It's not easy to find a company with more reach than Google, where Rachel Potvin worked for more than a decade, rising to lead a key part of Google Cloud.
But in moving to GitHub, Potvin says she saw a chance to create developer tools for a much broader audience than she had previously considered.
"I was so motivated and excited by the mission of GitHub to make software development more accessible for that broad group of people who had never had the opportunity to enter the tech sector otherwise," Potvin told Business Insider.
Potvin joined GitHub as its first vice president of engineering to lead the data organization, GitHub, Potvin spent 11 years at Google, where she most recently ran the Google Cloud Insights organization that managed Google Cloud's customer and product data. Her team also built data products to inform Google and its customers on business and product decisions.
And prior to that, she worked for six years at the video game company Ubisoft and nearly two years at Deloitte.
"The amount of impact this company is having is just so broad," Potvin said. "When I was in the video game industry at Ubisoft, at the time I was writing developer tools for hundreds of people. At Google, I was writing developer tools for thousands of people. Now at GitHub now. She says that at Google, while the team did "great work" in building systems for "elite developers," she also wants to build for students, academics, and other types of developers who may just be starting out.
For example, most of GitHub's users are from outside the US, and GitHub also has many student users. Potvin hopes to make $20 billion Stripe is making a new global push with the product that's helping open source developers on GitHub get paid for the code they write
When she heard about the role opening up at contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop
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