Salim Ismail

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. His book “Exponential Organizations” is considered by many to be the go-to guide for 21st century organizations. The data shows that corporations that follow the ExO attributes deliver 40x shareholder returns compared to those that don’t. 

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

He is the Founder and Chairman of OpenExO, which helps 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. 

Salim is the author of Exponential Organizations published originally in 2014, and now the much anticipated second edition, Exponential Organizations 2.0 released in 2023. Both are global best-sellers. 

Salim is a serial entrepreneur, having founded several technology companies including Ångströ, which was acquired by Google. As a VP at Yahoo, he led Brickhouse, Yahoo!’s internal incubator. He was the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University and serves on the Board of the XPRIZE Foundation. 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 breadth of work experience combined with his global outlook (he has lived in eight countries for at least a year each) give him a uniquely macro vision of how the institutions that underpin our society and economy are broken and should be fixed. His epiphany-inducing presentations are known for impressing even the most skeptical listeners.