failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should not work in the office
It had been a big enough problem before that they had a formal agreement prohibiting it.
After being presented with the results we felt Tom could no longer be an effective leader at GitHub. He offered his resignation and we accepted.
I mean he'll have trouble hiring people to work for him. I'd certainly think twice (and this is not an entirely casual statement since I'm an engineer and a startup guy) - not because of the allegations, but because the result of a careful investigation was that he made it an unpleasant place to work for some of his employees by being confrontational, disregarding complaints, and being insensitive to something that wasn't a problem for him personally. I do not want to work in a place like that, and I'd be worried that he'd do it again.
It won't stop everybody from working for him. He'll still get plenty of graduate attention. But putting together a good startup team is hard, and this kind of verdict might make it impossible.
Edits - let me clarify: I think this would go far in explaining why Horvath is reacting as she has been doing to the report. But I'm struggling to understand if this means that the personal subjective interpretation is more valuable to the truth than an objective independent investigation? (Now I think that the investigation on the whole may not have been at all independent - only to ensure that Github was in the clear legally - with no obligation to the truth or to expose any other things - but I think that's out of this side discussion!)
An investigation found no legal liability of sexism but that doesn't mean there isn't a culture aspect to it. On the other hand Horvath's experience with the founder may have colored her view of the culture.
I'm saying Github's interpretation of events and Horvath's interpretation are consistent, they don't conflict, hence they can both be true at the moment.