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Announcing the first AI Grant Fellows
Talks about Machine Learning, Open Source and Artificial Intelligence
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Nat Friedman
Investor, entrepreneur
San Francisco, California
Overview
Nat Friedman is an experienced entrepreneur and investor based in San Francisco, California. He has held prominent roles such as Chairman Emeritus and CEO at GitHub, and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, with a strong focus on software development, cloud computing, and open source initiatives. Notable highlights include co-founding Xamarin and serving as Chief Technology Officer at Novell, showcasing his leadership in the tech industry.
Work Experience
Chairman Emeritus
2021 - 2022
CEO
2018 - 2021
GitHub is a software company that offers code hosting services that allow developers to build software for open-source and private projects.
Raised $350,000,000.00 from EquityZen and Employee Stock Option Fund.
Corporate Vice President, Developer Services
2016 - 2018
At Microsoft I was responsible for Visual Studio Team Services and App Center, application lifecycle and devops services with more than a million users. I was also responsible for the internal company-wide engineering systems.
Microsoft Advertising provides digital advertising solutions.
CEO and Cofounder
2011 - 2016
At Xamarin our mission was to make mobile development fast, easy, and fun. Xamarin allows developers to write native apps for iOS and Android using C#. We also built a number of other mobile development tools, including app monitoring and testing services, and a developer training program. In 4.5 years, the company grew to $50M ARR and thousands of paying customers. Xamarin is where I fell in love with go-to-market and sales. We built two successful sales models: a high-velocity, low-touch inside sales model, and a more traditional enterprise model. Both models benefited from strong inbound marketing and thousands of daily signups. The company was 350 people when we were acquired by Microsoft.
Xamarin provides development tools to build and test native mobile apps, such as Xamarin Platform, Xamarin Test Cloud, and Xamarin Insights.
Raised $82,750,000.00 from Lead Edge Capital, CRV, Ignition Partners, Insight Partners and Floodgate.
Chief Technology Officer, Open Source
2003 - 2009
After Novell bought my company, I led all the Linux client efforts and served as CTO for open source. I also ran GroupWise, a $150M collaboration product.
Novell provides identity and security management, systems and resource management and open platform solutions.
Cofounder, Chairman
2000 - 2003
The GNOME Foundation works to further the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is composed entirely of free software. Many companies were involved in GNOME, so I co-created the GNOME Foundation to provide independent governance for the project. It was one of the first such open source foundations.
GNOME is a non-profit community that develops free software.
Raised $300,000.00 from Handshake.
Cofounder, CEO
1999 - 2003
At Ximian I invented the popular and uncontroversial "curl | sudo bash" installer method.
Education
Investments
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