Bio
Uniting the Builders of the Digital Age
Dean is a seasoned technology executive with a 30+ year career building and operating global digital infrastructure portfolios. He is currently the Founder and CEO of Dean Nelson Inc, a strategic advisory and consulting company and the CEO of Cato Digital, a startup company delivering low cost, carbon-free compute platform in all the right places.
Dean Nelson is the Founder and Chairman of Infrastructure Masons, a professional association of industry executives and technology professionals entrusted with building and operating the physical and logical structures of the Digital Age. Since its founding in 2016 iMasons has amassed a global membership representing over $150Bn in infrastructure projects spanning 130 countries.
Prior to DNI, Dean lead the Metal team at Uber responsible for Metal as a Service (MaaS) technical infrastructure (data center, compute, storage, network and infrastructure software) and business functions serving Uber’s global leading ridesharing business, as well as UberEats, UberFreight, UberHealth, UberForBusiness, and Autonomous vehicle and UberAir development. The Uber Infrastructure portfolio served 150 million trips a week in more than 700 cities spanning 6 continents. The Uber Metal strategy was shared with the industry in London in November/2018.
Prior to Uber, Dean worked at eBay Inc as the Vice President of Global Foundation Services, which served over 300 million active users enabling over $250Bn of enabled commerce volume annually. At the 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.
Through his 30 year career, Dean he has driven $10B in infrastructure projects across three continents. His extensive architecture, engineering and operations experience includes 33 years in Hardware, 26 years in Network, and 21 years in Data Centers and Infrastructure Software. He has produced numerous award-winning innovations in mission critical facilities and compute environments. He also holds four US patents.
Dean is creator of the Digital Service Efficiency methodology (DSE), 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 datacenter 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 and Outstanding Contributions to the Data Center Industry award from Data Center Dynamics.