Our intuition told us non-technical founders were creating and using their GitHub accounts more. So we pulled data on 105 million GitHub users and 12,429 YC founders to find out how true this is.
Turns out, it's more common than we expected, and it's accelerating.
The claim
GitHub is becoming the identity layer for all founders - technical and non-technical. Not a developer tool they happen to use, but the place their work lives and their reputation compounds. LinkedIn is where you say what you did. GitHub is where you show it.
AI is the forcing function. When anyone can ship software, everyone does. And when you ship software, you put it on GitHub.
Why now
- Pre-AI: idea → hire engineers → ship code.
- Post-AI: idea → ship code.
The distance between having an idea and having a running product collapsed. Tools like Cursor, Lovable, and Claude Code turned non-engineers into shippers. And shipping still means Git, which still means GitHub.
So founders are on GitHub not because they learned to code. They're on GitHub because their company now lives there.
YC founders are the leading indicator
We scraped 12,429 confirmed YC founders from YC's website and matched them to their GitHub profiles. The matching rate is the cleanest signal in the piece:
- YC 2021–2022 batches: 35 in 100 had a matchable GitHub.
- YC 2026 batches: 49 in 100.
A 14-point jump in four years. For comparison: ~2 in 100 of the general population has a GitHub account, and ~5 in 100 LinkedIn users with "CEO" in their title do. YC founders are 10–25x more likely to be on GitHub than the average person and the gap is widening.
The profile of the accounts is shifting too. Founders from YC's 2020 batch had GitHubs created around 2013, on average. Founders from the 2026 batch have GitHubs from around 2018 — five years newer. One in four YC 2026 founders has a GitHub account less than four years old.
These aren't lifelong developers who pivoted to entrepreneurship. They're founders who adopted GitHub because the job now demands it.
The 105M-account view
Across every GitHub account created since 2008, the language has shifted:
- In 2018, 3 of every 100 bios used the word "building." Today, 12 do.
- "Startup," "founder," "investor," and "AI" are all more common in bios than five years ago.
- In 2025, ~2,650 new accounts self-identified as founders — 78% more than 2024.
- February 2026 had 387 new founder-bio accounts in a single month. Three times February 2024.
And these accounts aren't dormant username squatters. Founder-bio accounts less than two years old show 3.2x the median activity (public commits + repo creations) of baseline new accounts in the same cohort.
The dip-then-rebound
We didn't expect this, btw.
From 2018 to 2024, the share of new GitHub accounts identifying as founders was actually declining. GitHub was growing faster than the founder population — flooded with students, hobbyists, and people trying AI coding tools. Founders were getting diluted.
Then 2025 flipped the curve. For the first time in eight years, more than 1 in 100 new GitHub accounts identify as a founder, and the share is still climbing.
We saw this same dip-then-rebound in three independent measurements: bio keyword share, YC match rate by account-creation year, and activity-weighted founder density. Different data with the same inflection point. When three uncorrelated signals bend together, the underlying trend is probably real.
What this means
For founders: your repos are your resume. Commit history is becoming the equivalent of a portfolio for designers or clips for writers. Investors increasingly look at it.
For LinkedIn: ceremonial. Still useful for hiring and broad distribution, but losing its grip as the primary founder surface.
For non-technical founders: you will have a GitHub. You may not write the code, but your product will live there, and people will look.
A prediction: by 2028, more than half of new YC founders will have GitHub accounts younger than their LinkedIn accounts. The order of account creation is flipping — and that's how you know the identity layer has moved.
YC founders are first. They usually are. Everyone else is catching up.
We can see it happening right now, across 105 million accounts. And that's why we're building noticed.