Tom Preston-Werner is the Co-Founder and former CEO of GitHub, the world's leading software collaboration platform, and currently serves as Co-Founder and General Partner at Preston-Werner Ventures (PWV), an early-stage technology investment fund.

Tom grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, studied physics at Harvey Mudd College before dropping out, and honed his engineering skills at Powerset, a natural language processing company, famously turning down a Microsoft acquisition bonus to pursue GitHub full-time.

A prolific open-source inventor, Tom created Gravatar (sold to Automattic in 2007), authored the widely-used static site generator Jekyll, and designed both the TOML configuration file format and the SemVer versioning standard.

Tom co-founded GitHub in 2008 alongside Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett, bootstrapping it to profitability before raising a $100M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2012; he served as CEO until 2014, after which Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018.

Under Tom's leadership, GitHub grew into the world's largest code host; today the platform serves over 150 million developers, hosts over 1 billion repositories, and surpassed $1 billion in annual recurring revenue.