Praveen Saxena saxenap

(This is the text of the keynote I gave at Startup Riot 2009. Will update when video becomes available.)

Hi everyone, I'm Chris Wanstrath, and I'm one of the co-founders of GitHub.

GitHub, if you haven't heard of it, has been described as "Facebook for developers." Which is great when talking about GitHub as a website, but not so great when describing GitHub as a business. In fact, I think we're the polar opposite of Facebook as a business: we're small, never took investment, and actually make money. Some have even called us successful.

Which I've always wondered about. Success is very vague, right? Probably even relative. How do you define it?

After thinking for a while I came up with two criteria. The first is profitability. We employ four people full time, one person part time, have thousands of paying customers, and are still growing. In fact, our rate of growth is increasing - which means January was our best month so far, and February is looking pretty damn good.

	#!/bin/bash
	#
	# Copyright (c) 2014-2017 Praveen Saxena <>
	# License: BSD-3-Clause
	#
	# To get:
	# 1. rm -rf helper_functions_for_bash
	# 2. wget -O helper_functions_for_bash https://gist.githubusercontent.com/saxenap/073049d1ead105417837/raw

	BASENAME=${0##*/}

	#!/bin/bash

	# rm -rf server_initialization
	# wget -O server_initialization https://gist.githubusercontent.com/saxenap/4189df60f22d827583e8/raw/
	# chmod 777 server_initialization
	# ./server_initialization

	loadHelpersFromUrl()
	{
	rm -rf helpers

	; Section keys, if used for iteration, must:
	; 1. Begin with 1
	; 2. Be sequential

	[Server]
	Timezone=US/Eastern

	[PackagesToInstall]
	1=gcc
	2=gcc-c++

	#!/bin/bash
	#
	# Copyright (c) 2014-2017 Praveen Saxena <>
	# License: BSD-3-Clause
	#
	# To Use:
	# wget -O IniParserToParameterAdapter https://gist.githubusercontent.com/saxenap/fd1328c6e6cfa0b2b08a/raw
	#
	# Requires:
	# 1. Common Functions from https://gist.githubusercontent.com/saxenap/073049d1ead105417837/raw

	#!/bin/bash
	#
	# Copyright (c) 2014-2017 Praveen Saxena <>
	# License: BSD-3-Clause
	#
	# To get:
	# rm -rf apache-php56-environment && wget -O apache-php56-environment https://gist.githubusercontent.com/saxenap/03064bd5d805ee0c0675/raw && chmod 777 apache-php56-environment && ./apache-php56-environment

	sudo ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST /etc/localtime
	echo " Timezone modified to EST."

	#!/bin/bash
	#
	# To run:
	# rm -rf install-ruby && wget -O install-ruby https://gist.githubusercontent.com/saxenap/90122a9bfb7ae6928870/raw && chmod 777 install-ruby && ./install-ruby

	sudo yum -y update

	sudo yum -y install ruby22-devel
	sudo yum -y install rubygems22

	#!/bin/bash
	#
	# To run:
	# rm -rf install-nodejs && wget -O install-nodejs https://gist.githubusercontent.com/saxenap/a11c32c94b66319047d4/raw && chmod 777 install-nodejs && ./install-nodejs

	sudo yum -y install nodejs npm --enablerepo=epel
	echo "Node.js and NPM Installed."

	#!/bin/bash
	#
	# To run:
	# rm -rf install-jekyll && wget -O install-jekyll https://gist.githubusercontent.com/saxenap/3df6305113a640743485/raw && chmod 777 install-jekyll && ./install-jekyll

	set -o errexit

	function exit_if_not_installed
	{
	RED='\033[01;31m'