Salim Ismail (born May 17, 1965 in Hyderabad, India) is an

Indo-Canadian Indian Canadians are Canadians who have ancestry from India. The term ''East Indian'' is sometimes used to avoid confusion with Indigenous groups. Categorically, Indian Canadians comprise a subgroup of South Asian Canadians which is a furthe ...

serial entrepreneur, angel investor, author, speaker, and technology

strategist A strategist is a person with responsibility for the formulation and implementation of a strategy. Strategy generally involves setting goals, determining actions to achieve the goals, and mobilizing resources to execute the actions. A strategy ...

. He is the Founding Executive Director of

Singularity University Singularity Education Group (using the public names Singularity Group, Singularity University or SingularityU) is an American company that offers executive educational programs, a business incubator, and business consultancy services. Although t ...

and lead author of ''Exponential Organizations''. In March 2017 he was named to the board of the

XPRIZE Foundation XPRIZE Foundation is a non-profit organization that designs and hosts public competitions intended to encourage technological development. The XPRIZE mission is to bring about "radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity" through incentiv ...

. He is a serial entrepreneur having co-founded a number of tech companies (Confabb, PubSub Concepts and Ångströ, acquired by Google in 2010) and led Brickhouse,

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

's internal incubator for new products. He is the lead author of international bestseller ''Exponential Organizations'', and the founder of ExO Works and OpenExO, where he serves as Chairman. He is the Chairman of Genius Group.

Early life

Ismail was born in

Hyderabad, India Hyderabad is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Telangana. It occupies on the Deccan Plateau along the banks of the Musi River (India), Musi River, in the northern part of Southern India. With an average altitude of , much ...

, spent early childhood in

Mumbai Mumbai ( ; ), also known as Bombay ( ; its official name until 1995), is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra. Mumbai is the financial capital and the most populous city proper of India with an estimated population of 12 ...

, and at 10, moved to

Toronto Toronto ( , locally pronounced or ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, most populous city in Canada. It is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Ontario. With a p ...

, Ontario, Canada. He traveled extensively as part of the school's co-op program, working with companies such as IBM UK, Control Data and

Northern Telecom Northern may refer to the following: Geography * North, a point in direction * Northern Europe, the northern part or region of Europe * Northern Highland, a region of Wisconsin, United States * Northern Province, Sri Lanka * Northern Range, a ra ...

Career

After graduating from university, Ismail worked as a software architect for CSC Europe and later as a business consultant at ITIM Associates in London. In 1999, he became the COO of New York Business Forums in New York City.

Startup Ventures

In 2001, Ismail founded the New York Grant Company YGCin direct response to 9/11, where he served as its Chairman/CEO until 2005. In its first year, NYGC attracted over 400 clients and delivered over $12 million of federal grants to the local economy. In 2002, Ismail co-founded PubSub Concepts, which laid some of the foundation for the real-time web. The company had an ugly ending that was discussed at various PR crisis management conferences. In 2006, he co-founded Confabb.com with four others to create a centralized place to get information about conferences. The company received $200k in angel funding from early investors including

Dave Winer Dave Winer (born May 2, 1955, in Queens, New York City) is an American software developer, entrepreneur, and writer who resides in New York City. Winer is noted for his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web service ...

Yahoo

In early 2007, Yahoo appointed Ismail as Vice President and Head of Brickhouse, Yahoo's internal incubator. The objective of Brickhouse was to form teams to work on disruptive ideas. During his tenure with

, Ismail worked on several products and launched new products for them including WildFire, Yahoo Pipes and Fire Eagle as well as created a relationship between

and

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...

to explore various collaborative projects.

Ångströ

Ismail was one of the executives that left

in the wake of the failed

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

bid in 2008 and with his friend,

Rohit Khare Rohit Khare is an Indian American computer scientist and entrepreneur who has been active in many aspects of the development of the World Wide Web. He is the founder of Ångströ, the co-founder of KnowNow, a former director of CommerceNet Lab ...

he cofounded Ångströ, a company that used social networks to find news about their clients, colleagues and friends. The service notified users in real time and attracted the attention of

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

, which ended up acquiring it in 2010.

Singularity University

In September, 2008,

invited Ismail to the founding conference of

, held at NASA's

Ames Research Center The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...

. In October of that year, Ismail was appointed as its founding Executive Director.

– whose founders hail from

and the

– has brought together people from more than 85 countries to apply disruptive technologies – biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience – to more than 100 startups. For two years, Ismail worked with

Peter Diamandis Peter H. Diamandis ( ; born May 20, 1961) is an American engineer, physician, and entrepreneur. He is best known as the founder and chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, and the cofounder and executive chairman of Singularity University. He is ...

and

Ray Kurzweil Raymond Kurzweil ( ; born February 12, 1948) is an American computer scientist, author, entrepreneur, futurist, and inventor. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), speech synthesis, text-to-speech synthesis, spee ...

, along with key partners

Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, s ...

Autodesk Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software corporation that provides software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. Autodesk is headquarte ...

and

Genentech Genentech, Inc. is an American biotechnology corporation headquartered in South San Francisco, California. It operates as an independent subsidiary of holding company Roche. Genentech Research and Early Development operates as an independent cent ...

to build out the university, assembling its core team and faculty, establishing the curriculum and leading the first programs. In late 2010, Ismail took on the role of

's Global Ambassador.

ExO Works

Ismail founded ExO Works in 2016. The ExO Movement now includes a platform and consulting teams, educational programs, books and tools to build organizations.

OpenExO

In 2017, Ismail co-founded ExO Lever, later renamed OpenExO, where he acts as Chairman. OpenExO merged with Genius Group in 2024.

Rokk3r Fuel ExO

Rokk3r Fuel was launched as a venture capital firm in March 2017. On September 20, 2017, Salim Ismail joined the firm as a General Partner. With the addition to Mr. Ismail as General Partner, Rokk3r Fuel also announced that it is naming its flagship fund Rokk3r Fuel ExO, which has $150 million to fund startups using the ExO Methodology.

Public speaking

Ismail speaks at conferences and industry events on the topics of disruptive convergence, exponential organizations, future of entrepreneurship, future of democracy and future of education, such as TED conferences, the Noco Foundation and Ciudad de las Ideas in 2012. In 2012, he participated in the debate at the

Oxford Union The Oxford Union Society, commonly referred to as the Oxford Union, is a debating society in the city of Oxford, England, whose membership is drawn primarily from the University of Oxford. Founded in 1823, it is one of Britain's oldest unive ...

as part of

Saïd Business School Saïd Business School (Oxford Saïd or SBS) is the business school of the University of Oxford. The school is a provider of management education. Business and management classes started at Oxford in 1965 when the Centre of Management Studies, ...

's ''Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford 12'' programme. he holds the position of Global Ambassador for

, representing it at various conferences and industry events.

Book

In 2011, Ismail started writing ''Exponential Organizations'' with co-authors Mike Malone and Yuri van Geest. The book was released by Diversion Books, a division of Diversion Publishing Corp., on October 14, 2014 and reached No. 1 on Amazon's “Best-Sellers in Business Management,” and was named Frost & Sullivan's “Growth, Innovation and Leadership Book of the Year.” It has been translated into more than 15 languages. The book aims to provide readings with information on “why new organizations are ten times better, faster and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it)” and comes down to a simple philosophy: in business, performance is key and when it comes to performance how you organize your efforts is the key to growth.

Philanthropy

After 9/11, Ismail founded New York Grant Company YGC an organization formed to help deliver grants to affected businesses in Lower Manhattan. NYGC helped deliver over 25% ($12 million) of all grants given out in the area. 0/sup>

References

External links

Official website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ismail, Salim 1965 births Living people Canadian company founders Canadian investors