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NG Nick Gerace Nick Gerace On Fallthrough

“I was just texting someone about this yesterday. They were like, I can't believe no one's replaced GitHub yet. I'm like, you mean nobody's wanted to add free CI, free private repos, free project management, free discussions in a world where agents are spamming things 10 times more than this time six months ago? Yeah, no, nobody wants to play that ballgame right now unless you're doing it in a very specific niche.”

Fallthrough · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026

“I was just texting someone about this yesterday. They were like, I can't believe no one's replaced GitHub yet. I'm like, you mean nobody's wanted to add free CI, free private repos, free project management, free discussions in a world where agents are spamming things 10 times more than this time six months ago? Yeah, no, nobody wants to play that ballgame right now unless you're doing it in a very specific niche.” — Nick Gerace, Fallthrough

Context

Gerace was explaining that his new source-control startup is deliberately not going after the open-source social coding market GitHub serves. Offering all of that for free, he says, is unattractive once agents are flooding repositories.

Transcript

Fallthrough Around 29:02 into the episode
Nick Gerace

…say that's not true. If you go to our website, we talk a bit about what we want and there's a way to contact us, but we're for sure early on some things. So yeah, that's how I describe us. If you're looking for not just like a step, but a leap, as corny as that sounds, that's where we're aiming.

Matthew Sanabria

That makes sense. So like, is that going to be, that's going to be larger companies then technically? Or maybe not. Maybe it's just companies with a larger monorepo-y setup.

Nick Gerace

The metrics we like to track in the end will be things like commits per second, I think, for where we really want to get performant on clones, fetches, pushes, you know, hot path type of operations. We do a lot of benchmarking work. And I think when you're on, it's actually, you can think of it less about company size and more about projects in particular. We also have like a big belief in mono repos. We use one ourselves. We can support people that don't have monorepos, but that's like a really, a really big thing that's important for us. We dog food East River entirely. We use some of the underlying technology for ourselves. It's one of the biggest privileges every day that I have. And yeah, I'm trying to think of, I'm trying to think of what else to say on this. I mean, basically, yes, there is like people that will see the biggest upside with some of the investment we have are probably larger orgs with larger repos. Sure. But I would hesitate to go so far because if you're the right profile of like someone who's mid-size with the monorepo, then by all means, we could probably be a good fit. But one thing that I would say is true is almost the inverse. We're specifically not looking at the…

Matthew Sanabria

Yeah, I mean, I think Microsoft GitHub made that decision and like that's on them, right? It's hard for me. I'm not, I'm not a hug opsy type of person. You're not going to see me post the whole hug ops, everyone. I don't do that. Like, you get paid a lot of money to keep your systems up. Things are…

Kris Brandow

I think I see like that's that's a review and that's a that's a change set and all that like okay I see what's going on

Nick Gerace

here yeah so for for context Matthew Sanabria I are uh we've become friends sort of outside the industry which is great because and actually Chris and I got the catch up after Rust NYC recently um you start to realize over time that like once you meet enough of the folks from x.com the everything…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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