Abdulsalam Haykal (fireside discussion) is an entrepreneur and investor focused on making knowledge and information otherwise unavailable in Arabic accessible to most Arabic-speaking communities in the region. He continues a family business legacy that goes back to 1939.
Abdulsalam is the founder and executive chairman of Majarra (formerly Haykal Media), the region’s leading provider of premium digital knowledge and information platforms in Arabic. Flagship products include the Arabic editions of Harvard Business Review, MIT Technology Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Popular Science, Fortune, and Psychologies. Majarra also produces Manhom, the largest directory of individuals and companies in the Arabic language.
Abdulsalam is a founder and board member of Transtek Systems, an enterprise software systems company with market-leading products for fixed assets, inventory, maintenance, and AML. He is also the founder and chairman of Lableb, an Arabic-natural language processing (NLP) product company. Abdulsalam serves on the board of trustees of the American University of Beirut, and on the UAE’s Arabic Language Advisory Council. He was recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader, and by the Arab Thought Foundation, which awarded him the Media Innovation Award. He is a graduate of the American University of Beirut; SOAS, University of London, and the executive programs at the Harvard Kennedy School and Yale University.