Juan Benet
Bio
"The 26-year-old Mexican-American dual citizen was applying to the startup incubator after a spell of academic respite, taking graduate level computer science courses at Stanford. Just four years after completing a bachelors degree in the same subject, also at Stanford, Benet had already built a reputation as a world-class coder. In 2010, he launched a gaming startup, Loki Studios, that was acquired by Yahoo in just three years. Then there was his ambitious open-source education platform, Athena – which failed.
Growing up, he told me, Benet devoured libraries. Particularly works of science fiction, history and philosophy – subjects that still weigh on his mind. “He knows a lot about a lot of things,” Caldwell, Y Combinator’s head of admissions, told me. “He’s in that category of founder: well-rounded, well-read, broad-based interests, seeing patterns across different industries and even time periods,” Caldwell said. “He’s a very serious and thoughtful person. After reading “The Lord of the Rings” saga, a personal favorite, he learned the basics of orcish.
Benet rekindled relationships with his former graduate professors at Stanford, including professors of cryptography Dan Boneh and Stellar co-founder David Mazières.
Occupations
- Founder of both IPFS and Filecoin (under the same company Protocol Labs). IPFS needs an incentive system build in for it to be truly usable and useful, filecoin is building that incentive system.
- Protocol Labs; CEO & founder
- Was listed as a technical advisor of Civic on their announcement page.
