Nat Friedman

Nathaniel Dourif Friedman (born 6 August 1977[1]) is an American technology executive and investor, currently head of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs. He was the chief executive officer (CEO) of GitHub and former chairman of the GNOME Foundation. Friedman is currently a board member at the Arc Institute and an advisor of Midjourney.[2][3] Friedman attended and graduated from St. Anne's-Belfield School in 1995.[4] In 1996, while a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Friedman befriended Miguel de Icaza on LinuxNet, the IRC network that Friedman had created to discuss Linux. As an intern at Microsoft, Friedman worked on the IIS web server. At MIT, he studied Computer Science and Mathematics and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1999.[5] In 1999, Friedman co-founded Ximian (originally called International Gnome Support,[5] then Helix Code[6]) with de Icaza to develop applications and infrastructure for GNOME, the project de Icaza had started with the aim of producing a free software desktop environment. The company was later bought by Novell in 2003.[7][8] At Novell, Friedman was the Chief Technology and Strategy Officer for Open Source until January 2010.[9][7][10] There he launched the Hula Project which began with the release of components of Novell NetMail as open source.[11] During his tenure, Novell began an effort to migrate 6,000 employees away from Microsoft Windows to SUSE Linux and from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org.[12][13][14] Friedman's final project before his departure was work on SUSE Studio.[7]