Nat Friedman

I'm an investor, entrepreneur, developer.

Some things about me:

• Grew up in Charlottesville, VA


• On the Internet since 1991, which is my actual "home town"


• Went to MIT because I loved the Richard Feynman autobiographies


• Started two companies


• CEO of GitHub from 2018 through 2021


• Live in California

Some things I believe:

• As human beings it is our

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There’s a lot to love about metrics driven systems: they’re fairly meritocratic, they reward intelligence and hard work, they align (at least in some way) the incentives of producers and consumers, and they accelerate really quickly once they start working.

But, using this framework to understand the systemic failure at the root of a lot of wide sca

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It's important to do things fast: You learn more per unit time because you make contact with reality more frequently. Going fast makes you focus on what's important; there's no time for bullshit.

I think there are things in life that you want to telescope and compress and accelerate and streamline and make more efficient. And there are things where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent, in the pain endured, in the effort you have to invest. And I don’t think we’re going to differentiate between those things. Because ... See more

Technology is changing one of the most powerful forces in shaping society: ambition. What the most ambitious people choose to do with their lives has a profound impact on society, the economy and culture. It’s changing, fast.First, that digital technology is the most recent in a series of ‘technologies of ambition’ that have enabled ambitious peopl... See more