Primary Job Title CEO and Founder Primary Organization 
Foros Group
Location New York, New York, United States Regions Greater New York Area, East Coast, Northeastern US Gender Male
Jean is the CEO of Foros, which he founded in 2009 in the midst of the financial crisis to provide corporate clients differentiated strategic and financial advice focused on shareholder value creation. Foros has been ranked among the top M&A advisors and among top independent advisory firms in the U.S. by league table providers. The Financial
Times called Foros one of the “big fish among the boutique investment banks.”
Jean has been advising CEOs, CFOs and Boards of Directors over his three-decade career and is amongst a select group of very experienced, senior M&A bankers who remain fully engaged personally in day-to-day client engagements. He serves his clients as both a trusted strategic advisor, helping them think through strategies for long-term value creation, and a deeply experienced and highly effective negotiator in achieving successful outcomes in M&A transactions. Since its founding, Foros has served 87 clients on 96 transactions totaling $73 billion.
Prior to founding Foros, Jean was Americas Head of Mergers & Acquisitions and a member of the Global Banking Executive Committee at Deutsche Bank. Under Jean’s leadership, Deutsche Bank rose from number twelve in the U.S. M&A league tables in 2006 to number five in 2008, according to Thomson Financial. Prior to joining Deutsche Bank in early 2006, Jean was a Managing Director and Co-Head of Mergers & Acquisitions in the Technology, Media and Telecommunications Investment Banking Group at Goldman, Sachs & Co. At Goldman Sachs, he also worked as a senior banker in the M&A and Financial Institutions Groups. Prior to joining Goldman Sachs in 1998, Jean was a Vice President in J.P. Morgan’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications Investment Banking Group.
Jean received a J.D. (magna cum laude) from Harvard Law School, where he was Supervising Editor of the Harvard Law Review, and a B.A. (summa cum laude) from Princeton University (School of Public and International Affairs). After law school, he served as law clerk to Judge William A. Norris of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and had a multi-year fellowship at Harvard Law School where he did research work funded by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation on the prevention and mitigation of ethnonational conflicts. Jean is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Robert College of Istanbul, Turkey and of Ethiopia Education Initiatives whose principal project has been the founding and operating of the Haile-Manas Academy, a premier co-ed boarding school in Ethiopia. He resides in New York City with his family.
