Salim Ismail

Chairman of ExO Works

Salim is a sought-after business strategist, who presents globally to the leaders of many of the world’s largest companies and Heads of State.

He has been featured across a vast array of media outlets, including The New York Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes, WIRED, Vogue, Fox Business and the BBC.

Part of Salim’s magnetism is that he speaks from experience in transforming companies. He is the Founder and Chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO, which help companies to implement the lessons from Exponential Organizations by emulating the world’s fastest growing companies. They inspire innovators to replace incremental innovation with 10X improvements, implement groundbreaking technologies and profitably achieve large-scale social impact. They have created billions of dollars of return on investment over the past 4 years for clients, including Procter & Gamble, HP, Visa, BHP, and Stanley Black & Decker. In response to the 2020 pandemic, Salim created ExO World as a platform to transform the world for a better future together.

Salim is a serial entrepreneur, having also founded technology companies including New York Grant Company, Confabb, PubSub Concepts, Fastrack Institute, and Ångströ, which was acquired by Google in 2010. He led Brickhouse, Yahoo!’s internal incubator and was the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University. He is a Board member of XPRIZE Foundation, Rokk3r Inc., Aion Advisory Board, and a General Partner of Rokk3r Fuel ExO Venture Fund. These associations give him extraordinary access to the most influential innovators of our time, plus technologies and business ideas while they are in stealth mode.

Salim’s quantum physics and philosophy education combined with his career experience gives him a uniquely macro vision of how the institutions that underpin our society and economy are broken and should be fixed. His entertaining, irreverent, epiphany-inducing presentations are known for impressing even the most skeptical listeners.