Dan has been a leader in open source networking and security world since 2008 when he helped start Nicira, the company that created and led the software-defined networking (SDN) movement. At Nicira, Dan drove the creation of the Open vSwitch and OpenStack Networking open source projects, and led product strategy for their commercial product, the Nicira Network Virtualization Platform (NVP). In 2012 VMware acquired Nicira for $1.2B, where the Nicira technology and team formed the foundation of what would become VMware NSX. In 2017, Dan co-founded Isovalent, the company behind the foundational cloud native open source technologies eBPF (ebpf.io) and Cilium (cilium.io). Dan led Isovalent as CEO, helping build Cilium into the de facto standard for Kubernetes cloud-native networking and security across both cloud and on-premises environments while partnering with leading enterprises, growth-stage startups, and telcos on the adoption of Isovalent’s enterprise offerings. Isovalent was acquired by Cisco in April of 2024, and Dan continues to lead the Isovalent team, which operates as an independent unit inside of Cisco.