Juan Benet

Juan Benet is a California-based software engineer and entrepreneur. He studied for both his bachelor's degree and master's degree in Computer Science at Stanford University, where he also worked as a teaching assistant and conducted research in his field of study. He then worked as a research and software engineering intern at various organizations, such as Anticancer Inc. and Cooliris.

In 2010, he co-founded his first company, Loki Studios. He acted as CTO of the company, which was a mobile game studio acquired by Yahoo. Benet then became the entrepreneur in residence for StartX before founding his next company, Athena. In 2014, he founded Protocol Labs, where he also acts as CEO of the Y Combinator-backed company that is creating the distributed, permanent web.

Benet created IPFS, a decentralized web protocol and has also created Filecoin, a decentralized storage network. Benet has been published as well, when he co-authored the SAFT (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens) whitepaper released on October 2nd, 2017 along with Marco Santori and Jesse Clayburgh.

In addition to being an entrepreneur, Benet is an angel investor and has invested in technology companies such as CoinTracker and Anjuna. He has been a speaker at events in his industry as well and has spoken at engagements around the world, including Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Since the launch of IPFS, he has developed other protocols at Protocol Labs including libp2p, a modular network stack for peer-to-peer apps and systems; IPLD, a data model for interoperable protocols; Multiformats, a collection of protocols to future-proof systems; CoinList, a token sale and investment platform; and the SAFT Project, a legal framework for token fundraising.

In 2018, Benet was named one of Fortune magazine's "40 under 40" in recognition of his work creating IPFS.