Dan Kohn


Dan Kohn is an American serial entrepreneur and nonprofit executive who leads the Linux Foundation’s Public Health initiative. He was formerly the executive director at Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which sustains and integrates open source cloud software including Kubernetes and Fluentd, through 2020. The first company he founded, NetMarket, conducted the first secure commercial transaction on the web in 1994.

The Linux Foundation and CNCF

As Executive Director of CNCF, Kohn helped expand CNCF membership to include all of the largest public cloud and enterprise software companies. He led the efforts to create a conformance standard for Kubernetes and a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider program, both of which launched in 2017 with broad support from numerous companies across the cloud industry.
During Kohn's tenure at CNCF, he oversaw the growth of KubeCon from 500 attendees in 2015 to over 12,000 at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019 in San Diego, CA.
Kohn was previously the Chief Operating Officer of the Linux Foundation and helped launch the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative, a project created after Heartbleed to fund and support free and open-source software projects that are critical to the functioning of the Internet. More recently, he helped create their open source best practices badge.
As General Manager of LF Public Health, Kohn is using open source software to help public health authorities fight COVID-19 and other epidemics.

NetMarket

Kohn co-founded and was CEO of NetMarket, an online marketplace. On August 11, 1994, NetMarket sold Ten Summoner's Tales, a CD by Sting, to Phil Brandenberger of Philadelphia using a credit card over the Internet. The New York Times described this as "...the first retail transaction on the Internet using a readily available version of powerful data encryption software designed to guarantee privacy." The encryption used in the transaction was provided by the Pretty Good Privacy program, incorporated into the X Mosaic browser.

Other Employment

Kohn was CTO at Spreemo, a healthcare marketplace, and Shopbeam, a shoppable ads startup. He also worked as Vice President, Strategy at Teledesic, the satellite-based "Internet-in-the-Sky" funded by Craig McCaw and Bill Gates and was a general partner at Skymoon Ventures.

Education

He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Swarthmore College.

Other

Kohn co-authored RFC 3023, XML Media Types, which defined how XML and MIME interoperate and is the origin of the widely used +suffix in MIME types. He also contributed two chapters to The Bogleheads' Guide to Retirement Planning.