Biography|Nat Friedman — The Ivy Road School He Finished in 1995

People treat Charlottesville as a university town first.

Nathaniel Dourif Friedman grew up here and finished St. Anne's-Belfield School in 1995, on Ivy Road, before he ever saw an MIT lecture hall.

The Greenway Rise campus at 2132 Ivy Road is the upper school, grades 9 through 12.

On his own site he has described Charlottesville as where he grew up, and the internet he reached in 1991 as his actual home town.

That is a teenager's claim, not a tourist line.

By fourteen he and a friend had already formed a software company.

By the time he left this campus he had been writing code for most of a decade.

The school sits minutes from the University of Virginia.

It is a private day and boarding campus, still operating on the same Ivy Road address.

The family house is not a public site and is not pinned here.

What can be stood on is the school he left for Cambridge.

He took that path after reading Richard Feynman's autobiographies and deciding MIT was the place that matched them.

The next pin is that front door on Massachusetts Avenue.

Photo: Doc Searls, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait made 24 April 2006.