Erica Brescia, Chief Operating Officer at GitHub, on Trusting your Gut While Bootstrapping and Scaling Open Source Companies

Erica Brescia is GitHub’s Chief Operating Officer, where she leads the business development, support, and workplace teams. Prior to joining GitHub, she was the COO and co-founder of Bitnami, where she was instrumental in leading the team's business development efforts with all of the leading cloud platform providers. Erica’s leadership in the technology space extends to serving on the board of directors of the Linux Foundation, as well as being an Investment Partner in X Factor Ventures, which empowers female-led businesses to succeed.

In this episode, we learn how Erica Brescia went from balancing a Y Combinator interview while caring for her then 2-week-old baby to growing Bitnami’s team with her Co-Founder, Daniel Lopez to about 100 people with little outside capital. Erica explains why taking her current role at Github felt like “coming home,” despite not being a developer. When she’s not helping scale Github’s product roadmap and global expansion, Erica is supporting the next wave of female founders at XFactor Ventures, a seed fund that only invests in female entrepreneurs. Listen to the full episode for Erica’s book recommendations and advice for founders.