Leadership Team
Paul Vallée
Executive Chairman, Founder
In these past fifteen years since Pythian’s founding, Paul has been at the helm of the company through staggering growth, creating a special environment where the industry’s best minds most want to work and where the industry’s toughest problems naturally flow.
Paul Vallée was a particularly driven young man. Having been voted "Most Likely to Succeed" by his high-school graduating class, he promptly moved 1000km away from home to attend the University of Ottawa, graduating in 1993 with a B.Com (Management of Information Systems) with Honours.
“We are an intelligent species and the use of our intelligence quite properly gives us pleasure. In this respect, the brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good. Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.”
- Carl Sagan
Starting his career as an information scientist in the Canadian Department of National Defence, Paul was a key contributor to an operations planning team responsible for optimizing a workforce reduction affecting 10,000 employees. That work won his team the prestigious Leaders of the Public Service award.
Continuing as a systems architect, Paul then led a critical project to perform a corporate business systems migration for a 1000-person company from Digital VAX/VMS to Digital UNIX. This project, engaging 19 resources and 10 person years of effort, was delivered on-time and under-budget by Paul at the tender young age of 23.
Throughout his university years and continuing afterward, Paul was a serial entrepreneur. By the age of 25 he had already started his fourth company – and that company is Pythian.
Having created a unique business that can deliver improved quality of service at a savings in cost versus traditional insourced approaches for database infrastructure management, Paul is now ready to change the world.
For his next trick, Paul plans over the next 10 years to change corporate thinking worldwide when presented with a DBA requirement. Today, that thinking is "who should we hire?" Paul will consider himself moderately successful if, in 10 years, a better thought process ("what specialist vendor company should we select?") becomes mainstream. And he will consider himself completely successful if in 10 years Pythian continues to be selected more often than any other vendor.
Awards
Paul is a recipient of The Ottawa Business Journal Forty Under 40 Award in 2011
