wrote. "I am more convinced than ever that the world will soon see one billion developers enabled by billions of AI agents, each imprinting human ingenuity into a new gold rush of software. When that day comes, we'll know where the path began: with GitHub."

Related: AI Will Create More Millionaires in the Next 5 Years Than the Internet Did in 2 Decades, According to Nvidia's CEO

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Erin Davis

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