I published a CVE detection tool recently. Nothing unusual there.
https://github.com/liamromanis101/CVE-2026-31431-Copy-Fail---Vulnerability-Detection-Script
On LinkedIn, the post got 385 impressions. A handful of likes, two comments, one of which was a recruiter, and one person clicked the link which might have been me testing it.
The GitHub repo, in the last 14 days alone: 6,230 views, 3,254 unique visitors, 923 clones from 585 unique cloners. 22 stars, 22 watchers, 2 forks. People actually ran the code.
Nobody clones a repo to be polite.
That is not an edge case. That is the pattern, every time.
LinkedIn Shows You What People Claim. GitHub Shows You What People Do.
LinkedIn is a performance platform. You write a headline, list your credentials, and hope the algorithm rewards you. The engagement is performative by design. Reactions, reposts, congratulations on your work anniversary from people you met once in 2019.
GitHub is a proof-of-work platform. You push code. People clone it, break it, improve it, or ignore it. Nobody pretends to engage. The stars and forks are real signal because there is no social pressure to give them.
This matters enormously if you are trying to build a company or find people worth building one with.
The Problem GitHub Has Not Solved Yet
Here is the thing: GitHub already has everything it needs to become the place where startups are formed.
It has developers at the earliest stage of their best ideas. A commit is often the first tangible artifact of a company that will eventually be worth something. GitHub sees that before any investor does, before any accelerator does, before the founders themselves have put a name to what they are building.
It has genuine engagement data. Not vanity metrics. Actual signals about who is working on what, who is collaborating with whom, and whose code other people trust enough to build on.
It has a culture that LinkedIn cannot replicate. GitHub is not a strictly professional environment. It is not NSFW either. It sits in the space between the two, which means people are actually themselves on it. That is rare, and it is valuable.
What it does not have is a product layer that uses any of this deliberately.
What I Think GitHub Should Build
I wrote a full strategic proposal on this. The short version is: a founder matching and angel investor platform built on top of GitHub's existing engagement data.
Call it GitHub Launchpad.
The idea is not complicated. If you look at what somebody has built, what others have contributed to, who has consistently shown up across meaningful repositories, you have a far more reliable picture of a potential co-founder than any LinkedIn profile gives you. You are not reading a CV. You are reading a commit history.
Add a structured layer for founders to signal that they are looking for collaborators or early investment, connect that to angels who want to back people before the pitch deck exists, and you have something no other platform can replicate. Because the proof-of-work layer is already there. It is just not being used for this.
Why This Is a Disruption Opportunity, Not an Incremental Feature
LinkedIn is not the natural home for early-stage startup formation. It is where companies post jobs once they already have fifty people. The seed-stage problem, finding the right co-founder, getting in front of the right angel before you have traction, has never been solved well.
GitHub is already embedded in the moment before that. It is at the first commit. It sees the proof of capability that no other platform has access to.
The opportunity to own startup formation from a position of genuine structural advantage is available now. That window will not stay open indefinitely as purpose-built competitors continue to develop.
The Full Proposal
I have written this up properly, with the product detail, the revenue model, and the competitive picture.
If this is an idea worth discussing, I would rather discuss it somewhere people are actually building things.
The full proposal is in the repo below. Thoughts welcome, especially from anyone who has tried to solve the co-founder matching problem and found the existing options wanting.
github.com/liamromanis101/github-launchpad
Tags: #startup #github #productivity #discuss