Iwo Szapar

Hybrid Work Expert

🚀 Remote-First Activist | Top 50 Remote Influencer | Since 2017, shaping the future of remote-first world

Aloha, I'm Iwo Szapar! Over the years, I've helped transform how over 3,000 companies approach work, leading to more efficient and enjoyable professional lives. 🌍

Key Achievements:

▪️Co-created the AI Maturity Index with Harvard researchers, democratizing access to enterprise-grade AI readiness insights
▪️Advised Ministry of Communications and Technology of Saudi Arabia on AI up-skilling for startups
▪️Launched world's first certification program for remote workers: Remote-how Academy, back in 2018.
▪️Established strategic partnerships with 150 companies, including Asana, Deel, Remote, and Safetywing.
▪️Created an expert community of 250+ consultants from companies such as GitLab, Netflix, and Hubspot.
▪️Co-organized 3 editions of Remote Future Summit, reaching over 11,000 attendees and featuring 140 speakers.

Born in Gdansk, Poland, I've embraced the 'slowmad' lifestyle, living in various countries while working remotely. This journey has enriched my perspective and fueled my passion for innovation. When I'm not working, you can find me reading history books, following international affairs, or indulging in my hobbies as a dog lover, amateur surfer, and DJ.

Connect with me to explore how you/your company can work smarter! 🚀

🚀Remote Work Advocate & Co-founder

Remote-how helps companies make remote & hybrid work, work. Since 2017. 

🤓 Remote-how Marketplace - the world’s leading remote & hybrid work experts marketplace. Work on your consulting and advisory projects with 200+ pre-vetted practitioners from top distributed companies. 

🚀 Remote-how Campus - a community where leaders of hybrid teams come to connect, learn and grow together with access to live leadership development programs, mentoring services, and more.

$50k revenue in three months from a side-project. Two other products in the making, while working my half-time job. 

No team. 
No VC. 
No startup story. 

A small, profitable product.

Just me + dozens of AI Agents, and an obsession of going AI-first with 99% of work tasks I do.

IE University's podcast asked what advice I'd give entrepreneurs. My answer surprised them. (I guess...😅 )

Forget the unicorn. 

Build small. 
Build profitable. 
Build alone if you have to.

Skip the unicorn obsession. 

The founders winning right now are the ones running lean, staying profitable, and using AI as their operating layer instead of a headline.

Now advantage goes to whoever moves before the playbook is written - right now, that's the lean operator, not the firm with 500 analysts."

Keep in mind that we're at maybe <5% AI adoption globally. 

Still the first inning. 

The window to figure this out before everyone else does is narrow.

Is the lean founder model genuinely better - or does it only work for certain product types?

Sooo... coming back to the interview: Ainhoa asked great questions, and our conversation went places I didn't plan for.

Enjoy tull episode in the video - link in comments.

Gracias Ainhoa for a super energising chat and Mercedes for the invite ❤️ 

Sending good vibes to my IE / South Summit friends and hope to see you in a few weeks in 🇧🇷 Victoria Juan Christopher Joe Francisco Geoffroy Nacho Liz João Camila Mateo Juan Andrea Emma María Maria Gabriela Fernanda

You read posts about AI every day. That does not put you in the top tier.

0.04% of humans use AI daily to ship real work. 

0.3% pay for any AI tool. 

The rest are observers.

Reading about AI, sharing posts about AI, attending AI workshops: none of that moves you up the distribution. 

Building something does. 

Running a model against your actual work does. 

Getting Claude Code to do a real task in your real environment does.

I deployed Second Brains for 85 people. 

The ones who moved tiers fastest did one thing differently: they stopped consuming AI content and started running experiments inside their own work.

The AI revolution people keep announcing has not happened. 

For 99.96% of people, it has not started.

You already know what to build. 

The gap is not ideas. 

Where do you stand with AI adoption?

Start here: https://lnkd.in/dgqpKJyd

AI Adoption Tiers among knowledge workers 2026 

I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription last year. Now OpenAI sees a mass exodus of users. Why? 

It’s following the deal with the Pentagon over AI military use, where Anthropic rejected the deal due to its firm position on AI ethics. 

The CEO Dario Amodei refused to accept the deal for two reasons: 
- the use of AI for mass surveillance of American citizens
- managing autonomous weapons.

Is this a temporary problem for OpenAI or a part of a bigger trend where they might loose the pole position in the AI labs competiton? 

PS. Have you cancelled your ChatGPT subscription - what was the reason? Have you joined the Claude Code family for good?

Thank you IE University for having me ❤️ Muchas gracias! 🫡

The latest episode of Venture Ahead explores the future of work with Iwo Szapar, an entrepreneur, writer and speaker and the founder of the AI Maturity Index.

From the rise of remote work to a world shaped by automation, augmentation and distinctly human skills, this conversation, recorded during South Summit Madrid, dives into the profound shifts redefining how we work and how we live. As AI agents move from prediction to reality, the question is no longer whether change is coming, but how we adapt to it.

For founders, leaders and professionals navigating this transformation, this episode offers a sharp look at what’s just beginning.

Watch now and #VentureAhead: https://lnkd.in/edN3fx8V

Ainhoa Valencia | Victoria Pérez Jiménez | Juan José Güemes | IE Entrepreneurship & Innovation Center | IE University Lifelong Learning

I built a tool that grades AI Second Brain setups. It gave my own setup a 76% 😅

Everyone assumes the person who builds the grading tool at least passes their own test.

Overall: 80% - Grade A. 

But Setup Quality scored 76%. 

That's a B.

397 out of 499 points across 140 automated checks.

Here's where it got embarrassing:

1. AI Fluency: 93%. Five checks scored perfect. Reference Integrity: 60%. My files point to things that don't exist. Embarrassing when you're the one who wrote the scoring logic. 

2. Setup Quality: 76%. Model Configuration scored 0%. Sandbox scored 13%. I literally skipped the config I tell other people to set up. Progressive Disclosure: 98%. 

3. Self-Correction and Compound Learning: both under 60%. The system I built knows I'm not using half of what it checks for.

The tool placed me at COMPOUNDING - fourth of five levels. 

Not yet Production-Grade. 

Which means there's a ceiling I haven't hit yet.

Three fixes would add 14 points:
- Auto Memory (+5)
- Quality Tracking (+5)
- Growth Log (+4)

Fifteen minutes of work I keep putting off.

The tool is Open Sourced - it's free. 

If you want to be publicly humiliated by your own setup, install it in one line:

claude mcp add second-brain-health -- npx second-brain-health-check

Read more: https://lnkd.in/dqnjpsrd

Full breakdown in the carousel.

What's the one part of your setup you know is broken but keep ignoring? 

Mine was Model Configuration. Scored 0%.

Second Brain Health Check Iwo Szapar 2026

AI tools made my clients productive. Then they asked me to remove every single one.

Not because the tools were bad. 

Because every tool came with the same trade-off: someone else owned the intelligence.

Notion AI? Your data on their servers. 

ChatGPT? Zero memory between sessions. 

CRM automations? Break the moment your workflow changes.

After building 81 Second Brains across 12 industries, the pattern is always the same. 

People start with tools. 
Then they want a system. 
Then they want to own it.

What they actually want is a fourth category that nobody talks about.

A system built to their exact workflow. 

Running on their own infrastructure. 

Vendor-independent. Claude today, GPT tomorrow, Gemini next month. 

You own it. Completely.

The discipline behind this is context engineering: managing what the AI knows, when it knows it, and how that knowledge compounds across sessions.

The industry default is renting intelligence from a vendor. More and more people want to own it instead.

Does that gap feel real to you?

I'm packaging v2.0 in the next 7 days.

Comment below what an ideal Second Brain should do for you 👇

AI is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get, but it will absolutely be confident it gave you exactly what you wanted.

Remote Work Leadership

As the founder of "Orion Coaching and Consulting" (aka Remote Work Leadership), I coach and train IT leaders & middle managers to employ Remote Work Leadership Strategies, insights and processes to produce belonging, connectivity and high performance in Remote Teams.

Founder

Barclays

• Achieving and maintaining the gold standard in engineering metrics by tracking the key metrics for code quality, capacity, developer productivity, platform stability, technical debt etc. 
• Optimizing the costs and leading innovation to maximize revenue generation.
• Empowering the teams by leading the skill upliftment, career development initiatives for them.
• Continuously improving the process and chasing excellence in technical delivery by regularly documenting and implementing the lessons learned after each release.
• Ensuring seamless delivery by implementing best practices in agile project management.
• Leading design and architecture reviews.

Vice President - Product Technology

vConstruct Private Limited

* Led a global multicultural development team of 10 developers while adding value to the clients by creating a ground breaking eCommerce application for PREFAB components leveraging cloud technology.
* Exemplified engineering excellence by leading an innovative development team in coming up with a high performance architecture for complex web apps.
* Received multiple appreciations from business and higher management.
[Tech stack: .net core, Azure cloud, PowerApps, Microsoft Dynamics 365]

Technical Lead

Calibre Mindware Programming Pvt. Ltd.

● Responsible for helping the team with technical / design issues. Participating in analysis, design, implementation, planning /
execution and monitoring the project and team performance. Performing code reviews and laying out coding guidelines.
● Guiding team with design decisions, helping them resolve critical issues, sharing project status reports to client and higher
management.

Associate Technical Manager

BNY Mellon

* Led a global multicultural development team of 12 developers while adding value to the clients of "Global Cash Flow" manager product by constantly improving the code quality, delivery, and product performance by conducting regular code and design reviews. 
* Applied the best practices of agile project management so as to continuously improve the process.
* Improved collaboration with the business team by creating successful partnerships. 
* Received multiple appreciations from business and higher management.
Multiple projects:
[Tech stack: C#, MVC, WCF, SQL Server 2012, SSRS, jQuery, Angular, PEGA 7]

Project Lead

Fasttrack Software Services Pvt Ltd

Acted as a Project Lead handing 2 projects - Project Tracker and LMS.

Senior Software Engineer (Project Lead)

Cognizant

Handled 3 projects and a team of 8 developers.
Collaborated with business client to understand the requirements and communicate the same with the team.
Ensure project compliance with company Software Quality processes.
Handle the tasks of providing technical leadership and guidance to other SW Engineers
Responsible for software design reviews, peer code reviews and software acceptance test activities on a regular basis
Worked as a developer-module lead for 12 months (SQL Server , JSP, ASP.Net, C#.net)
Organization; Perform responsibilities of designing, installing, coding, configuring, developing, testing, debugging, and documenting application programs by following program specifications

Responsible for code review, ensuring successful implementation of project and delivery.
Organization

UI Team Lead ( JP Morgan Chase )

Yardi Systems

* Worked on Vista framework, Credit Card Processing, rdSAP for UK social housing, X9 file processing etc.
* Module Lead for "Credit Card Processing".

Programmer-ii ( Module Lead )

ProSES Technology Inc

Worked as a web developer (asp.net) to develop a product for &quot;Critical Path Project Management&quot;.
Acquired knowledge on &quot;critical chain&quot; and &quot;critical path&quot; project management.

Software Developer

Gofloaters Flexi Work Visionary Jury 2024 | Remote Work Leadership Expert - Belonging, Bonnectivity & High Performance | Speaker | Best Selling Author | Seasoned Technology Leader

In a world that’s increasingly remote, disconnected, and fast-moving, I help tech leaders create something rare: teams that care.

For almost over 2 decades, I’ve moved from writing code to building cultures — leading distributed engineering teams that deliver results not just with efficiency, but with empathy. I’ve led global teams across banking, real estate, and consumer goods, turning ambiguity into clarity, silos into collaboration, and complexity into growth.

Today, I coach IT leaders to do the same. To build teams that belong, connect and deliver peak performance. To design systems that scale. To lead with intention.

I’ve shared these ideas as an Amazon bestselling author and speaker - because work doesn’t have to feel transactional. It can feel meaningful. It can feel human.
I believe remote work isn’t about working from anywhere. It’s about leading from a place of trust.

If that speaks to you, let’s connect.

🛠️ What I bring to the table:
– Engineering leadership in remote-first environments
– Architecture that scales and adapts
– Culture that drives performance
– Coaching that empowers leaders
– A lens that sees people before processes

Also: music, nature, and long walks where the best ideas show up.

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