nat.dev

Background & Experience:

• Grew up in Charlottesville, VA; on the Internet since 1991, which is considered the actual "home town".
• Went to MIT because of a love for Richard Feynman's autobiographies.
• Started two companies: Ximian and Xamarin.
• CEO of GitHub from 2018 through 2021.
• Lives in California.

Current Projects:

• Working on reading the Herculaneum Papyri (scrollprize.org).
• Tested 300 Bay Area foods for plastic chemicals (plasticlist.org).

Core Beliefs & Principles:

• Right to reshape the universe: As human beings, it is our right (maybe moral duty) to reshape the universe to our preferences; Technology, which is really knowledge, enables this; You should probably work on raising the ceiling, not the floor.
• Enthusiasm matters: It's much easier to work on things that are exciting; It might be easier to do big things than small things for this reason; Energy is a necessary input for progress.
• Importance of speed: Doing things fast means learning more per unit time due to more frequent contact with reality; Going fast forces focus on what's important, leaving no time for bullshit; "Slow is fake"; A week is 2% of the year; Time is the denominator.
• EMH is a lie: At best it is a very lossy heuristic; The best things in life occur where EMH is wrong; In many cases it's more accurate to model the world as 500 people than 8 billion; "Most people are other people".
• We know less than we think: The replication crisis is not an aberration; Many beliefs are wrong; Often not even asking the right questions.
• Prohibition on micromanagement is harmful: Great individuals should be fully empowered to exercise their judgment; The goal is not to avoid mistakes, but to achieve uncorrelated levels of excellence in some dimension; The downsides are worth it.
• Smaller teams are better: Faster decisions, fewer meetings, more fun; No need to chop up work for political reasons; No room for mediocre people (can pay more, too!); Large-scale engineering projects are more soluble in IQ than they appear; Many tech companies are 2-10x overstaffed.
• Dopamine source: The answer is predictive of behavior; Better to get dopamine from improving ideas than from having them validated; It's ok to get it from "making things happen".
• You can do more than you think: We are tied down by invisible orthodoxy; The laws of physics are the only limit.