Dan Ciruli is VP and General Manager of Cloud Native at Nutanix. A computer science graduate of UC Berkeley, Dan spent a decade in engineering before pivoting to product management in 2003 — a role that barely had a name when he started. Since then he has held product leadership positions at EMC and Google, where he was part of the team that helped create Kubernetes and open source Google's cloud infrastructure.
He was a founding member of the OpenAPI Initiative and a steering committee member for the Istio service mesh project, and has spent the last two decades with one foot in commercial product development and one in the open source community.
In this episode, Dan explains why open source is not a charity exercise, how companies actually make money from code they give away for free, and what product managers get wrong when they tell their engineers to avoid it.
Chapters
Key Takeaways
Much of the contribution comes from companies investing on the clock, because broad adoption benefits everyone more than proprietary lock-in. The hobbyist coder is the exception, not the rule.
The CNCF succeeded because it created a neutral space where the largest and smallest organisations felt equally safe contributing and consuming. That structure — not the code itself — is what made cloud native computing universal.
Being a product manager in open source requires the same core instinct as any other PM role: understanding the why. The difference is that your engineers may work for a competitor, and your roadmap is not entirely yours to control.
AI is multiplying the capability of both good actors and bad actors in open source security. The answer is not to slow adoption but to keep a credible human in the loop — someone with accumulated trust, judgement and accountability.
Before open sourcing your own work, be clear on how your company will make money, articulate it concisely for leadership, and then find at least one other organisation — even a competitor — willing to join you.
