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Nat Friedman

Nat Friedman is an entrepreneur and investor who co-founded Ximian and later Xamarin with Miguel de Icaza and was chief executive of GitHub from 2018 to 2021; after GitHub he invested in artificial intelligence companies with Daniel Gross, instigated the Vesuvius Challenge to read the Herculaneum scrolls, and in 2025 joined MetaMetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry to lead Meta Superintelligence Labs with Alexandr WangAlexandr WangAlexandr Wang is an artificial intelligence entrepreneur, a co-founder and former chief executive officer of Scale AI. He joined Meta in June 2025 as the company’s first chief AI officer and leads Meta Superintelligence Labs. His work spans AI training data, model evaluation, government applications, and personal agents.Open the full entry.

Contents32 sections
Key facts

Growing Up in Charlottesville and Going Online

Intern at Microsoft

In 1997 he was an intern at MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry; he later described Miguel de Icaza’s job interview in Redmond that year, in which Miguel de Icaza lectured the managers interviewing him on abandoning their business model in favor of open source, and was not hired.⁠[2]

Co-founding Helix Code (Later Ximian) with Miguel de Icaza

Later in 1999 he suggested to Miguel de Icaza that the two of them start a software company. Miguel de Icaza wrote on his blog in 2011 that the two co-founded Ximian in 1999 to advance Linux, user experience and developer platforms.⁠[2][3]

Early Operations of Helix Code

As of April 12, 2000, Helix Code, the software firm that Miguel de Icaza and he had co-launched, was based in Cambridge, MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry, employed about 20 people, mainly developers, and was funded by a group of private investors together with the venture capital group LinuxFund; he had also invested in the company himself, which he said reflected his belief in open source. He said: “Helix Code is to Gnome what Red Hat is to Linux.” Helix Code had issued a prerelease edition of the Helix Gnome Desktop, a suite of 80 applications, and its next big project was a full-featured GNOME word processor.⁠[4]

Helix Code Renamed Ximian

On January 10, 2001 Ximian, Inc. announced on the gnome-hackers mailing list that Helix Code, Inc. had changed its name to Ximian, Inc., and that it was moving all of its mailing lists, web pages and addresses to the ximian.com domain.⁠[5]

Novell Acquires Ximian

Early in the year in which Novell’s acquisition of Ximian was announced, on the day Miguel de Icaza was starting a vacation in Brazil, he called to say that Novell executives were coming to Cambridge the next day; Miguel de Icaza recalls thinking, “God, not another meeting that doesn’t go anywhere,” but he flew back and gave a presentation about Mono.⁠[2]

On August 4, 2003 Novell announced the all-cash acquisition of Ximian, a privately held company based in Boston; no other terms were disclosed. Ximian had been co-founded by Miguel de Icaza and him, then Ximian’s senior vice president, and the two had also helped found the GNOME and Mono projects; Ximian became the Novell Ximian Services business unit, with Miguel de Icaza as its chief technology officer, him as vice president of research and development, and David Patrick, Ximian’s president and chief executive, as general manager, and all Ximian employees moved to Novell. Ximian’s products included Ximian Desktop 2, a Linux desktop environment built on GNOME; Evolution, which combines email, calendaring, contact management and task lists; Red Carpet Enterprise, for centralized management of Linux servers and desktops; and the Ximian-backed Mono project, which provides tools that let .NET applications run on other platforms.⁠[6]

He announced the news on the gnome-hackers mailing list; Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller’s reply that day quotes his announcement, which says “Novell is committed to making GNOME the best open source desktop environment possible” and that Ximian now had an opportunity to advance GNOME as an integral part of Novell’s strategy.⁠[7]

Co-founding Xamarin and Becoming Its Chief Executive

Miguel de Icaza announced Xamarin on his blog on May 16, 2011, noting that the Mono team at Novell had been laid off earlier that month. On May 25 he posted that Nat Friedman had joined Xamarin that week as a company founder and chief executive; the post says the two had known each other and worked together on and off since the early days of Linux, and that his most recent product had been SUSE Studio. Miguel de Icaza’s announcement had first mentioned a plan that included angel funding; an update later added that the company “self-funded the whole thing in the end.”⁠[3]

Xamarin Raises $12 Million in Series A Funding

As of July 24, 2012, Xamarin had raised $12 million in Series A funding from Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners and Floodgate; the company said that 150,000 developers used its platform, 7,500 of them paying customers, including Rdio and National Instruments. The Next Web called him a veteran software entrepreneur.⁠[9]

Microsoft Acquires Xamarin and He Joins Microsoft

On February 24, 2016 Scott Guthrie, an executive vice president of Microsoft, announced that Microsoft would acquire Xamarin, subject to regulatory approval; the announcement says that Xamarin had more than 15,000 customers in 120 countries, including more than one hundred Fortune 500 companies, and that more than 1.3 million unique developers had used its offering. He joined Microsoft in 2016 through that acquisition; a Microsoft blog post of 2018 calls him the “former CEO of Xamarin (acquired by Microsoft in 2016).”⁠[10][11][12]

He recalled on the Dwarkesh Podcast that he “didn’t actually expect or plan to spend more than a year or so there,” and that in his first week at Microsoft, “like March or April of 2016,” he said, “I think we should buy GitHub.”⁠[8]

Microsoft Announces the Acquisition of GitHub

On June 4, 2018 Microsoft announced that it would acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock, with the deal expected to close by the end of the year; the announcement states that Nat Friedman, the founder of Xamarin and an “open source veteran,” would become GitHub’s chief executive, while Chris WanstrathChris WanstrathChris Wanstrath is an American software developer and entrepreneur who co-founded the code hosting and collaboration platform GitHub with Tom Preston-Werner and others in 2007, and served as its chief executive from 2014 until GitHub’s acquisition by Microsoft in 2018.Open the full entry, GitHub’s co-founder and chief executive, would become a Microsoft technical fellow. The caption of the photo with the announcement names him as Microsoft corporate vice president, Developer Services, pictured with Chris Wanstrath and Satya NadellaSatya NadellaSatya Nadella is a business executive who serves as chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft; his leadership career spans cloud computing, developer platforms, corporate acquisitions, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry, Microsoft’s chief executive.⁠[13]

He recalled on the Dwarkesh Podcast that he wrote “an email to Satya, a little memo,” and that “three weeks later, we had a signed term sheet and an announced deal.”⁠[8]

Becoming Chief Executive of GitHub

On October 26, 2018 Microsoft announced that it had completed the acquisition of GitHub and that he was taking over as GitHub’s chief executive, reporting to Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Microsoft Cloud + AI Group. The same day he published a post on the GitHub blog, “Pull request successfully merged. Starting build…,” in which he wrote: “Monday is my first day as CEO.”⁠[11][14]

He wrote that GitHub would continue to operate as an independent community, platform and business: “We will always support developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform, or cloud.” He named three priorities: making GitHub the best place for productive communities and teams, expanding access for developers around the world, and improving reliability, security and performance; near-term work would start with everyday usability, including the paper cuts project, search, notifications, issues and projects and the mobile experience, and with making GitHub Actions broadly available. He also wrote that in preparing for the role he had spent a few months meeting hundreds of developers.⁠[14]

Internal Letter on GitHub’s Contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had bought a license for GitHub Enterprise Server through a reseller since April 2016, and its most recent renewal as of October 2019 also went through the reseller, for a total of under $200,000. His internal letter to staff on the matter leaked on October 8, and he then published the full text on his blog. The letter says that GitHub believes in “basic human rights and treating people with respect and dignity,” that the revenue was “not financially material for our company,” and that GitHub had no professional services agreement with the agency, was not consulting on any of its projects and had no visibility into how the software was used; it notes that the agency has more than 20,000 employees and many duties, including immigration enforcement that GitHub and Microsoft opposed, as well as work against human trafficking, child exploitation, terrorism and cybercrime.⁠[15]

GitHub also pledged $500,000 to nonprofit organizations supporting immigrant communities affected by the policies of Donald TrumpDonald TrumpDonald Trump (born 1946) is an American politician and businessman, a Republican who ran the real estate company the Trump Organization and starred in the television series The Apprentice. He served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021 and has been the 47th president since 2025.Open the full entry’s administration. Chef had faced a backlash over its own work with the agency and had backed away from renewing its contract; a GitHub spokesperson referred The Next Web to his blog post and offered no further comment.⁠[15]

GitHub Fully Available in Iran

In a GitHub blog post on January 5, 2021 he announced that, after about two years of engagement with the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the U.S. Treasury Department, GitHub had secured a license from the U.S.United StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry government to offer all of its services to individuals and organizations in Iran, and would roll back the access restrictions it had imposed on developers in Iran in 2019 to comply with U.S. sanctions (public repositories had remained available in sanctioned countries). The post says “All developers should be free to use GitHub, no matter where they live,” and that GitHub was working to secure similar licenses for developers in Crimea and Syria.⁠[16]

Launch of the GitHub Copilot Technical Preview

In a GitHub blog post on June 29, 2021 he announced the technical preview of GitHub Copilot, which he called an “AI pair programmer”: it reads the code being written and suggests whole lines or entire functions, adapting to the way the user writes code. Copilot was developed with OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry and powered by OpenAI Codex, a model that the post says is significantly more capable than GPT-3 at generating code, partly because it was trained on a larger concentration of public source code; the preview worked especially well with Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby and Go, and places were limited.⁠[17]

He recalled in 2023: “GPT-3 came out in May of 2020. I saw it and it really blew my mind,” and he concluded that “we’ve got to build some products with this”; the team prototyped a chatbot first and then code completion, over about four or five months.⁠[8]

Stepping Down as Chief Executive of GitHub

On November 3, 2021 Microsoft announced that he was stepping down as GitHub’s chief executive and that Thomas Dohmke, GitHub’s chief product officer, would succeed him on November 15, reporting to Julia Liuson, the new head of Microsoft’s developer division. He became GitHub’s chairman emeritus, and the company said he was returning to the startup world. The announcement came weeks after GitHub’s competitor GitLab went public on the Nasdaq, at a valuation of $16.5 billion, twice what Microsoft had paid for GitHub.⁠[12][18]

He explained in 2023 why he left: “I didn’t really want to be a part of a giant company anymore”; coordinating large groups had become less energizing, and “I always liked small teams.” He also said that leading GitHub “was really an honor for me but it was time for me to go do something. I was always a startup guy.”⁠[8]

Building the Andromeda Compute Cluster with Daniel Gross

In 2023 he and Daniel Gross, a fellow investor, built Andromeda, a mass of cutting-edge chips weighing 7,255 lb. and costing around $100 million including electricity and cooling, and the two traded access to it for equity in AI startups they judged promising.⁠[19]

He co-founded the venture firm NFDG with Daniel Gross; in 2023 Daniel Gross and NFDG ended up running a compute-trading operation, NFDG committed more than $100 million upfront to Andromeda, and the cluster passed 4,000 GPUs by early 2024. Upstarts Media writes in 2026 that the two also set up the AI Grant, which allocated $10 million to batches of AI companies, among them PikaPikaPika develops AI creative tools for generating and editing video, images and audio. Its platform combines proprietary and third-party models, creative apps and developer interfaces for individuals and professional teams.Open the full entry, Browserbase, CursorCursorCursor is the trading name of U.S. AI coding software company Anysphere, Inc. and its namesake coding tool. Founded by Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger, it began as an AI-native development environment forked from VS Code and later shifted toward agent-centered coding. Its November 2025 Series D valued the company at $29.3 billion post-money; on August 14, 2026, SpaceX completed an all-stock acquisition at an implied equity value of $60 billion, making Cursor a wholly owned subsidiary.Open the full entry, GranolaGranolaGranola is a London-based AI meeting-notes software company. Its product combines user notes with transcripts for summaries, cross-meeting queries and collaboration, and has expanded into voice typing.Open the full entry and PerplexityPerplexityPerplexity is a San Francisco–based artificial intelligence company founded in 2022, known for its “answer engine” that gives answers with cited sources, and it has also launched products such as the Comet browser.Open the full entry.⁠[20]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes in 2025, by contrast, that the AI Grant program created by him and Daniel Gross awarded startup founders not money but mentorship and cloud computing credits.⁠[21]

Launching the Vesuvius Challenge with Daniel Gross

During the COVID-19 lockdown he read 24 Hours in Ancient Rome and became fascinated with the period, which led him to Brent Seales’s work on the Herculaneum scrolls; he contacted Brent Seales and asked how he could help speed up the effort. He thought Brent Seales would probably solve it himself, but that it could take years, and hoped that crowdsourcing would tap the creativity of AI researchers around the world. As of March 15, 2023, he was funding the prize money with Daniel Gross, who ran AI and search projects at AppleAppleApple is a public technology company founded in 1976 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Its business includes the iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, and services such as digital content, payments, and cloud storage. The company builds its product system through in-house hardware, operating systems, and services.Open the full entry from 2013 to 2017: $250,000 in all, including a $150,000 grand prize for the first team to make one of the fully scanned scrolls readable by the end of the year.⁠[22]

He recalled on the Dwarkesh Podcast in March 2023 that when he began reading about Vesuvius “it was the midst of COVID and we were in a lockdown,” and that when he reached out “it turned out they had been making really good progress,” so he put up a prize together with Daniel Gross.⁠[8]

In March 2023 Brent Seales’s team released its software and thousands of 3D X-ray images of the scrolls and partnered with him and Daniel Gross, both Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, to launch the Vesuvius Challenge, which aimed to get scientists to decipher the Herculaneum papyri from high-resolution CT scans.⁠[23][24]

First Letters and Grand Prize of the Vesuvius Challenge

As of November 16, 2023, he was leading the competition with Brent Seales, Daniel Gross (sponsor) and JP Posma (project lead), and the University of Kentucky called him its “instigator and sponsor”; prizes totaled $1 million, including a $700,000 grand prize for the first team to read four passages of text from the inner layers of the scrolls by the end of 2023.⁠[25]

On October 12, 2023 the Vesuvius Challenge awarded the First Letters and First Ink prizes, $60,000 in all: $40,000 to Luke FarritorLuke FarritorLuke Farritor is a software engineer. In 2023, while a student at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, he used a machine-learning model to read the first complete word from inside an unopened, carbonized Herculaneum scroll, and the following year he shared the $700,000 Grand Prize of the Vesuvius Challenge with Youssef Nader and Julian Schilliger. He was selected for the Thiel Fellowship in 2024, and from 2025 he worked on several federal agencies with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk, work that was widely covered and criticized.Open the full entry, $10,000 to Youssef Nader for second place and $10,000 to Casey Handmer; the 2023 Grand Prize awards totaled $850,000 (dated December 31, 2023 on the challenge’s Winners page), of which the $700,000 Grand Prize was shared by Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor and Julian Schilliger, with three runner-up entries receiving $50,000 each. Luke Farritor had heard him describe the Vesuvius Challenge on a podcast one morning in March while driving to Starbase.⁠[26][21]

The winners were announced in February 2024: three students had recovered four passages totaling more than 2,000 characters from the scans, which papyrologists translated as a discussion of the nature of pleasure, likely from a previously unknown work by the Epicurean poet and philosopher Philodemus of Gadara; the passages represent just 5 percent of one scroll.⁠[23]

Co-Hosting the Scale AI Security Summit

Luke Farritor Works at NFDG

Luke Farritor later worked for him and Daniel Gross at their venture fund, NFDG, spending many of his days in the spring of 2024 at the NFDG office in Palo Alto, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, researching emerging technologies in the space industry, and becoming involved with the AI Grant that summer and fall.⁠[21]

PlasticList Publishes Its Report on Plastic Chemicals in Food

He writes on his personal website that he tested 300 Bay Area foods for plastic chemicals, linking to the PlasticList site. The PlasticList report was published on December 27, 2024 and updated on December 31; the project was carried out by a team of four people, took half a year and cost about $500,000: the team collected 775 samples of 312 foods, and the lab tested 705 samples from 296 food products, each for 18 plastic-related chemicals; one image in the report is captioned “Nat’s tweet that started it all.”⁠[1][28]

PlasticList detected plastic chemicals in 86 percent of the foods tested, phthalates in 73 percent of products, phthalate substitutes in 73 percent and bisphenols in 22 percent; 22 products exceeded the European Food Safety Authority’s intake limits for BPA, and samples from two bottled-water brands had DEHP above the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s limit. The authors call their results a snapshot rather than grounds for firm conclusions, and say that safety limits may need revision.⁠[28]

Post on Luke Farritor

On the first Sunday in February 2025 Wired identified six of those who had responded to Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry’s call, Luke Farritor among them; the day after the Wired story came out he posted on X: “Luke Farritor is a national treasure,” and Elon Musk replied that the quality of the team was “epic.”⁠[21]

Joining Meta to Co-Lead Meta Superintelligence Labs

By June 18, 2025, The Information had learned that Meta was in talks to hire him to join its AI efforts, was also in discussions with Daniel Gross, and was in talks to partially buy out NFDG. He was a member of the Meta Advisory Group, an external council that advises Meta on technology and product development.⁠[29]

As of June 30, 2025, Meta had named Alexandr Wang, the former chief executive of Scale AI, as its first chief AI officer and had created a new organization, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL); in an internal memo that day Mark ZuckerbergMark ZuckerbergMark Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook, Chairman and CEO of Meta, and a co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. His work spans social networking, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry confirmed that Nat Friedman had joined Meta to partner with Alexandr Wang to lead MSL, heading Meta’s work on AI products and applied research. Mark Zuckerberg wrote in the memo: “Nat has served on our Meta Advisory Group for the last year.”⁠[27]

Leading AIUC’s Seed Round

As of July 23, 2025, the Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company (AIUC), a startup insuring AI agents, had raised a $15 million seed round led by Nat Friedman at NFDG. As GitHub’s former chief executive he had seen the trust issues firsthand when launching GitHub Copilot, and he had been looking for an AI insurance startup for a couple of years; he invested in a seed round in June before moving to join Alexandr Wang at Meta Superintelligence Labs.⁠[30]

Andromeda Raises Funding at a $1.5 Billion Valuation

As of March 18, 2026, Andromeda, the compute service spun up by him and Daniel Gross, had been spun out as its own startup with backing from NFDG and Paradigm; ParadigmParadigmParadigm is a technology investment firm founded in 2018 by Matt Huang and Fred Ehrsam, investing in crypto assets, artificial intelligence, robotics, and other emerging technologies at stages extending from initial funding to public markets. The firm also conducts protocol research, open-source software development, and company incubation.Open the full entry had invested $60 million in it in total, and its latest round, equivalent to a Series A, valued it at $1.5 billion. He and Daniel Gross had joined Meta as AI leadership hires in 2025 and stepped back from NFDG; neither had an active relationship with Andromeda anymore, and neither responded to Upstarts Media’s requests for comment.⁠[20]

As of November 2026: Instigator and Sponsor of the Vesuvius Challenge

As of November 2026 the Vesuvius Challenge lists him on its website under “Created by” as “Instigator, Director & Founding Sponsor,” with Daniel Gross as founding sponsor and Brent Seales as founder and principal advisor; in its list of sponsors his amount is $2,750,000, Daniel Gross’s $225,000 and the Musk Foundation’s $2,084,000. The challenge has awarded $2,008,500 in prizes since 2023; in October 2026 first letters were found in two more scrolls, PHerc. 306B and PHerc. 343, each with a $50,000 prize.⁠[31][26]

Education

Residence and Personal Life

He writes on his personal website that he lives in California; his GitHub profile gives his location as San Francisco. Bloomberg Businessweek writes that Luke Farritor attended a “Roman dinner” at his home in the Bay Area.⁠[1][32][21]

In the 2023 Dwarkesh Podcast interview he said that he does not keep trophies and prefers to look forward; asked whether that was why he took down his blog, he answered: “Yeah. I just wanted to move forward.”⁠[8]

Views and Self-Description

His personal website lists his beliefs: that as human beings it is our right (maybe our moral duty) to reshape the universe to our preferences, which technology, that is, knowledge, enables, and that one should probably work on “raising the ceiling, not the floor”; that enthusiasm matters; that it is important to do things fast, because one learns more per unit time by making contact with reality more frequently; that the efficient market hypothesis is a lie — “At best it is a very lossy heuristic” — and that the best things in life occur where it is wrong; that we know less than we think, and “The replication crisis is not an aberration”; that the cultural prohibition on micromanagement is harmful and great individuals should be fully empowered; that smaller teams are better, with faster decisions, fewer meetings and more fun; that it is better to get one’s dopamine from improving one’s ideas than from having them validated; and that you can do more than you think: “The laws of physics are the only limit.”⁠[1]

In the Dwarkesh Podcast interview of March 2023 he said: “I just fundamentally don’t believe the world is efficient,” and “I have learned to trust my enthusiasm.” He described himself as “an insecure overachiever” who does not feel good about himself unless he is doing good work, and said that his self-image is that he hasn’t “really done anything of tremendous consequence.” On artificial intelligence he said: “I have increasing worries about safety issues.”⁠[8]

Personal Open-Source Projects on GitHub

His popular repositories on GitHub include openplayground (an LLM playground that runs on a laptop), natbot (driving a browser with GPT-3), ghtop (seeing what is happening on GitHub in real time) and keyrace (daily multiplayer keyboard races for macOS); he is also a member of the xamarin organization on GitHub.⁠[32]

Related Organizations, Websites, and Public Accounts

Vesuvius Challenge: Official website: https://scrollprize.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[31]

PlasticList: Official website: https://plasticlist.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[36]

Sources36 sources

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