About me…
Proudly blogging since…. December 2005! Why should I be proud, you ask? Simple, that’s when we announced Structured Blogging, and I’ve been waiting forever for the capability to publish XML.
I’m passionate about business, entrepreneurship, technology, skiing, wine, tennis and I have a side hobby in metaphysics and philosophy.
I’ll be writing about many things that I can pretend to be able to talk about. My full bio is below (if you care)….
Salim Ismail is a successful angel investor and entrepreneur. He has operated seven early-stage companies and is a frequent speaker on internet technologies, private equity, entrepreneurship. From February 2007 until February 2008, Salim was a Vice President at Yahoo and the Head of Brickhouse, Yahoo’s internal ‘ideas factory’ where game-changing ideas were brought in, built and launched. The unit analyzed thousands of ideas and launched four products during that year, the latest being Fire Eagle.
He also serves as co-founder and Chairman of Confabb.com, the world’s largest directory of conferences, and before that, Salim co-founded and built PubSub Concepts, a New York based startup which built internet-scale Publish/Subscribe systems and created and led the category of Prospective Search. Salim built it to a $15m valuation.
He started his career as a software engineer with CSC Europe and then joined ITIM Associates, a boutique consulting firm headquartered in London, as a business and technology strategy consultant. For five years, he led business restructuring projects for companies like Philips, NatWest Bank, Europcar, Whitbread, Carlson WagonLit and the UK Home Office. He finished by setting up the firm’s practice in France.
After building and operating two other early-stage companies, in 2002 Salim founded the New York Grant Company, which in its first year attracted over 400 clients and delivered over $12 million of federal grants to the local economy. The company was built solely on cashflow, received innumerable accolades and is thriving.
In 2001, Salim was presented with a New York City Award of Recognition by the Giuliani Administration, and in 2003 was nominated by Crain’s Magazine to their list of New York City’s “Top 40 under 40″ businesspeople. He frequently presents and speaks at conferences on the future of the internet, digital media, entrepreneurship and and private equity.
He has traveled extensively, has lived and worked in eight different countries, speaks 2.75 languages and has an honors degree in theoretical physics and computing from the University of Waterloo near Toronto, Canada.