“Vitalik, Gavin Wood, and Juan, this is the most prestigious lineup of guests I've ever seen at a roundtable conference!" On October 27th, at the 6th Global Blockchain Summit in Shanghai, a blockchain enthusiast who rushed to attend the conference overnight exclaimed excitedly.

Vitalik is the founder of Ethereum, known as the "genius prodigy," and has recently been active on social media discussing Ethereum 2.0. Gavin Wood is the co-founder and former CTO of Ethereum, and now the founder of Polkadot. He has been heavily promoted and reported on by the media due to the launch of Polkadot's mainnet and the upcoming parallel chain slot auction. In comparison, Juan appears to be more low-key. Other than making an appearance around the launch of the Filecoin mainnet, he is rarely seen in media reports.

In fact, besides Filecoin and IPFS, Juan is also a successful serial entrepreneur. Today, let's take a brief look at this "low-key" founder of a public chain project.

First Venture

Juan Benet, born in March 1988, in a city in central-southern Mexico.

In 2006, Juan entered Stanford University, ranked among the top three in the United States, majoring in computer science. From his first year of study, he interned at various companies such as Anticancer, VerveWireless, and Cooliris, laying a foundation for his future entrepreneurship.

In 2010, after graduating with his bachelor's degree, Juan chose to stay at Stanford University to pursue a Master's degree in computer science. At the same time, he co-founded a game company called Loki Studios with several other computer science graduates from Stanford University and served as the CTO. Loki Studios focused on developing iOS games based on geolocation information, and its flagship product, Geomon, allowed users to have different gaming experiences in different places. Any change in the user's surrounding environment, such as weather, temperature, season, or geographical information, could affect the game itself. This concept was similar to the popular PokemonGo game that came out four years later.

At the end of 2011, Juan resigned from his position as CTO of Loki Studios, which was acquired by Yahoo in May 2013.

In 2012, Juan graduated from Stanford University and immediately founded a startup called Athena, using the technical skills and resources he had accumulated during his time at school. Athena aimed to transform various human knowledge into learning roadmaps, allowing learners to quickly identify the key points of knowledge they needed to master, thereby accelerating the learning process.

Due to difficulties encountered by Athena, Juan chose to leave a year later. During this time, Juan had his first encounter with blockchain technology and became fascinated by it, which laid the foundation for his subsequent blockchain entrepreneurship.

Prolific Protocol Labs

In May 2014, Juan co-founded Protocol Labs with like-minded partners.