Executive Forum

Marcus Samuelsson is a world-renowned chef, cultural icon, and creative force whose culinary influence spans continents — from the internationally celebrated Red Rooster Harlem to a hospitality portfolio stretching across the U.S., the Bahamas, Canada, and Ethiopia. He made history as the youngest chef ever to receive a three-star review from The New York Times, is an eight-time James Beard Foundation Award winner, and served as the guest chef for President Obama's first state dinner. Beyond the kitchen, he is a New York Times bestselling author, Emmy Award–winning television personality, and a tireless advocate for culinary education and economic opportunity in underserved communities.

Ethan Mollick is a leading scholar, author, and one of the most influential voices shaping how the world understands artificial intelligence. As the Ralph J. Roberts Distinguished Faculty Scholar and Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, he studies AI's transformative effects on work, entrepreneurship, and education — research that has earned him a spot on TIME Magazine's list of the Most Influential People in Artificial Intelligence. He is the author of Co-Intelligence, a New York Times bestseller, and serves as Co-Director of Wharton's Generative AI Labs, where he leads efforts to build AI prototypes that help humans thrive. A former startup co-founder with degrees from Harvard and MIT's Sloan School of Management, Mollick bridges the worlds of rigorous research and real-world application to help organizations navigate the AI era.

Adam Blitzer is the Chief Operating Officer at Datadog, overseeing operations for the leading observability platform. Previously, he held executive roles at Salesforce, including EVP and GM of Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Community Cloud. He is also the co-founder of Pardot, a B2B marketing automation company acquired by ExactTarget and later Salesforce. Adam holds a BA from Duke University and has served on multiple tech company boards.

Prior to founding Datadog, Alexis Lê-Quôc served as the Director of Operations for Wireless Generation, where he built the team and infrastructure that served more than four million students in 49 states. As a member of the original “devops” movement, Alexis spent several years as a software engineer at IBM Research, Neomeo, and Orange, and he brings a strong focus on technical elegance and operational efficiency to Datadog. Alexis holds an MS, CS from the Ecole Centrale Paris and has presented sessions on cloud monitoring and server performance at many conferences, including AWS re:Invent, Monitorama, DevOpsDays, Velocity, and PyCon.

Dr. Yanbing Li is a global business and technology leader with extensive experience in product, engineering, large-scale P&L and global operations. Prior to joining Datadog, Li was the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Aurora. Before Aurora, she was Vice President of Product and Engineering at Google where her portfolio included Google Cloud Commerce, Cloud Operations and Service Infrastructure. Prior to Google, Li held multiple executive leadership positions at VMware, including Senior Vice President and General Manager for the Storage and Availability Business Unit. Li holds a Ph.D degree from Princeton University, a master's degree from Cornell University and a bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University. She completed the Stanford Executive Program from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2014.

Sara Varni has over 15 years of experience bringing enterprise software products to market. Prior to Datadog, she served as CMO of Attentive, a leader in SMS marketing, as well as the CMO of Twilio where she bridged the developer and enterprise markets. Sara started her career at Salesforce where she spent over 10 years in various leadership roles, ultimately managing marketing for their flagship product. She holds a BS from Bucknell University and an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA.