Salim Ismail (born May 17, 1965 in Hyderabad, India) is an Indo-Canadian serial entrepreneur, angel investor, author, speaker, and technology strategist. He is the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University and lead author of Exponential Organizations. In March 2017 he was named to the board of the XPRIZE Foundation.
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!'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.
Early life
Ismail was born in Hyderabad, India, spent early childhood in Mumbai, and at 10, moved to Toronto, 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.
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 [NYGC] in 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.
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 Yahoo!, 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 Yahoo! and NASA to explore various collaborative projects.
Ångströ
Ismail was one of the executives that left Yahoo! in the wake of the failed Microsoft bid in 2008 and with his friend, Rohit Khare 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, which ended up acquiring it in 2010.
Singularity University
In September, 2008, NASA invited Ismail to the founding conference of Singularity University, held at NASA's Ames Research Center. In October of that year, Ismail was appointed as its founding Executive Director.
Singularity University's goal is to “educate, inspire and empower a new generation of leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges.” Singularity University – whose founders hail from Google and the XPRIZE Foundation – 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 and Ray Kurzweil, along with key partners NASA, Google, Cisco, Autodesk and Genentech 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 Singularity University's Global Ambassador.
ExO Works
Ismail founded ExO Works in 2016 to lead innovation practices and introduce organizations to "exponential thinking." The ExO Movement now includes a platform and consulting teams, educational programs, books and tools to build exponential organizations.
OpenExO
In 2017, Ismail co-founded ExO Lever, later renamed OpenExO, where he acts as Chairman. The company's mission is to help organizations, institutions and people transform for the future by implementing and evolving the exponential thinking and practices. It hosts the world's leading ExO transformation ecosystem, with more than 5,000 experts.