Episode 013 - A Founder's Perspective ft. Scott Chacon

Moringa School Podcast

On this episode of the Moringa School podcast, we are joined by Scott Chacon, an entrepreneur, software developer, startup enthusiast and language learner. Scott is the co-founder and CEO of Chatterbug, and Co-founder and former CIO of Github. Scott and his team of co-founders built a software development platform called Github, which brings together the world's largest community of developers to discover, share and build better software. Github was sold to Microsoft for $7.5B in 2018.

Scott joined GitHub in late 2008 when Git was still a rather obscure and difficult to use version control system. From those days of the 4 co-founders working from coffee shops, Scott helped build GitHub into a global company of more than 400 employees. In that time, Scott did a little of everything as GitHub grew - backend Git infrastructure work, Ruby and frontend development, training, sales, financial forecasting, documentation, internal tools development, hiring, fundraising, office planning and buildout, internal communications, evangelization and public speaking. While at GitHub Scott also did everything he could to help Git become the dominant technology it is today. He wrote two of the very first books on Git - Git Internals published by Peepcode and Pro Git published by Apress, both now open sourced and free to read. Pro Git is in it's second edition and has been translated into more than 10 languages. Scott helped start and supported the libgit2 project, which is used by nearly every Git user interface, plugin and hosting solution today. Scott gave more than 75 talks, tutorials and workshops across the globe, from small local meetups to training the Android development team. He also registered, developed and maintained the official Git website for 8 years.

Scott went on to his current venture, Chatterbug, a language learning system that helps users to learn a new language to fluency through adaptive courses that respond to the way users learn, as well as one-on-one video sessions with native speakers from around the world. Chatterbug combines the flexibility of digital language apps with the effectiveness of in-person language schools. Listen as Scott shares his entrepreneurial journey, the software development process, the future of work and learning and so much more on the podcast. Enjoy and share.

You can find Scott on Twitter at @chacon.

Hosted by Eugene Nzioki, Leo Igane, Kevin Ahere, Melissa Malala, Michel Atieno and Victor Ireri.