Eric Kerr

About 11 months ago, Marc Andreessen, founding partner of venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, wrote an essay titled “Why Software is Eating the World”. In it, he claims that industry leading corporations that fail to adapt by making technology the core of their business will be “creatively destructed” by startup companies.

Plenty of comparison has been made about the opportunity for GitHub to capitalize on the increased amount of software being written with their plans to further support development teams with plans and pricing for individuals, small businesses, and enterprises. GitHub has grown from bootstrapped to being valued at $750m without raising any outside funding, and I think the real value Andreessen-Horowitz sees lies far beyond GitHub’s current business model of monthly service plans.

It’s no secret that there is a significant engineering talent crunch for filling technical roles in companies. I’m asked fairly regularly if I know anyone available looking for programming work and my response is almost always look on GitHub for people who have written code in the languages you’re looking for – you can filter search queries by location and the programmer’s email is almost always included at the top of source-code they write.

If the talent crunch is as pronounced as recruiters and founders say it is, and technology jobs continue to transform previously untouched industries, then GitHub is sitting on an active database of the most in-demand user base in the world. Today GitHub is monetizing its viewership with a public jobs board, but in the future they could match technology job seekers with potential candidates in their user base by the type and quality code they’ve written, and that is a multi-billion dollar opportunity.

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