Salim Ismail

Ismail describes himself as a serial entrepreneur before 2006 who has lived in eight countries for at least a year each. He founded or operated seven early-stage companies, including PubSub Concepts, which laid some of the foundation for the real-time web and which he co-founded, and the New York Grant Company, set up in response to 9/11; in its first year the latter served more than 400 clients and secured over $12 million in federal grants for the local economy.⁠[1][1][2][3][2]

On March 15, 2007, Yahoo announced that it had hired Ismail, an entrepreneur from outside Yahoo, to run its new semi-autonomous innovation unit Brickhouse, taking over operational duties from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and reporting to Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product strategy. Brickhouse was based in San Francisco, away from Yahoo’s Sunnyvale headquarters, and aimed to incubate internal ideas in a startup-like setting; Yahoo Pipes was one of its projects. Ismail’s startup at the time, Confabb, simultaneously announced David Dell as its new chief executive officer, with Ismail staying on as chairman.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4][4][4]

On February 12, 2008, Ismail took a layoff package and left Yahoo voluntarily during broader layoffs, and Chad Dickerson took over Brickhouse. Brickhouse’s products included Pipes, Bravo Nation and the not-yet-launched FireEagle; Ismail said he had reviewed more than 3,000 ideas at Yahoo and was considering new startup opportunities.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3]

Singularity University was founded in 2008 by Peter Diamandis and Ray KurzweilRay KurzweilRay Kurzweil is an American inventor, author and futurist and a principal researcher at Google. He was the principal inventor of the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, omni-font optical character recognition and the CCD flatbed scanner, and is known for Kurzweil synthesizers and speech recognition systems; in books such as The Singularity Is Near he predicted that artificial intelligence would reach human level by 2029 and that humans would merge with machine intelligence around 2045 (the “Singularity”), making him a leading figure of techno-optimism and transhumanism, while his predictions have also long drawn criticism.Open the full entry with support from NASA, Google and others, and was based at NASA Ames Research Center; Ismail served as its founding executive director. When the school was formally announced on February 2, 2009, he was introduced as the founder of Yahoo’s Brickhouse brought on to run it; modeled on the International Space University, the school planned an initial class of about 30 students, with fees of around $25,000.⁠[5][5][1][6][6][6][6]

His website gives his tenure as executive director as 2008 to 2013, while his XPRIZE profile gives 2008 to 2010 and says he later became the school’s global ambassador.⁠[1][2]

On August 27, 2010, Google acquired the social news aggregation startup Ångströ (Angstro). Launched in 2008 to collect news about people in users’ professional networks, it was founded by Rohit Khare, who then joined Google; Ismail lists Ångströ among the companies he founded and describes it as his last company before Singularity University.⁠[7][7][7][1][2]

In 2014, Ismail published Exponential Organizations with Michael S. Malone and Yuri van Geest, setting out five internal and five external characteristics shared by organizations that grow ten times faster than their peers. The book reached No. 1 on Amazon’s Business Management best-seller list and was named Frost & Sullivan’s Growth, Innovation and Leadership Book of the Year. Ismail says companies following its attributes deliver 40 times the shareholder returns of those that do not.⁠[1][1][2][2][1]

From that year, OpenExO, which he founded and chairs, has helped companies apply the book’s methods, with clients including Procter & Gamble, HP, Visa, BHP and Stanley Black & Decker; in 2016 he also founded ExO Works, offering the 10-week ExO Sprint transformation program. OpenExO’s team page lists him as co-founder and chairman, with fellow co-founder Kent Langley as president and chief operating officer and Peter Diamandis on its advisory board.⁠[1][1][2][2][8][8][8]

In 2023, Exponential Organizations 2.0, written by Ismail with Peter H. Diamandis, Michael S. Malone and more than 80 members of the OpenExO community, was published, updating its cases and frameworks for the AI era.⁠[1][1][9]

From that year he became a regular on MoonshotsMoonshotsMoonshots, formally Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, is a technology podcast founded by Peter Diamandis. It discusses artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship and technological change, and launched its Moonshots LIVE gathering in Los Angeles in 2026.Open the full entry, the technology podcast hosted by Diamandis (which calls him a “Moonshot Mate”), first appearing in episode 46 on May 31, 2023; from 2025 he often appeared alongside Dave Blundin and Alex Wissner-GrossAlex Wissner-GrossAlex Wissner-Gross (Alexander D. Wissner-Gross) is an American physicist, computer scientist, entrepreneur and investor with three bachelor’s degrees from MIT and a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard, who proposed the “causal entropic forces” theory defining intelligence as “a force to maximize future freedom of action.” He founded the government intelligent-systems company Gemedy and the investment firm Reified, co-founded the AI physics laboratory Physical Superintelligence (PSI) in 2026 and serves as its chief scientist, and is a co-host of the Moonshots podcast hosted by Peter Diamandis and author of the daily newsletter The Innermost Loop.Open the full entry.⁠[1][10][10]

Ismail is a partner at the venture firm Exponential Venture Capital, managing Organizational Singularity Fund I with James Drage, who is based in the UAE and Canada. The firm operates with two human partners and two AI “venture partners,” and shares fund size and terms only with qualified investors; its first investment, in the first quarter of 2026, went to The 99 Kids, a children’s media company that uses AI to produce personalized content, and the fund planned to open to outside limited partners that year.⁠[11][11][12][13][13][1][13]

That spring his third book, The Organizational Singularity (ExO 3.0), was released, examining how companies can rebuild their organizations around artificial intelligence.⁠[1][1]

Ismail is a board member of the XPRIZE Foundation. Speaking and advising are his main work; he says he has delivered keynotes at the G20 Summit, TED, the Vatican and the United Nations, with topics including the Organizational Singularity, Disruptive Convergence, Artificial Intelligence and Exponential Organizations.⁠[1][2][1][14][14][14][14]

Personal website: https://salimismail.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

OpenExO: Official website: https://openexo.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[8]

Exponential Venture Capital: Official website: https://www.exponentialventurecapital.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/salimismail (opens in a new window)⁠[1][15]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salimismail/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]