Nat Friedman

Nat Friedman came up through open-source software. As an MIT student in the 1990s Friedman met Miguel de Icaza online, and together they founded Ximian, which built tools for the GNOME Linux desktop and was sold to Novell in 2003, and then Xamarin, which let developers write mobile apps in C# and was bought by Microsoft in 2016. When Microsoft agreed to buy GitHub for 7.5 billion dollars in June 2018, it named Friedman chief executive. GitHub released Copilot, an AI coding assistant built on an OpenAI model, as a preview in June 2021, one of the first large commercial products built on a language model. Friedman stepped down that November.

As an investor, usually with Daniel Gross, Friedman backed AI start-ups. In March 2023 Friedman, Gross and the computer scientist Brent Seales launched the Vesuvius Challenge, offering more than a million dollars for reading carbonized papyrus scrolls from Herculaneum; in February 2024 a team of three young researchers won the 700,000 dollar grand prize for using machine learning to recover more than 2,000 characters from a scroll unread for 2,000 years. Friedman's personal website lists "Working on reading the Herculaneum Papyri" among a few facts about its author, alongside the claim that "Many tech companies are 2-10x overstaffed."

Friedman joined the unpaid Meta Advisory Group in May 2024. In June 2025 Mark Zuckerberg hired Friedman and Gross, and Friedman became co-leader of Meta Superintelligence Labs with Alexandr Wang, in charge of AI products and applied research. The group shipped Muse, a personal agent, in early September 2026. When users found its configuration files nearly identical to those of the open-source agent OpenClaw, Friedman wrote on X that Muse was "built from scratch" but "definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw," and that after trying OpenClaw in January Friedman had bought hundreds of Mac minis for the lab's staff.