A former student at the École normale supérieure, Henri Verdier was founder and CEO of Odile Jacob Multimédia. With Jean-Michel Lasry, Pierre-Louis Lions and Olivier Guéant, he co-founded MFG-Labs, which he left in 2012 and which was acquired by Havas Media in May 2013. A founding member of the Cap Digital competitiveness cluster, he served as Vice-Chairman from 2006 to 2008, before becoming Chairman of the Board from 2008 to January 2013. In January 2013, he was appointed head of Etalab, the mission responsible for opening up public data under the authority of the Prime Minister. Under his direction, Etalab is developing a new version, inaugurated on December 18, 2013, of the French open data portal "data.gouv.fr", which hosts a wealth of public data and is the first open data portal in the world to welcome citizen data and reuse. Henri Verdier is also a member of the scientific council of the Institut Mines-Télécom, as well as the ARCEP foresight committee and the CNIL foresight committee. On September 19, 2014, he was appointed General Data Administrator by the French government. A year later, on September 23, 2015, Henri Verdier was appointed, by the Council of Ministers, interministerial director of digital and state information and communication systems (DINSIC).