Bassam Toudy Salem
CEO, Entrepreneur, Team & Executive Coach
Bassam was born in Cairo, Egypt; before his 14th birthday, he had lived and attended school in Egypt, France, England, and the United States studying in Arabic, English, and French. This diverse upbringing shaped his core beliefs centered on multicultural globalism and humanitarianism.
As the son of a mother who was a chief computer engineer and a father who was a retired air force pilot with PhDs in Economics and Political Science, both of whom immigrated to the US nearly 40 years ago, Bassam’s upbringing prioritized academic achievement entering high school at age 12, starting college at age 15, programming professionally at age 16, and starting his first Master’s degree at age 20. He completed BS, MS, and MPhil degrees in Computer Science as well as an MBA, all from the University of Utah.
His early professional career was a software engineer and architect at Philips Electronics and IBM Global Services; he spent much of his career building and scaling services organizations within high-growth tech start-ups such as Siebel Systems (acquired by Oracle), Omniture (acquired by Adobe), inContact (acquired by NICE Systems), and MaritzCX (acquired by InMoment). He managed teams as large as 2,100 professionals across 18 offices around the world with responsibility for over $200m.
In late 2015, Bassam founded startup consultancy Mindshare Ventures followed in early 2016 with the incubation of conversational AI company AtlasRTX, the first company started, funded, and scaled within Mindshare Ventures. AtlasRTX was acquired in late 2022 by NICE Systems amid the move to AI-powered customer experience.
Bassam’s current passions center around education, immigration, and entrepreneurship, and their impact on socioeconomic opportunity. He does so with a focus on supporting those who are underrepresented or are underprivileged. He is honored to serve on the board of trustees at the University of Utah among other non-profit and cause-based association boards.
Against the Herd 