Jeff Dean is Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, and a prolific angel investor who has backed 87 AI startups including Perplexity, Roboflow, Sakana AI, and World Labs.

Dean earned a B.S. summa cum laude from University of Minnesota in 1990 and a Ph.D. from University of Washington in 1996, then joined Google in 1999 as its 30th employee.

Dean co-invented MapReduce, BigTable, and Spanner, co-founded Google Brain in 2011, and co-authored the Transformer paper that powers modern AI systems. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009 and received the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2021.

As an angel investor, Dean focuses on AI infrastructure, LLM tooling, and AI for scientific discovery, backing deeply technical founding teams from Google, DeepMind, OpenAI, and top universities.

Dean's systems process over 6 billion requests per second at Google, TensorFlow has been cited over 30,000 times, and MapReduce inspired Apache Hadoop, democratizing distributed computing for an entire generation of engineers.