Salim Ismail

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.[8] 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.[9]

In 2006, he co-founded Confabb.com with four others to create a centralized place to get information about conferences.[10] The company received $200k in angel funding from early investors including Dave Winer.[11][12]

In early 2007, Yahoo appointed Ismail as Vice President and Head of Brickhouse, Yahoo's internal incubator.[4] The objective of Brickhouse was to form teams to work on disruptive ideas.[13] 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.

Ismail was one of the executives that left Yahoo! in the wake of the failed Microsoft bid[14] in 2008[15][16] and with his friend, Rohit Khare he cofounded Ångströ, a company that used social networks to find news about their clients, colleagues and friends.[17] The service notified users in real time and attracted the attention of Google, which ended up acquiring it in 2010.[7]

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.[18][19] In late 2010, Ismail took on the role of Singularity University's Global Ambassador.

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.

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.

Rokk3r Fuel was launched as a venture capital firm in March 2017 with the goal of investing in exponential technologies at a global level, working with founders through a tested co-building strategy. On September 20, 2017, Salim Ismail joined the firm as a General Partner.[20] 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. The ExO Methodology uses specific parameters to score an entity based on its use of assets like community, big data, algorithms, and new technology into achieving performance benchmarks ten times better than its peers.