GitHub to exit South Beach headquarters

San Francisco received a double shot of bad news. One of the city’s corporate denizens, GitHub, not only announced layoffs, it also made clear that it would leave its headquarters in the South Beach neighborhood.

In a message to the software developer’s employees, Thomas Dohmke, GitHub’s chief executive officer, announced that the company will lay off 10 percent of its workforce of 3,000 people by the end of its fiscal year. GitHub also anticipated having all of its employees work remote, as first reported by the San Francisco Business Times.

“We are not vacating offices immediately, but will move to close all of our offices as their leases end or as we are operationally able to do so,” Dohmke wrote to his employees. “We will share more workplace details and transition plans with you as they are finalized.”

The GitHub boss noted that its employees did not use its headquarters much. He said the building experiences “low utilization rates.”

In 2013, the company moved into its South Beach headquarters at 275 Brannon St., a three-story, brick-and-timber building. Hudson Pacific Properties completed the lease for GitHub’s 55,000 square feet of open, creative office space.

GitHub was founded in San Francisco in 2008. In 2018, Microsoft acquired the company for $7.5 billion in stock. In 2015, its valuation was $2 billion when it raised $250 million in a Series B round of funding led by Sequoia Capital.

Microsoft also made headlines recently when it laid off 10,000 people from its workforce in January.

– Andrew Asch