Biography|Nat Friedman — The Door at 77 Mass Ave He Walked Through as a Freshman

People assume a future GitHub chief executive arrived at MIT already running a company.

He arrived as a freshman in 1996, walked through this door at 77 Massachusetts Avenue, and set up an IRC network called LinuxNet to talk about Linux.

Miguel de Icaza was on the other end of that network.

The two later gave overlapping accounts of whether they first met on IRC or in a Microsoft corridor.

The documented overlap is not in dispute.

Friedman was a Microsoft intern on the IIS web server, and de Icaza interviewed in Redmond in those same years.

Inside MIT he studied computer science and mathematics.

He left in 1999 with a Bachelor of Science.

Building 7, the Rogers Building, is still the Institute's official street address.

The Little Dome over Lobby 7 is what a visitor sees from Mass Ave.

Stata Center, the later computer-science landmark, did not exist when he was a student.

It opened in 2004.

The work that followed was not a campus spinout in the modern sense.

It was a company he and de Icaza incorporated in Boston the year he graduated.

Photo: Beyond My Ken, own work, 12 August 2017, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Doc Searls, CC BY-SA 2.0, 24 April 2006.