Julio C. Avalos

A board director since 2019; stepped in to assist founder Mike Bostock — creator of D3.js — in January 2024, bringing operating focus and partnering with him on strategy and operations to lead the company's pivot toward AI for data analysis.

Co-founded a Gen-Z news platform that evolved into an AI product surfacing multiple perspectives on the issues of the day. Full zero-to-one founder experience across product, fundraising, brand, and growth, including the strategic realities of competing for attention against platform incumbents.

Joined in Q4 2012 as the company's first General Counsel — bootstrapped, at the Series A — and became the senior operating executive across the entire business outside of engineering, running legal, policy, people, brand, and partnerships as one connected system and serving on the board through the Microsoft exit.

• Owned the full non-engineering operating surface — legal, policy, people, strategic partnerships, marketing, and communications — and served as Chief Business & Strategy Officer through the Sequoia-led Series B (Thrive Capital also participating) and the $7.5B Microsoft acquisition.
• Repositioned the product from a “social coding tool” into the world's global code repository, and drove the move into enterprise (B2B) without alienating the open-source community that initially adopted us.
• Set the strategic foundation for GitHub's data-and-automation thesis — that a platform with a record of every bug and every patch should learn from itself and automate that work — the direction GitHub realized in Actions and, ultimately, Copilot.
• Took the company international (EMEA, APAC), with the majority of users outside the U.S., and was an early, public architect of remote work and open-source business models.
• Scaled the team from dozens to over a thousand while protecting a distinctive remote-first culture, and treated brand and developer trust as core strategy — not decoration — building one of GitHub's most durable competitive moats.
• Built the legal, policy, and GTM functions from zero and reinvented it as “legal-as-code” — lawyers shipping in Markdown on GitHub itself. Named the top in-house technology lawyer in the U.S. (Legal 500, 2015); inaugural recipient of The Recorder's legal-innovation awards.

Joined while the company was still private and helped take it public — S-1 through IPO from the inside. Crossed deliberately from litigation into corporate, governance, and capital-markets work to round out a complete operating toolkit.

Litigated at the digital frontier as one of the top associate trial lawyers in America, focusing on frontier IP, privacy, and cyber governance. Represented early-stage Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg in the matter that became the basis for Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network, and worked with Apple, early LinkedIn, and nearly every early social network.