Nat Friedman
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Nathaniel Dourif "Nat" Friedman (born August 6, 1977) is an American entrepreneur and investor known for his work in open-source software, developer tools, and artificial intelligence. He co-founded the Linux software companies Ximian (1999) and Xamarin (2011), both with Miguel de Icaza, and served as the chief executive officer of GitHub from 2018 to 2021 after Microsoft's acquisition of the company.[^1][^2]
After leaving GitHub, Friedman became one of the most active angel and venture investors in artificial intelligence. With Daniel Gross he ran the AI-focused investment firm NFDG and the AI Grant accelerator, backing companies such as Perplexity AI, Cursor (Anysphere), ElevenLabs, Character.AI and Safe Superintelligence.[^3][^4] In 2023 he and Gross co-founded the Vesuvius Challenge with computer scientist Brent Seales, a public competition that used machine learning to read the carbonized papyrus scrolls buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79; a grand prize was awarded in February 2024.[^5][^6]
In mid-2025 Meta Platforms partially acquired NFDG and recruited Friedman and Gross to its newly created Meta Superintelligence Labs, which was announced internally by Mark Zuckerberg on June 30, 2025. Friedman serves as vice president of products and applied research under chief AI officer Alexandr Wang.[^7][^8][^9]
| Born | August 6, 1977, Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S.[^1] |
| Education | St. Anne's-Belfield School (1995); Massachusetts Institute of Technology, B.S. in computer science and mathematics (1999)[^1] |
| Known for | Ximian, Xamarin, GitHub Copilot, NFDG, AI Grant, Vesuvius Challenge[^1][^5] |
| Spouse | Stephanie Schatz (m. 2009)[^1] |
| Residence | Menlo Park, California[^1] |
| Title (2025–) | VP of products and applied research, Meta Superintelligence Labs[^9] |
Friedman was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 6, 1977, and grew up there.[^1] In a personal sketch on his own website, he writes that he has been "online since 1991," when he was 14, and describes online communities as his "actual hometown."[^10] His early online experience-which he has described in interviews and on his blog as one of free-software mailing lists, IRC, Usenet and small bulletin-board systems-shaped the open-source bias that would dominate his career, and gave him an unusually long history of interaction with the global Linux community before he ever entered college.[^1][^10] He attended St. Anne's-Belfield School in Charlottesville, graduating in 1995.[^1]
Friedman entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995, where he studied computer science and mathematics. He has said he chose MIT in part because he had read Richard Feynman's autobiographical writings, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, while in high school.[^10] As a freshman in 1996 he created LinuxNet, an IRC network devoted to the Linux operating system, on which he met Miguel de Icaza, a Mexican programmer working at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico who would become his long-term business partner.[^1] De Icaza was already a prominent figure in the GNOME project, and the two collaborated remotely for several years before incorporating their first company together.[^1][^11] Friedman graduated from MIT with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1999.[^1] While a student he also worked as an intern at Microsoft on the Internet Information Services (IIS) web-server team.[^1]
In 1999, immediately after graduating from MIT, Friedman and de Icaza co-founded a company initially called International Gnome Support, then renamed Helix Code and finally Ximian in 2001.[^1][^11] The two were among the youngest founders backed by Boston venture-capital firms during the early dot-com era; Friedman has said that he had no formal business training and learned management on the job.[^1][^10] The company developed applications and infrastructure for GNOME, the free-software desktop environment for Linux and Unix-like operating systems, and represented one of the first attempts to build a commercial business around free desktop software for Linux end-users.[^1][^11]
Ximian's main products included Evolution, a groupware suite intended to compete with Microsoft Outlook on Linux desktops; Red Carpet, a graphical software-distribution and update service that became one of the earliest examples of an automatic Linux package manager; and the Ximian Desktop, a polished GNOME-based distribution.[^1][^11] These products were notable for trying to provide a "consumer-grade" Linux experience years before mainstream distributions like Ubuntu adopted similar goals.
Ximian also incubated the Mono project, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET runtime and class libraries that de Icaza announced in 2001 after attending a Microsoft press event for the .NET platform. Mono allowed .NET applications to run on Linux, macOS and other non-Windows platforms and would become Ximian's most enduring technical contribution.[^11][^12] At the time the project was controversial in some open-source circles because of concerns about Microsoft's patents, but Friedman defended it publicly as a way to bring a powerful runtime to free software.[^11][^12]
In August 2003 Novell acquired Ximian for an undisclosed sum, and Friedman joined Novell. He held a series of roles there, eventually becoming Novell's chief technology and strategy officer for open source.[^1] At Novell he was responsible for projects including SUSE Linux Enterprise, the open-source Hula collaboration server (built from the source code of Novell NetMail), and SUSE Studio, a web-based appliance builder that allowed users to compose custom Linux images entirely in a browser-an early example of cloud-style developer tooling.[^1] Friedman also oversaw an internal effort to migrate roughly 6,000 Novell employees from Windows and Microsoft Office to SUSE Linux and OpenOffice.org, an unusually large desktop-Linux deployment for the era.[^1] He left Novell in early 2010.[^1]
When Novell was acquired by Attachmate in 2011 and the Mono team faced layoffs, Friedman and de Icaza founded Xamarin on May 16, 2011 to continue commercial development of Mono. Friedman served as CEO and was responsible for the company's go-to-market strategy, while de Icaza led engineering.[^12][^13] Within months Xamarin obtained a perpetual license from Novell for Mono, MonoTouch and Mono for Android, securing the intellectual property foundation it needed to operate as an independent business.[^12]
Xamarin's flagship products allowed developers to build native applications for iOS, Android and macOS using the C# programming language and the .NET ecosystem; they included Xamarin.iOS (originally MonoTouch), Xamarin.Android and, later, the cross-platform UI toolkit Xamarin.Forms, which provided a single C# API for designing native user interfaces across multiple mobile platforms.[^12] The company also developed Xamarin Test Cloud, a cloud-based device farm for automated mobile-app testing.[^12]
Xamarin grew rapidly in the early 2010s as enterprise adoption of mobile applications accelerated. By the mid-2010s the company had raised more than $80 million in venture capital from investors including Charles River Ventures, Benchmark, Lead Edge Capital and Insight Venture Partners, and reported tens of thousands of paying developer customers across major enterprises.[^13] Friedman became a frequent speaker at developer conferences and was widely credited with rehabilitating the perception of Microsoft-adjacent tooling within the broader open-source community.[^1][^13]
On February 24, 2016, Microsoft announced that it had agreed to acquire Xamarin. Microsoft did not disclose the price, but the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reported the deal at roughly $400 million to $500 million.[^13][^14] The acquisition was widely seen as part of Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella's broader strategic shift toward open source and cross-platform support, which also included open-sourcing .NET Core and acquiring tools companies such as HockeyApp and, later, GitHub.[^13][^15] After the deal closed, Microsoft made Xamarin's developer tools free inside Visual Studio and open-sourced the SDK under the MIT license, removing what had been a significant cost barrier for individual developers.[^12][^13] Xamarin's runtime has since been superseded by .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI); Microsoft ended formal support for the Xamarin SDK on May 1, 2024.[^12]
Friedman joined Microsoft as a corporate vice president responsible for developer services after the acquisition, reporting to executive vice president Scott Guthrie. In that role he was involved in Microsoft's developer-tools strategy for roughly two years before being tapped to run GitHub.[^1][^15]
On June 4, 2018, Microsoft announced its agreement to acquire GitHub for approximately $7.5 billion in stock. At the same time the companies announced that Friedman would become GitHub's new chief executive officer once the deal closed.[^1][^15] The selection of Friedman, an open-source veteran with a strong reputation in the free-software community, was seen as a deliberate signal that Microsoft intended to operate GitHub at arm's length and preserve its identity as a developer-first platform.[^15] Friedman assumed the role on October 29, 2018, succeeding co-founder Chris Wanstrath, who had returned as interim CEO during the acquisition process.[^1]
During Friedman's three-year tenure GitHub launched or formally released a series of major new products, many of which became central pieces of the company's commercial strategy:
gh), an official command-line client, was released in 2020.[^1]Friedman also oversaw a series of strategic acquisitions during his tenure, including npm (the JavaScript package registry, acquired in 2020), Semmle (a static-analysis tool maker whose CodeQL technology became the foundation of Advanced Security, acquired in 2019), Dependabot (automated dependency updates, acquired in 2019), PullPanda (code-review tools, 2019), Pull Reminders and the design studio Spectrum.[^1] In total six acquisitions were completed under his leadership.[^1]
In addition to product launches, Friedman publicly steered the company on a number of contentious policy issues. He reversed a long-standing GitHub policy by allowing the company to do business in countries subject to U.S. sanctions where U.S. export-control rules permitted, advocated repeatedly against the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions when they affected open-source projects, and oversaw the introduction of GitHub Discussions and GitHub Issues redesigns aimed at improving open-source maintainer experience.[^1] He also became one of the most-followed CEOs of a major developer platform on social media, regularly engaging with users directly on Twitter/X.[^1][^10]
On November 3, 2021, Friedman announced that he was stepping down as GitHub's CEO and would be succeeded by chief product officer Thomas Dohmke. In his farewell note, Friedman wrote that under his leadership GitHub had reached "nearly 50 million new developers" and listed Actions, Copilot, Codespaces, Sponsors, Discussions, mobile apps, the CLI, CodeQL and Dependabot among its major launches.[^19] At the time of his departure, GitHub Copilot-still in technical preview-was already being characterized in industry coverage as one of the most consequential AI products to reach the market.[^1][^18]
After leaving GitHub, Friedman concentrated on angel and venture investing alongside his long-time friend Daniel Gross, a former Y Combinator partner who had founded the search startup Cue (acquired by Apple in 2013) and the talent-development platform Pioneer.app.[^3][^4]
In 2017 the two had already co-founded the AI Grant program, originally a low-key open-source funding initiative that awarded small grants (typically $5,000 to $50,000) to people working on practical machine-learning research outside major labs.[^4] After Friedman's GitHub exit, AI Grant relaunched in 2023 as a structured accelerator providing $250,000 SAFE investments (on uncapped, most-favored-nation terms) and large allotments of NVIDIA H100 GPU compute at no cost to selected AI-first startups.[^4][^20] Selected founders also received direct mentorship from Friedman and Gross and access to their network of investors and operators. Alumni of the program include Perplexity, Cursor (Anysphere), Pika, Replicate and Suno, among roughly sixty companies funded by 2024.[^4]
In 2023 Friedman and Gross also built Andromeda, a privately funded supercomputing cluster of about 2,512 NVIDIA H100 GPUs (later expanded to roughly 4,000) made available at low cost to AI Grant portfolio companies. Industry reporting estimated the cluster's all-in cost at around $100 million, including networking, electricity and cooling, making it one of the largest privately operated AI training clusters outside of the major hyperscalers at the time of its construction.[^4]
The investment vehicle that Friedman and Gross used for larger-stage deals became known as NFDG (from their initials Nat Friedman / Daniel Gross). It operated more like a long-duration family office than a conventional venture firm: the partnership pooled the founders' own balance sheets together with capital from a small set of limited partners and made highly concentrated bets in AI-native software. Reported portfolio investments included Safe Superintelligence (co-founded by Gross with Ilya Sutskever and Daniel Levy), Perplexity AI, Cursor, Character.AI, ElevenLabs, Pika, Magic, Midjourney (where Friedman has been listed as an advisor) and the meeting-transcription startup Granola.[^3][^21] John Collison of Stripe and Matt Huang of Paradigm have been described as advisors to the fund.[^3] According to SaaStr's reporting on the 2025 Meta deal, NFDG had deployed roughly $550 million of capital that grew to a paper value of approximately $2.2 billion before the Meta transaction-a return of roughly 4x in about two years.[^3]
In March 2023 Friedman publicly offered emergency lines of credit to startups caught in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, an episode that further raised his profile as an early-stage AI investor and reinforced his association with the wider founder community.[^1] He also became a frequent guest on technology podcasts during this period, including The Logan Bartlett Show, the Stratechery interview series and Patrick O'Shaughnessy's Invest Like the Best.[^10]
Friedman has described the Herculaneum papyri-Roman scrolls carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 and excavated from the Villa of the Papyri in the 18th century-as a personal obsession dating back several years before the challenge launched.[^10] The scrolls are too fragile to unroll physically; computer scientist Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky had spent decades developing techniques for "virtually unwrapping" them from high-resolution X-ray tomography produced at the Diamond Light Source synchrotron in the United Kingdom, but the carbon-based ink left only faint signal in the imagery.[^5][^22]
On March 15, 2023, Friedman, Gross and Seales launched the Vesuvius Challenge, a public competition to use machine learning and computer vision to extract readable text from the scans. The Vesuvius Challenge offered more than $1 million in prizes funded by Friedman, Gross and other donors for progress milestones, with the bulk of the money concentrated in a single grand prize.[^5][^22] The organizers released open scan data, training labels and tooling on the project's website, encouraging participants from outside the academic papyrology community.
The challenge's headline Grand Prize required teams to recover at least four passages of 140 readable characters from one of the still-rolled scrolls before the end of 2023. Earlier in 2023 the competition awarded smaller "First Letters" and "Ink Detection" prizes for intermediate milestones; one of these, the "First Letters" prize won by University of Nebraska student Luke Farritor in October 2023, surfaced the Greek word porphyras ("purple") and demonstrated that legible text could in principle be recovered from the scans.[^5][^22]
On February 5, 2024, the organizers announced that a three-person team-Youssef Nader, an Egyptian PhD student in Berlin; Luke Farritor, a SpaceX intern and University of Nebraska student; and Julian Schilliger, a Swiss robotics student at ETH Zurich-had won the $700,000 grand prize, recovering more than 2,000 characters of text from the so-called Scroll 1. Three runner-up teams received $50,000 each.[^5][^6][^23] The recovered text appears to be a previously unknown Epicurean philosophical work discussing pleasure and the senses, most likely written by the philosopher Philodemus of Gadara, who lived in the villa in the first century BC.[^5][^6]
The Vesuvius Challenge has continued in subsequent seasons with additional prizes for recovering further scrolls and reading entire works, and is widely cited as a high-profile example of "open science by prize," in which a privately funded competition mobilized hundreds of volunteer researchers around an archaeological problem that had resisted institutional efforts for over two centuries.[^22]
In the first half of 2025, Meta Platforms faced mounting internal and external criticism over the lukewarm reception of its Llama 4 family of large language models, and Mark Zuckerberg publicly committed to a substantial reorganization of the company's AI efforts.[^7][^8] After Meta's reported efforts to acquire Safe Superintelligence outright were rebuffed by co-founder Ilya Sutskever, Zuckerberg pivoted to recruiting NFDG's principals individually and bringing the rest of the fund along through a financial transaction.[^24]
Multiple outlets including the Wall Street Journal, The Information, Bloomberg and Wired reported between June and July 2025 that Meta would partially acquire NFDG's holdings-buying out limited partners at full net asset value through a tender offer covering up to 49% of the fund-while hiring Friedman and Gross to lead a new artificial-intelligence organization. Press reporting put the headline value of the transaction in the multi-billion-dollar range.[^7][^24][^25] The arrangement did not give Meta control of NFDG's portfolio companies or board seats in them, but it provided liquidity to the fund's limited partners and locked in the founders' attention for the new role.
On June 30, 2025, Zuckerberg announced in an internal memo the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), a unit consolidating Meta's foundation-model research, product teams and the company's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab.[^7][^8] Alexandr Wang, the founder of Scale AI (in which Meta had made a separate, much larger investment), became Meta's first chief AI officer and head of MSL; Friedman joined as vice president of products and applied research, reporting to Wang.[^7][^8][^9] Friedman wrote on social media on July 3, 2025 that he had begun work at Meta to "make amazing AI products."[^9] Gross joined the same organization in July 2025 as Friedman's counterpart on the research side.[^8][^9]
Subsequent reporting through late 2025 described MSL as organized into several internal labs including a "TBD Lab" focused on training next-generation frontier models, a products group led by Friedman, an applied-research group, and the legacy FAIR organization.[^9] Friedman's mandate, according to industry coverage, included Meta's consumer-facing Meta AI assistant, the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses experience and integration of generative-AI features across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads.[^9]
Friedman maintains an active public profile on social media and through his personal website nat.org, where he publishes essays, project notes and a regularly updated list of current obsessions.[^10] He is widely followed on the platform X (formerly Twitter) under the handle @natfriedman, and his posts about open source, AI products and Vesuvius progress have shaped tech discourse since the early 2020s.[^10][^19]
In 2017 he co-founded California YIMBY, a state-level housing-policy advocacy group that pushes for greater housing density and fewer regulatory barriers to homebuilding in California. He launched the organization with Pantheon co-founder Zack Rosen and housing activist Brian Hanlon, and contributed roughly half a million dollars in seed funding to the group.[^26] The organization has lobbied for major California state-level housing bills and has remained one of the most visible YIMBY policy organizations in the United States.
Friedman sits on the board of the Arc Institute, a non-profit biomedical research organization based in Palo Alto, California and co-founded in 2021 by Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, UC Berkeley bioengineer Patrick Hsu and Stanford biochemist Silvana Konermann. He had advised Arc since its founding and was formally appointed to its board of directors in 2024 alongside Reid Hoffman and Meta CFO Susan Li.[^27] He has also been listed as an advisor or early backer to companies including Midjourney, Cursor, Perplexity and ElevenLabs, as well as biotech and robotics ventures supported through NFDG.[^21]
In 2023 Friedman launched nat.dev, a public web playground for comparing the outputs of multiple large language models side by side. The site, originally a personal project, became widely used among AI researchers and developers in the early generative-AI period as one of the few neutral interfaces that exposed multiple frontier models in a single chat surface.[^1][^10] He has also funded a number of public-interest research projects: in 2024 he commissioned a privately financed study that tested approximately 300 commercially available Bay Area foods for synthetic chemical contaminants and published the results publicly.[^10] On his personal site he describes additional efforts in cultural preservation and open-source AI tooling.[^10]
Friedman has been recognized in industry-influence rankings several times. Time magazine named him to its inaugural TIME100 AI list in 2024, citing his role in launching GitHub Copilot and his Vesuvius Challenge work, and again in 2025, when he was recognized jointly with Alexandr Wang for their leadership of Meta Superintelligence Labs.[^28][^29] He has also been a frequent endorser of titles published by Stripe Press, the publishing imprint of payments company Stripe, which has produced cover-quote endorsements from him for several of its non-fiction titles on technology and progress.[^30]
Friedman has been married to Stephanie Schatz since 2009; the couple have one daughter and have lived primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area since the mid-2010s, currently residing in Menlo Park, California.[^1]