In 1999, Friedman co-founded
Ximian (originally called International Gnome Support,) 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. In May 2011, Friedman and de Icaza founded
Xamarin, with Friedman as CEO. With the June 2018 announcement of Microsoft's $7.5 billion (~$ in ) acquisition of
GitHub, the companies simultaneously announced that Friedman, then a Microsoft corporate vice president, would become GitHub's new CEO. GitHub's co-founder and then-current CEO
Chris Wanstrath had been leading a search for his replacement since August 2017. Friedman assumed the role of CEO on October 29, 2018. During his tenure as CEO, Friedman introduced a number of new products rapidly, including GitHub Copilot, GitHub Codespaces, a native GitHub mobile app for iOS and Android, the GitHub Advanced Security product, GitHub Sponsors to support open source developers financially, and a new GitHub CLI. Friedman also acquired six companies including NPM, Semmle, Dependabot, and PullPanda. In November 2021, Friedman announced that he was stepping down as CEO. Friedman co-founded
California YIMBY in 2017 to address California's housing shortage. In 2023, Friedman created nat.dev, a web interface for popular
large language models. Alongside
Daniel Gross, Friedman also has made significant investments in the AI space through a fund called C2 Investments, as well as running an AI grant program that gives funding and Microsoft Azure credits. During the
depositor run on Silicon Valley Bank in mid-March 2023, Friedman provided capital to multiple startups. In June 2025, Friedman joined
Meta Platforms to co-lead the newly established Meta Superintelligence Labs alongside
Alexandr Wang, overseeing the development of Meta's AI-driven products and applied research. ==Personal life==