Nat Friedman

Nat Friedman is an American technology executive and investor born in 1977 who built his career around open source software. In 1999, while still fresh from studying computer science and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he co-founded Ximian with Miguel de Icaza to build applications and infrastructure for the GNOME desktop, and the company was bought by Novell in 2003. He stayed on as Novell's chief technology and strategy officer for open source until 2010. In 2011 he and de Icaza founded Xamarin, which he led as chief executive until Microsoft acquired it in 2016. Microsoft then named him chief executive of GitHub when it bought that company in 2018, and he held the post from October 2018 until he stepped down in November 2021, a period in which GitHub launched Copilot, Codespaces and Sponsors. He later invested in artificial intelligence companies and joined Meta in 2025 to co-lead its Superintelligence Labs.