Nat Friedman
Nathaniel Dourif Friedman is an American technology executive. He is currently the Chief Executive Officer of GitHub.Life and career
In 1996 while a freshman at 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 in 1999.
Friedman co-founded Ximian 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.
At Novell, Friedman was the Chief Technology and Strategy Officer for Open Source until January 2010. There he launched the Hula Project which began with the release of components of Novell NetMail as open source. 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. Friedman's final project before his departure was work on SUSE Studio.
During his sabbatical, Friedman created and hosted a podcast called Hacker Medley.
In May 2011, Friedman and de Icaza together founded Xamarin, and Friedman was made CEO. The company was created to offer commercial support for Mono, a project that de Icaza had initiated at Ximian to provide a free software implementation of Microsoft's.NET software stack. At Xamarin they focused on continuing to develop Mono and MonoDevelop and marketing the cross-platform Xamarin SDK to developers targeting mobile computing devices and video game consoles.
In 2016, Friedman became an employee of Microsoft upon its acquisition of Xamarin. There he rose to the position of corporate vice president, Developer Services.
With the June 2018 announcement of Microsoft's $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub, the companies simultaneously announced that Friedman would become GitHub's new CEO. GitHub's co-founder and then-current CEO Chris Wanstrath had been leading a search for Wanstrath's replacement since August 2017. Friedman assumed the role of CEO on the 29th of October 2018.
