Nathan (Nate) Lipscomb

Nathan (Nate) Lipscomb, an influential YouTube lawyer, died of a sudden heart attack at age 46.

Nate was a senior product counsel leading a team of lawyers focused on YouTube’s efforts to foster a responsible and open platform, including content moderation, information accuracy, and election integrity.

Nate was also a dedicated mentor to many young entrepreneurs who were focused on the developing world, education, space exploration, and advances in medicine.

He loved surfing, snowboarding, and barbecue. But he loved his two boys, Jackson and Mateo, and his wife, Rosie, more than anything else.

Nathan was born in Salem in 1976, the eldest child of Paul and Donna Lipscomb, now of Sisters. Nate graduated from Salem’s Sprague High School, where he was elected student body president, and then from Stanford University with a B.A. in political science in 1998. He was an online mediator after college, which allowed him to work from Hawaii and Colorado, where he lived for several years.

In 2006, Nate graduated from Columbia Law School as a James Kent Scholar. He met his wife, Rosie, during the summer between their first and second years of law school, while the two were both on human rights fellowships in Tanzania. They climbed Mount Kilimanjaro together, went on photo safaris, and fell in love in Zanzibar before returning to New York to join the Columbia Law Review. They were married the following summer.

After law school, Nate clerked for Federal Judge Emilio Garza on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Both Nate and Rosie subsequently joined the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell in Menlo Park, California, where they have resided for the last 15 years.

Nate took a break from his career to be a stay-at-home dad for several years, and, in the evenings, taught himself to code and developed a learn-to-read app for children, Skyfish Phonics. Marketed through his own educational company for preschool children, Knowbility, Skyfish quickly rose to the top of the charts in the App Store.

Nate returned to Davis Polk briefly and then joined Google’s legal team in 2014 where he focused on children’s privacy and consumer protection before moving to YouTube, where he worked at the time of his death.

Nate earned widespread admiration and respect as one of the sharpest minds in the legal department and was a superb colleague, friend, and teacher to everyone who worked with him. He took care of his team with dedication, love, humor, and respect, and he leaves a legacy of deep caring for everyone around him.

But Nate’s first priority was always family. He and Rosie encouraged their boys to become citizens of the world and traveled as a family to varied locations like Costa Rica, Fiji, Africa, Japan, Bali, and the Maldives. He was an outstanding father.

Nate is survived by his wife, Rosie, and their two sons, Jackson (16) and Mateo (12); as well as by his parents, Donna and Paul Lipscomb of Sisters (where Nate loved to visit), and his siblings, Shannon Lipscomb of Bend, and Ryan Lipscomb of Nashville, Tennessee.