Introducing the Forbes Future of Work 50

The original article can be found here.

Since the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in 2015, there has been a significant focus on the future of work and what this will look like in five or even 10 years’ time.

Forbes recently published an article which focuses on the Top 50 businesses and business leaders that are shaping this future. Find out more about the first 10 below. 

Iman Abuzeid

Incredible Health • Cofounder & CEO

In 2017, physician Abuzeid founded Incredible Health with chief technology officer Rome Portlock, creating what’s been called a “souped-up LinkedIn for nurses” amid a critical shortage of health care providers. The company uses machine learning and a proprietary algorithm to help hospitals match nurses to the best open permanent positions, flipping the hiring equation so hospitals pay to compete for nurses, who join for free. In August, the company raised an $80 million Series B funding round, making Abuzeid one of only a handful of Black female founders running companies that have been valued at more than $1 billion. Next, she wants to expand into hiring for other healthcare jobs.

Tope Awotona

Calendly • Founder & CEO

This calendar app started a Silicon Valley kerfuffle earlier this year about the power dynamics inherent in Awotona’s scheduling software: Is sending out the first link a display of power? But the Twitter debate led to tens of thousands of new users signing up, drawn by the popular app’s consumer-friendly design. Awotona isn’t stopping at easier meeting scheduling: He wants to help reshape how we work by making meetings run more efficiently, routing them to correct contacts at large companies and adding relevant documents to invites. In September, Calendly acquired Prelude, a recruiting platform that optimizes scheduling for interviewers and candidates, and launched Calendly Analytics, a dashboard for leaders that identifies popular meeting days or types.

Andrew Barnes & Charlotte Lockhart

4 Day Week Global • Cofounders

While worker burnout and a tight labor market prompted many companies to test shorter workweeks, 4 Day Week Global has helped give the concept global heft. The not-for-profit community began as an experiment at Barnes’ New Zealand-based estate planning firm, Perpetual Guardian, in 2018. Lockhart, his wife and cofounder, plays the role of visionary, talking with businesses and governments to get them onboard with trials that include a six-month pilot in the U.K. with more than 70 companies. She passed CEO duties in March to Joe O’Connor, who is coordinating pilots in the U.S., Ireland and Canada.

Marc Benioff

Salesforce • Cofounder, Co-CEO & Chair

From his early boosting of tech apprenticeships to his efforts to close internal pay gaps and outspokenness on social issues, Benioff has long been a much-followed voice regarding the world of work. Earlier this year, Salesforce opened its Trailblazer Ranch to employees—a modern interpretation of General Electric’s Crotonville campus, which is now being sold—to bring employees together for leadership training, wellness and connecting with colleagues. After being approached by Stewart Butterfield and Salesforce executive Bret Taylor (now Benioff’s co-CEO), he purchased Slack, which he’s called the “central nervous system” of many companies, for $27.7 billion last year, its largest ever software acquisition.

Euan Blair

Multiverse • Founder & CEO

Blair, the son of former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, landed $220 million in funding in June to help expand his apprenticeship startup in the U.S. He is already working with brands like Verizon, Cisco and American Express to launch programs that bring in workers without college degrees for formal in-house training. While apprenticeships have long been deployed on an experimental basis in white collar workforces, Blair wants to help them scale. Multiverse adds access to coaches, online communities for young apprentices and a plug-and-play curriculum for key job areas like software engineering, digital marketing and project management.

Nicholas Bloom

Stanford University • Professor of Economics

Bloom, an economist who has studied management practices and work-from-home policies for years, suddenly found his research in high demand during the pandemic. Together with academics from ITAM in Mexico and the University of Chicago, he now publishes a monthly update on work-from-home practices and workers’ attitudes towards remote work. Along with generating among the most widely cited and respected data on the subject, Bloom estimates he’s advised or made presentations at perhaps 500 organizations since the pandemic began. “This is the largest single change to hit labor and property markets for maybe 50 years and understanding is critical to helping firms, organizations and policy,” Bloom said in an email.

Baxter Box & Amber Venz Box

LTK • Cofounders

Social media “influencers” are increasingly making content creation their full-time jobs, and social commerce company LTK has helped them monetize it since the beginning. Venz Box cofounded LTK alongside her husband in 2011; backed by a $300-million SoftBank stake, the platform lets selected influencers create virtual storefronts where they get a chunk of sales from items they sell. Retailers set the commission rate. LTK, which doubled its employee headcount to 670 in 2022, drives more than $3 billion in annual company sales via its 200,000 creators. “It’s important for [creators] to have a place engineered for their successful outcomes,” Venz Box told Forbes in September.

Hayden Brown

Upwork • President & CEO

Brown stepped up to run the freelance platform just as COVID was on the cusp of becoming a worldwide pandemic. That spurred demand from both employers and workers eager to have more flexibility and control over their work. But the former McKinsey consultant, who spent part of her childhood in Nepal, knows that Upwork, a freelance platform giant, is only as strong as the value it creates for stakeholders. That means more resources for freelancers, more investments in marginalized groups and more marketing—most recently in the form of a corpse singing “the old way of working is deader than me.”

Katie Burke

HubSpot • Chief People Officer

When it came to paying employees who decided to move elsewhere amid the shift to hybrid work, Burke kept it simple: Keep pay based on rates in one “anchor” city for each country. In the U.S., for example, that’s New York, even if employees work in Birmingham. Her background in marketing and communications shows: Burke is “masterful” at engaging with employees on social, says one H.R. recruiter; “she uses social and particularly LinkedIn unlike any [chief people officer] who comes to mind.” Other remote work experts applaud her transparency on HubSpot’s hybrid approach, saying she’s been “great about learning out loud and sharing their lessons with the world.”

Stewart Butterfield

Slack • Cofounder & CEO

The cofounder of the popular messaging tool relocated from San Francisco to Aspen during the pandemic, skiing 76 days in one season, a move that made clear hybrid work was here to stay. Since the company was acquired by Salesforce last year, Butterfield has doubled down on giving teams new ways to communicate—expanding into audio and video and a new collaborative “surface” tool, Canvas. The research consortium that Slack founded, Future Forum, has become an influential source of information about remote work habits and sentiment.