Tom Preston-Werner

Tom Preston-Werner is a venture capital investor and the cofounder of Preston-Werner Ventures, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is best known as the cofounder and former CEO of GitHub, a software repository platform that Microsoft later acquired for $7.5 billion in 2018. Prior to his tenure at GitHub, he founded the globally unique avatar service Gravatar, which he sold to Automattic in 2007, and worked at the search engine Powerset. He subsequently cofounded the language learning software platform Chatterbug, securing an $8 million Series A funding round in 2018. He has served on the board of directors for the cloud computing service Netlify since 2020 and has created prominent open source projects like Jekyll. His current professional focus centers on early stage technology startup investments and philanthropic environmental initiatives through the 128 Collective Foundation.