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Memorial Keepers(1)
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Julie Pullen
Dan Kohn
November 20th, 1972 - November 1st, 2020
November 20th, 1972 - November 1st, 2020
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Tributes
Share a favorite memory, send condolences, and honor Dan’s life with a heartfelt message.
Adina Davies
anni lai
This is how I remember Dan - intelligent, logical, authentic, generous, adventurous, open-minded, hardworking, and fun loving. A beautiful soul gone too soon. Dan, rest in peace and we will miss you at every Kubecon.
Katie Greenley
I first met Dan at the first CloudNativeDay event, I was the event organizer assigned to the project. Over the next 4.5 years, I got to know Dan fairly well. He always demanded the best of people, for us to have opinions, and that the only person telling us it was impossible was ourselves. Dan was always trying to make us better employees and often gave direct feedback that I still use to this day. In 2018, I was getting ready to leave on maternity leave right before KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU and Dan jokingly told me I could still come to the event and have the baby in Copenhagen. I knew he was joking but he had gone home and told Julie about him telling me to come to Copenhagen and to just be at the event and have the baby. She asked him if I knew if he was joking, which sparked him at our next event in Austin to let me know he was joking about me coming to Copenhagen. His concern to ensure I knew he was joking was very enduring. Dan always wanted to do a special treat for the team when we all got together, whether it was to see a cirque du soleil show in Las Vegas or a special dinner; this was his way to show us that he appreciated our hard work. I wish so often that I had let him know the impact he made on me and my career, I am a better manager because of him. I will miss Dan but I plan to continue to share his knowledge that he bestowed upon me.
Guy H
Dan, thank you for being a great friend and an inspiration to so many of us. Your energy and enthusiasm for life and building new things could always be felt and it motivated action. When you approached us about starting an online company back in the early days of the Internet you were putting together your visions of the future coming together and thinking of how it would change the world. It was exciting and you saw it coming and you wanted to make it real. You continued to do this throughout your life and talking with you about the future becoming reality was second only to hearing about your joy and excitement for your travels, your adventures with Julie, and seeing the world with your boys Adam and Ellis. You had such a generous soul and a love of the world. I could always hear it in your laugh and in your appreciation of travel, history, or just hearing a good story told well. Thanks for everything you have done and everything you were. It was too short. We miss you Dan.
Chris Aniszczyk
I first met Dan as I was bootstrapping CNCF/OCI and we were entering our crazy growth phase and needed to expand the team. I was hesitant at first working with Dan and we didn't always agree on everything, but I had the pleasure of working with Dan on a daily basis the last few years cultivating CNCF and other LF projects. We warmed up to each over time and built one of the most successful open source foundations of all time (sorry I was wrong on usefulness of the cloud native landscape and you were right Dan). I also wanted to sure that Dan was committed to building a global and diverse community, he always took the time to chat with community members all over the world and ensured that CNCF was using its resources to uplift the community. We spent many hours on the road together away from family building this amazing global community that changed the industry for the better. In the end, I have lost a close friend and work colleague... I will miss our crazy conversations and plans to bring open source to new places... I will do my best to carry on some of those ideas, you were one of a kind and will be truly missed!
Pamela Block
I had several years of friendship, the joyful discovery in my adolescence of a distant relative who was a "kindred spirit" (as Anne of Green Gables would say), when I was in my early to mid 20s (Dan's teens to early 20s). Then life took us in very different directions, and we had no contact for about 3 decades. Watching the memorial service reminded me of something he told me in one of our last visits -- he in his last year of college and me well into my doctoral program with plans to be a college professor, studying social movements for disability activism and gender and racial justice. We had similar social change dreams but he told me that he had very different plans for enacting them. He said getting a doctorate, being a professor, doing research, was an okay path. However, his plan was to make a lot of money and then use it to do good. This was before his first internet company struck gold, though I think it was in the works already. What struck me from the memorial service is that Dan lived his life exactly as he outlined it to me on that long ago day when he was maybe 20 years old. He had a dream, he had a plan to make that dream a reality. And he did it. He lived deeply with passion, integrity and the desire to leave the world better than he found it. He left the world too soon, and we can bitterly regret what good he could have done with more time, but after the memorial service I was left with the sense of a life well-lived in joy, love and no regrets. We should all be so lucky.
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