Dan Kohn (November 20, 1972November 1, 2020) was an American serial

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...

and nonprofit executive who led the

Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit technology consortium founded in 2000 as a merger between Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group to standardize Linux, support its growth, and promote its commercial adoption. Additi ...

's Public Health initiative. He was the executive director at

Cloud Native Computing Foundation The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a Linux Foundation project that was founded in 2015 to help advance container technology and align the tech industry around its evolution. It was announced alongside Kubernetes 1.0, an open sourc ...

(CNCF), which sustains and integrates

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

cloud software Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multip ...

including

Kubernetes Kubernetes (, commonly stylized as K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Google originally designed Kubernetes, but the Cloud Native Computing Foundation now maintains ...

and

Fluentd Fluentd is a cross platform open-source data collection software project originally developed at Treasure Data. It is written primarily in the Ruby programming language. Overview Fluentd was positioned for "big data", semi- or un-structured dat ...

, through 2020. The first company he founded,

NetMarket NetMarket is an online marketplace owned by Trilegiant that sells various goods ranging from electronics to jewelry. It was founded in 1994 by Dan Kohn and Roger Lee, both former London School of Economics students, and by Guy H. T. Haskin and E ...

, conducted the first secure commercial transaction on the web in 1994.

Early life and education

Kohn was born in

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

on November 20, 1972. He studied at

Phillips Exeter Academy (not for oneself) la, Finis Origine Pendet (The End Depends Upon the Beginning) gr, Χάριτι Θεοῦ (By the Grace of God) , location = 20 Main Street , city = Exeter, New Hampshire , zipcode ...

, and graduated with a

bachelor's degree A bachelor's degree (from Middle Latin ''baccalaureus'') or baccalaureate (from Modern Latin ''baccalaureatus'') is an undergraduate academic degree awarded by colleges and universities upon completion of a course of study lasting three to six ...

from

Swarthmore College Swarthmore College ( , ) is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1864, with its first classes held in 1869, Swarthmore is one of the earliest coeduca ...

in 1994.

Career

NetMarket

Kohn co-founded and was

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

, an online marketplace. On August 11, 1994, NetMarket sold ''

Ten Summoner's Tales ''Ten Summoner's Tales'' is the fourth solo studio album by English rock musician Sting. The title is a combined pun of his family name, Sumner, and a character in Geoffrey Chaucer's ''The Canterbury Tales'', the summoner. Released in 1993, it ...

'', a CD by

Sting Sting may refer to: * Stinger or sting, a structure of an animal to inject venom, or the injury produced by a stinger * Irritating hairs or prickles of a stinging plant, or the plant itself Fictional characters and entities * Sting (Middle-eart ...

, 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 (PGP) program, incorporated into the X Mosaic browser.

Other work

Kohn worked as chief technology officer at Spreemo, a healthcare marketplace, and at Shopbeam, a shoppable ads startup. Earlier, he worked as vice president at

Teledesic Teledesic was a company founded in the 1990s to build a commercial broadband satellite internet constellation. Using low-Earth-orbiting satellites small antennas could be used to provide uplinks of as much as 100 Mbit/s and downlinks of up to 720 ...

, the satellite-based Internet provider funded by

Craig McCaw Craig McCaw (born August 11, 1949) is an American businessman and entrepreneur, a pioneer in the cellular phone industry. He is the founder of McCaw Cellular (now part of AT&T Mobility) and Clearwire Corporation (now part of T-Mobile via the Sprin ...

and

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...

and then became a general partner at Skymoon Ventures. Kohn co-authored RFC 3023, ''XML Media Types'', which defined how

XML and MIME There are two MIME assignments for XML data. These are: *application/xml (RFC 7303, previously RFC 3023) *text/xml (RFC 7303, previously RFC 3023) However, since the introduction of RFC 7303, these are to be regarded as the same in all aspects exce ...

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''.

The Linux Foundation and CNCF

As executive director of CNCF, Kohn helped expand CNCF membership to include the largest public cloud and enterprise software companies. He led the efforts to create a conformance standard for

and a Kubernetes certified service provider program in 2017. During Kohn's tenure at CNCF, he oversaw the growth of KubeCon (the foundation's primary event) from 500 attendees in 2015 to over 12,000 at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019 in San Diego, California. Kohn was

chief operating officer A chief operating officer or chief operations officer, also called a COO, is one of the highest-ranking executive positions in an organization, composing part of the "C-suite". The COO is usually the second-in-command at the firm, especially if t ...

of the

and helped launch the Linux Foundation's

Core Infrastructure Initiative The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) was a project of the Linux Foundation to fund and support free and open-source software projects that are critical to the functioning of the Internet and other major information systems. The project was ann ...

, a project created after

Heartbleed Heartbleed was a security bug in the OpenSSL cryptography library, which is a widely used implementation of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. It was introduced into the software in 2012 and publicly disclosed in April 2014. Heartble ...

to fund and support

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

projects that are critical to the functioning of the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

. More recently, he helped create their open source best practices badge. As general manager of LF Public Health, Kohn helped "public health authorities use open source software to fight

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was COVID-19 pandemic in Hubei, identified in Wuhan, China, in December ...

and other epidemics."

Personal life

Kohn was married to climate scientist Julie Pullen. Pullen and Kohn had two sons.

Death

Kohn died of complications from

colon cancer Colorectal cancer (CRC), also known as bowel cancer, colon cancer, or rectal cancer, is the development of cancer from the colon or rectum (parts of the large intestine). Signs and symptoms may include blood in the stool, a change in bowel mo ...

in New York City on November 1, 2020, at age 47.

References

External links

Video about the first web transaction
by

Shopify Shopify Inc. is a Canadian multinational e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. Shopify is the name of its proprietary e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. The Shopify platform offers online ret ...

, 4 minutes, 10 seconds {{DEFAULTSORT:Kohn, Dan 1972 births 2020 deaths 20th-century American businesspeople 21st-century American businesspeople American business executives Businesspeople from Philadelphia Deaths from cancer in New York (state) Deaths from colorectal cancer Free software programmers Open source advocates Open source people Phillips Exeter Academy alumni Swarthmore College alumni