Ryan J. Salva

VP of Product at GitHub

Ryan J. Salva is VP of Product at GitHub, where he incubated and launched GitHub Copilot — one of the most significant advances in developer productivity — using OpenAI's models trained on GitHub's public code repositories.

The Operator The Visionary

Dimension Profile

Strategic Vision 80%

Execution & Craft 75%

Data & Experimentation 55%

Growth & Distribution 60%

Team & Leadership 60%

User Empathy & Research 65%

Key Themes

incubating GitHub Copilot Arctic Code Vault origin story big bets within large companies prototype to scale at Microsoft AI ethics in code generation R&D team innovation

Episode Summary

Ryan Salva tells the origin story of GitHub Copilot — born from an Arctic Code Vault project that preserved the world's public code, which was then fed to OpenAI's models. He shares lessons on incubating big product bets within a large company like Microsoft, navigating ethics and business model challenges, and taking a prototype from a small R&D team to massive scale.

Leadership Principles

→ Take a snapshot of existing assets and ask 'what can we do with this?' to discover breakthrough products
→ Incubating big bets at a large company requires protecting the team while navigating business model and ethics questions
→ Non-traditional backgrounds can be an advantage in product innovation

Notable Quotes

"We took that same data snapshot and brought it to our friends at OpenAI to see what we can do with large language models built on public code. It turns out we can do some pretty cool things."
— On the origin story of GitHub Copilot emerging from the Arctic Code Vault project

"We had put this snapshot of public repositories on silver film preserved for thousands of years in this Arctic Code Vault."
— On how preserving the world's open source code led to the idea for Copilot

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