Nat Friedman
The Pioneer
The frontier and an appetite for the unknown, goes first.
Nat Friedman fits The Pioneer archetype through a career defined by moving early into unproven territory and pulling others along. He co-founded Xamarin to bring cross-platform mobile development to mainstream engineers, then led GitHub after its Microsoft acquisition, where the launch of GitHub Copilot made him one of the first executives to ship generative AI as a mass developer product.
“Yeah, I mean, I don't know exactly. It's a good question. I ask people that a lot. I mean, the more I've sort of done in life, the more I've been mystified by this.”
“Marketplace like Upwork, for example, like what fraction of Upwork jobs can GPT-4 do? I think is sort of an interesting question. My guess is extremely low right now autonomously. But over time it will grow. And then the question is, what does that do for upwork?”
“Bad things happen. The probability mass of my belief, though, is that it's probably better in the whole for more people to get to tinker with and use these models, at least in their current state.”
“And so, yeah, like that's frequently what happens is the commitment to do it is impulsive, and it's done that of enthusiasm. And then you get into it and you're like, oh my God, this is really much harder than we expected. But then you're sort of committed and you're stuck and you're going to have to get it done.”
Sohn Conference Foundation: “Sohn 2022 | Nat Friedman in conversation with Tobi Lütke”
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