Nat Friedman

Background

Nathaniel Dourif Friedman was born on August 6, 1977, and grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia ¹². He has been online since 1991 and befriended Miguel de Icaza in 1996 while a freshman at MIT on LinuxNet, an IRC network that Friedman had created to discuss Linux ¹².

Friedman studied Computer Science and Mathematics at MIT, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1999 ¹³.

In 1999, Friedman co-founded Ximian (originally called International Gnome Support, then Helix Code) with Miguel de Icaza to develop applications and infrastructure for the GNOME desktop environment ¹². Ximian was acquired by Novell in 2003, where Friedman served as CTO of Open Source from 2003 to 2009 ¹³.

In May 2011, Friedman and de Icaza co-founded Xamarin, with Friedman as CEO ¹². Xamarin developed cross-platform mobile development tools using Mono. Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft in 2016 ¹².

Following the Xamarin acquisition, Friedman served as Corporate Vice President of Developer Services at Microsoft from 2016 to 2018 ³. When Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018, Friedman was named GitHub’s CEO, assuming the role on October 29, 2018 ¹².

During his tenure as GitHub CEO, Friedman introduced GitHub Copilot, GitHub Codespaces, a native mobile app for iOS and Android, GitHub Advanced Security, GitHub Sponsors, and a new GitHub CLI ². He stepped down as CEO in November 2021 and served as Chairman Emeritus through November 2022 ¹³.

After leaving GitHub, Friedman became a prolific angel investor and co-founded NFDG with Daniel Gross in 2023, a $1.1 billion AI-focused venture fund ⁴⁵. With only approximately 50% of the fund deployed, NFDG achieved roughly 4x returns — from approximately $550 million deployed to approximately $2.2 billion in portfolio value ⁵⁶.

In June 2025, Friedman joined Meta Platforms as Vice President of Product and Applied Research at the newly established Meta Superintelligence Labs, alongside Alexandr Wang ⁷⁸. Meta agreed to acquire a substantial portion of NFDG’s holdings — potentially more than $1 billion — to provide liquidity to the fund’s limited partners ⁶⁷.

Friedman was named to the TIME100 AI list in 2024 ⁹. He is also co-founder and chairman of California YIMBY, a housing advocacy organization, and serves on the board of the Arc Institute ³. He spearheaded and funded the Vesuvius Challenge, using AI to read ancient Herculaneum scrolls buried under volcanic ash nearly 2,000 years ago ²⁹.

Stated Thesis

(Self-reported: These represent what Friedman says publicly about his approach. See Inferred Thesis for analysis of actual investment behavior.)

Friedman has articulated his investing and building philosophy through his personal website and interviews:

• Speed as core principle: Friedman has written on his personal website: “It’s important to do things fast” and “Slow is fake” ². He also stated: “A week is 2% of the year. Time is the denominator” ².

• Small teams: He advocates for smaller organizations: “Smaller teams are better. Faster decisions, fewer meetings, more fun” ².

• Market inefficiency: His website states: “The efficient market hypothesis is a lie” ².

• Ambition: He has written: “It might be easier to do big things than small things” and “Enthusiasm matters!” ².

• Human agency: Friedman has written: “As human beings it is our right (maybe our moral duty) to reshape the universe to our preferences” ².

• AI conviction: Through NFDG, Friedman and Gross explicitly focused on AI-enabled products, AI infrastructure, and AI applications ⁴. Friedman told Forbes he had become “a full-time computer chip broker for upstart AI companies” during the GPU shortage ⁹¹⁰.

Inferred Thesis

Based on analysis of 26 unique companies with verified investments in the table below. CB Insights reports 97+ companies in Friedman’s portfolio; Premier Alternatives lists 39 confirmed investments ¹¹¹².

Stage focus: - Through NFDG, Friedman invested across seed through growth stages, with check sizes ranging from $1 million to $100 million ³⁴. As an individual angel, he made smaller early-stage bets. NFDG led or co-led major rounds including Weights & Biases ($50M), Suno ($125M), Magic ($117M), and Safe Superintelligence ($1B) ^13141516.

Sector concentration (of 26 unique verified investments): - AI & machine learning: 16 of 26 (62%) — Perplexity, Character.ai, Safe Superintelligence, ElevenLabs, Pika, Magic, Suno, EvolutionaryScale, The Bot Company, Keen Technologies, Pulse, Anysphere (Cursor), Distyl AI, Recraft, XBOW, Granola ^{41214151718192021} - Developer tools & infrastructure: 5 of 26 (19%) — Retool, Vercel, Weights & Biases, Streamlit, ggml.ai ¹¹¹²¹³ - Enterprise SaaS: 3 of 26 (12%) — Scale AI, Basis, Sumble ¹¹²²²³ - Other (biotech, climate): 2 of 26 (8%) — NewLimit, Terraform Industries ¹²²⁴¹¹

Note: This sample represents approximately 27% of Friedman’s 97+ investments, so percentages are indicative. However, the heavy AI concentration (62% of verified investments) strongly reflects NFDG’s explicit AI focus and Friedman’s personal conviction.

Co-investor patterns: - Friedman’s primary co-investing partner is Daniel Gross (NFDG co-founder and former Y Combinator partner) ⁴⁶. - Frequent co-investors include: Elad Gil (Magic, Perplexity, Distyl AI), Khosla Ventures (Recraft, Distyl AI, Basis), Andreessen Horowitz (ElevenLabs), Patrick and John Collison (Retool, Anysphere), and Sequoia Capital ^1417181922.

Geographic patterns: - Predominantly San Francisco Bay Area companies, consistent with Friedman’s location and NFDG’s SF headquarters ³. Notable exceptions include Recraft (London) ¹⁹ and ElevenLabs (originally Poland-based) ¹⁷.

Distinctive patterns: - AI-first strategy: NFDG was among the most concentrated AI-focused funds at the $1B+ scale, betting heavily on the AI wave during 2023-2025 ⁴⁶. - Infrastructure provision: Beyond capital, NFDG built the Andromeda Cluster — a supercomputer with 4,000+ H100 GPUs — for portfolio companies to use, addressing the GPU shortage. Friedman spent significant time personally brokering GPU access ⁶⁹¹⁰. - AI Grant program: Friedman and Gross ran an AI grant program offering $250K in funding and $250K in Microsoft Azure credits to AI startups ⁶. - Operator-investor hybrid: Friedman’s deep technical background (founding two developer tools companies, running GitHub, co-creating GitHub Copilot) gives him distinctive credibility with technical founders building AI and developer tools. - Repeat investment pattern: Friedman frequently invested across multiple rounds in the same company — e.g., Magic (Series A, B, and D), Distyl AI (Seed and Series A), ElevenLabs (Series A and B), Recraft (Series A and B) ^1415171819.

Portfolio

Note: Friedman’s full portfolio includes 97-100+ companies ¹¹¹². This table represents approximately 34% of known investments. Investments through NFDG (2023-2025) and personal angel investments (2019-present) are combined. Some years are approximate (marked with ~) when exact dates could not be verified.

In Their Own Words

“It’s important to do things fast. You learn more per unit time because you make contact with reality more frequently.” — Nat Friedman, personal website ²

“Slow is fake.” — Nat Friedman, personal website ²

“Smaller teams are better. Faster decisions, fewer meetings, more fun.” — Nat Friedman, personal website ²

“The efficient market hypothesis is a lie.” — Nat Friedman, personal website ²

“As human beings it is our right (maybe our moral duty) to reshape the universe to our preferences.” — Nat Friedman, personal website ²

“A week is 2% of the year. Time is the denominator.” — Nat Friedman, personal website ²

“There were weeks where I spent most of my time finding GPUs for people.” — Nat Friedman, as reported by Forbes/TIME, on his work brokering GPU access for AI startups during the chip shortage ⁹¹⁰

“The Recraft team has a deep level of talent and experience in machine learning, and combined with their unique focus on professional design and vector graphics foundation models, sets them up to play a key role in the future of professional use of generative AI.” — Nat Friedman, Recraft Series A announcement, January 2024 ¹⁹

“Weights & Biases found their footing by helping developers supervise model training, where they are the popular choice for practically everyone we know — from Meta to OpenAI to Microsoft. Now that the industry is maturing, they’re expanding from training to prompting — helping enterprises around the world use LLM platforms in a safe & reliable way.” — Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, joint statement on Weights & Biases $50M investment, August 2023 ¹³

“I can’t help but read it as a 2,000 year old blog post, arguing with another poster. It’s ancient Substack, and people are beefing with each other, and I think that’s just amazing.” — Nat Friedman, on the AI-decoded Herculaneum scrolls, TIME100 AI profile, 2024 ⁹

What Founders Say

“I’m thrilled to raise an institutional round from Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross — who have both trained quite a lot of their own models — and have been significant users of Weights & Biases for quite a long time.” — Lukas Biewald, CEO and Co-Founder of Weights & Biases, on the $50M investment round led by Friedman and Gross, August 2023 ¹³

No other independently sourced founder testimonials found. Friedman is widely regarded in the developer community for his tenure as GitHub CEO and his technical credibility, but specific additional portfolio founder quotes about his investing activities were not found in public sources beyond the Biewald quote above.

Sources