Primary Job Title CEO Primary Organization Cato
Location San Francisco Bay Area, California, United States Regions West Coast, Western US Gender Male
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Dean Nelson is the s CEO of Cato. He is a former Head of Uber Metal at Uber. He attended DeVry University.
Dean Nelson is the Founder and Chairman of Infrastructure Masons, an independent industry group of executive and technology professionals entrusted with building and operating the physical and logical structures of the Digital Age.
Dean has
led over $5B in infrastructure projects in 9 countries. His extensive architecture, engineering, and operations experience includes 28 years in hardware, 21 years in network, 16 years in Infrastructure Software, and 16 years in Data Centers. He has produced numerous award-winning innovations in mission-critical facilities and computer environments. He also holds four US patents.
Dean is currently the Head of Uber Compute, at Uber. His team is responsible for technical infrastructure (data center, compute, storage, network, and infrastructure software) and business functions serving Uber’s global leading ridesharing business, as well as UberEats, UberRush, UberForBusiness, and Autonomous vehicle development.
Prior to Uber, Dean worked at Ebay Inc for 6 ½ years as the Vice President of Global Foundation Services, which served over 300 million active users enabling over $250Bn of enabled commerce volume annually. At end of his tenure at eBay, his team successfully integrated, then split eBay and PayPal infrastructures into two independent internet companies. Prior to eBay, Dean worked at Sun Microsystems for 17 years in various technical, management, and executive leadership roles in Manufacturing, Engineering, IT, and Real Estate. His final project was the consolidation of Sun’s multi-billion dollar global technical infrastructure portfolio of over 1,000 facilities.
Dean is the creator of the Digital Service Efficiency methodology, the first miles per gallon measurement for technical infrastructure, used to measure ebay.com as a single system. He served as the Chair of the Technology Business Management Council High Tech Workgroup, and Chairman & Founder of Data Center Pulse in 2009 – an exclusive data center owner community with over 9,000 members in 100 countries. Dean was identified by SearchDatacenter.com as one of the top five people who changed the data center. Dean is also the recipient of Sun’s prestigious Innovation Award, Modular DC Deployment award, and Best DC Design award from Uptime Institute as well as the Operational Excellence and Infrastructure Trailblazer awards from The TBM Council.
In his personal time gives back by building schools and dorms to provide access to education for impoverished children through his Mother and Son Just Let Me Learn Foundation. He also enjoys spending time with his wife and performing with his daughter.
