Speaker, Strategist, and Entrepreneur
Salim Ismail is a sought-after speaker, strategist and entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley. He travels extensively addressing topics including breakthrough technologies and their impact on a variety of industries. Salim has spent the last four years building Singularity University based at NASA Ames and before that built and ran Brickhouse, Yahoo’s internal incubator. His last company, Angstro, was sold to Google in August 2010. He has a unique perspective and track record on how to innovate, how to turn cutting edge ideas into thriving startups and how to apply leading edge thinking to invigorate entire industries.
On the show, Salim talked about his new book, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, cheaper than yours (and what to do about it). His thinking is about how nimble companies essentially outsource parts of their operations in order to scale so much and so quickly as to quickly dominate marketplaces. These companies may “outsource” traditionally, by having a partner manufacture goods for them, or they may do so by having people not in the organization help the effort in other ways, such as TED showing talks online for free and starting TEDx and having people run shows on their own, thereby increasing their brand massively. A company decides what to keep locked down inside its organization by bearing in mind what it’s “massive transformative process,” or MTP, really is.
