GitHub gets Yelp’s old CFO to help manage its new $100M budget

After venturing into heavy financial territory with its recent $100 million Series A of funding, GitHub has taken on some top-shelf help: Vlado Herman, who was formerly the chief finance officer at Yelp.

Herman is GitHub’s first-ever chief finance executive, it confirmed to VentureBeat via email.

Before July, GitHub had been running its business on sales alone; its service involves code repositories and collaboration, and its enterprise sales were enough to keep the ship afloat and the staff expanding. However, just a few months ago, the famously bootstrapped startup decided to take a massive first round of institutional funding from Andreessen Horowitz. At $100 million for the round, that came to more than $1 million per employee.

So to help manage the new money (and the money coming in from all those big, beautiful sales), GitHub’s taken on a new C-suite hire. Herman was Yelp’s CFO for five critical years that saw the company blossom from a scrappy startup to a web giant. Before that, he had stints at Yahoo and Ernst & Young.

“From the very first time I shook his hand, I knew I wanted to work with Vlado,” wrote GitHub cofounder Tom Preston-Werner today on its  blog. “He’s sharp, funny, patient, and believes in optimizing for happiness. Finding a proven financial expert that fit our culture wasn’t easy, but we were very lucky to find someone special, and now we’re incredibly proud to call Vlado a GitHubber.”

As for the money Herman’s been hired to manage, Preston-Werner told us in a previous chat that the cash was intended to help his startup take over the enterprise, roll out new features and products for nondeveloper personnel such as technical writers and web designers, and build bug-free clients for all platforms and devices.

“Specifically, there’s a strategy called ‘GitHub Everywhere.’ We want everyone in software to be using GitHub,” said Preston-Werner, “individuals by themselves, small teams, students, as well as big, massive enterprises. … Where we are now and what’s left for us to accomplish, having some money in the bank is going to … make GitHub better for everyone involved.”