Investor, former GitHub CEO, and all-around Tech Guy™ Nat Friedman has posted a strangely enticing offer on X.
His post reads, “Need volunteers to come to my office in Palo Alto today to construct a 5000 piece Lego set. Will provide pizza. Have to sign NDA. Please DM.”
Thanks to the investigative reporting of my intrepid colleague Kyle, we know that he isn’t kidding.
Legos and pizza hold the promise of a great Friday night if I’m being honest, but the NDA is what gets me.
I’m no legal expert. But I can state, with some degree of confidence, you shouldn’t go around signing NDAs willy-nilly. And yet, if I lived in Palo Alto, I would show up to build this Lego set and sign that NDA, no questions asked — the lure of discovering a secret Silicon Valley Lego cult is too hard to resist.
It’s already a little strange to be a well-known investor making this offer in public. He has to know that he’s going to get swarmed with Stanford sophomores who want to pitch their startup idea, right? But 5,000-piece Lego sets are no joke, and if you have 215,000 followers, why not get some help with an intimidating architectural challenge?
That is to say, I can get past the whole “come do Legos with me” thing.
Wealthy tech folk deserve to have fun too! But the NDA part ruined me and now I have to live the rest of my life knowing that something weird is going on at this meeting of the minds — something so weird that Friedman would mention the NDA from the get-go. He could’ve played it cool and chatted with potential builders before letting them know that they have to sign an NDA. But he laid it all out there.
What could be so secretive about this Lego night? Does Friedman have access to some top-secret Lego sets that you can only acquire through years-long relationships with the company, like a Birkin bag for nerds?
Or does he just want to make sure that no one who shows up is going to go rogue and tell everyone where his office is? I know that some celebrities require the people they hang out with to sign NDAs, but listen: GitHub is cool and all, but I don’t think Nat Friedman is on the same level of fame as Timothée Chalamet.
Anyway, if anyone in Palo Alto likes Legos and is cool with breaking an NDA to aid in the lowest-stakes journalism you’ve ever imagined, hit me up.
