Strategy & Innovation

Building on Open Source: The New Product Playbook

with Dana Lawson & Cédric Gégout & Michael "Monty" Widenius & Sebastian Kister & Ignacio Riesgo

Thursday 9 July 11:30 – 12:00 Tech Leaders Stage

About This Session

Open source powers modern software, but building a real product and business on it has never been simple. This panel brings together people who have lived it to talk about what the playbook looks like today. Honest lessons on turning open source into something that lasts.

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Speakers

Dana Lawson

CTO · Netlify

CTO of Netlify

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Dana Lawson is the Chief Technology Officer at Netlify, where she leads the Engineering, Product, and Design teams to innovate and deliver transformative digital experiences. With over two decades of leadership at industry-leading companies like GitHub, Heptio, and New Relic, Dana has a proven track record of scaling teams, fostering collaboration, and navigating complex technical landscapes. Throughout her career, she’s worn many hats across the product lifecycle, showcasing her versatility and expertise building impactful technology solutions. Driven by a genuine passion for people, Dana infuses her leadership with a blend of technical expertise and a spirit of fun, creating an inspiring and dynamic work environment.
Cédric Gégout

VP of Product · Canonical

VP of Product at Canonical

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Cédric Gégout, Canonical's VP of Product, is a strong believer in open source as both the foundation of major platform shifts and the primary source of innovation. Before Canonical, he founded Streamezzo, later led cloud-native strategy at Amdocs, and holds a PhD in AI. He has spent his career adopting new technologies early, from AI and mobile platforms to cloud-native systems, Kubernetes, secure containers, and edge computing with the same passion for helping developers turn open innovation into enterprise-ready solutions.
Michael "Monty" Widenius

CTO · MariaDB

CTO of MariaDB

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Michael “Monty” Widenius is the co-founder of MariaDB, a renowned advocate for the open source software movement and one of the original developers of MySQL, the predecessor to MariaDB. He is currently serving as the CTO at MariaDB Plc., and was previously co-founder at SkySQL, and the CTO of MySQL AB until its sale to Sun Microsystems (now Oracle). Monty was also the founder of TCX DataKonsult AB, a Swedish data warehousing company. He was awarded the Finnish Software Entrepreneur of the Year prize in 2003. In 2015, Monty was selected as one of the 100 most influential persons in the Finnish IT market. Monty studied at the Helsinki University of Technology and lives in Finland.
Sebastian Kister

Chief AI Architect · Volkswagen Group

Chief AI Architect at Volkswagen Group

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Sebastian Kister is a speaker and transformation strategist who makes the complex simple and inspires action. With a rare blend of authenticity, sharp storytelling, and deep hands-on experience in large-scale IT and cultural change, he connects C-level leaders, tech teams, and innovators alike. His keynotes on People-First Transformation, AI adoption, and platform culture spark clarity, energy, and the drive to shape the digital future. Combining a decade of successful start-ups with in-depth enterprise wisdom, delivering more than 100 keynotes world wide he plays Champions League with premium-speakers.com. Sebastian is building functional and RoI driven Agentic Orgs along Human Orgs, harmonizing both and building a future work environment reducing complexity and enhancing time 2 market.
Ignacio Riesgo

Senior Director, Developer Advocacy · IBM & Red Hat Runtimes

Senior Director, Developer Advocacy at IBM & Red Hat Runtimes

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Ignacio Riesgo is Senior Director, Developer Advocacy, for IBM & Red Hat Runtimes. In his role, he leads all Developer Outreach Programs, Content and Advocacy initiatives for the IBM and Red Hat Java portfolio.