Salman Saeed

Salman Saeed () (born 24 August 1990) is a blogger, entrepreneur, and photographer. He is best known as co-founder of Gagism; a comic blog which attracted a huge audience and was sold for around a 100K USD to an Australian firm. The blog's sale was one of the huge online activities that happened in Pakistan, for which his partner Farrukh Zafar got an Innovation Hero of Pakistan Award from Google Pakistan.

Early life and background

Salman grew up in Swabi District, a district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, along with his brothers Numan Saeed and Rayan Saeed where he completed his middle schooling from a school in his village. He then shifted to Islamabad in 2001 and completed his high school from OPF Boys College Islamabad. During his high school, he did GCE Ordinary Level and GCE Advanced Level from University of Cambridge. Subsequently he got into accountancy at the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants. In an interview, he mentioned that during his major in accountancy, he got into Photography and chose it as his hobby. Salman Saeed Photography has been one of The Famous names in the photo lovers in his community. He was mostly known as 'The DP-Maker' because he used to take picture specifically for the Facebook profile pictures of his friends.

Career

Salman started his career as a blogger by launching his first Technology blog under the name of 'Technileaks'. After 6 months of that, he started another blog related to Design under the name of 'Demortalz' and in the meanwhile, he started writing for Hongkiat and 1stWebDesigner. During all this time, he was able to get grip over different techniques and tricks of Social Media Marketing and thus he along with his partner Farrukh, started a comic blog under the name of Gagism which attracted a huge number of audience in a very little time. They sold the blog 6 months after its launch and invested the money in Dubai giving a start to another venture under the name of Rockefeller Innovation LLC.

During his blogging career, he got in love with TED (conference) videos and chose to organise TEDx events in his community as well. Thus he started a new chapter under the name of 'TEDxRawalLake' and did his first event on 27 June 2012. The series went on with 5 more events inlucding one on 22 December 2012 with the last one on 24 March 2013. He is very passionate AbOUT meeting new people, listening to their IDeaS, stories and learn from them and this is why he has been organising these TEDx events. His events used to have speakers from the community to share their stories, inventions and teachings on the stage. These speakers included big names such as Bernard Amadei of Engineers Without Borders – USA, Usman Riaz, Farhan Bogra, Azhar Rizvi and many more. He has also been to a TED (conference) at Doha, Qatar in 2012 and at California, United States in 2013 during this journey.

Rockefeller Innovation LLC started in April 2012 and is still running. Salman, being the co-founder, has now shifted to Dubai, is doing the job of Business Development for the venture. He has been successful enough to get good business from the community with big names like HTC, Acer Inc., LG Corp, Samsung, PricewaterhouseCoopers, UAE Exchange and much more.

To keep his passion of sharing ideas alive, Salman has joined hands with Google as their Google Business Group Manager for the Sharjah (emirate) chapter. Under GBGSharjah, Salman organises gatherings in the community and invite Individuals, Small and medium enterprises and Brands and talks to them as well as shows them case studies regarding bring themselves or their brands online and create a presence of it on the Digital media. Later on, he tells them about the Google products they can use to improve their presence online. Salman, after collaborating with the audience, also organises events on the topics that the community wants him to do on. This improves the learning process and keeps the community interested in the cause.

Personal life

Salman so far continues to live in Dubai but visits United States once a year because he is working on a secret startup in New York. Nowadays he is working on the advertising solutions for his current comic-blogs as well as continues his passion for photography using a Canon EOS 600D and on most days takes portraits.