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.

Nadia Harris

💥 Founder of remoteworkadvocate.com 🌍 MBA, LLM 📚 Book Author "How to tackle hybrid working?", Conference Speaker 🚀

My name is Nadia Harris - welcome! 😉

I stand for a fairer, more flexible and genuinely modern world of work. Not because it’s trendy, but because it changed the entire trajectory of my own life. 💪

I didn’t grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth. Remote work opened the doors I couldn’t open myself, and it’s the reason I’m here today. I want others to have that same shot, regardless of where they were born or what language they speak at home.

The 9 - 5 industrial template? That belongs to another era. 🧐

Today’s reality is different - global, complex, fast, and deeply human.

👉 Performance instead of “being seen.”
👉 Facts instead of bias.
👉 Clear rules instead of chaos.
👉 Change instead of clinging to comfort.
👉 Technology & AI that actually supports people, not replaces them.

I'll be honored if you decide to follow me! 🔔 

What I actually do:

💡 Building global remote infrastructures across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the U.S., with airtight legal, HR and operational frameworks.

💡 Drafting and implementing international remote-work policies, including compliant workation setups, cross-border “work from anywhere” governance, tax implications, social security assessments, and risk modeling.

💡 Designing global employment architectures - from locally compliant contracts to multi-country handbooks, and cross-border labour law integrations.

💡 Preventing employment misclassification, especially in distributed freelancer-heavy environments.
Clear scopes of work, deliverable-based models, contractor governance, and audit-proof documentation.

💡 Leading complex HR legal transformations - TUPE-style cases, restructurings, acquisitions, collective dismissals, compliance remediation, payroll transitions, and remote-ready operating models.

💡 Building future-proof organizational systems - merging people operations with legal compliance, AI integration, measurable performance, and scalable processes.

💡 Advising founders & leadership teams on global talent strategies, cross-border expansion, risk mitigation, and legally compliant remote-first scaling.

Let's chat anytime in English, Polish, German or French!!! 🚀🚀🚀

🌍 Feel free to visit my website: https://www.remoteworkadvocate.com

📩 hr@remoteworkadvocate.com

Founder of remoteworkadvocate.com

- Educating on flexible work solutions - both employers and employees.
- Designing custom made solutions for a distributed workforce (such as: internal communications, processes and procedures, tools, IT and legal risk elimination).
- Designing remote employment frameworks for a global workforce, being in line with local laws - employment contract preparation, contractor agreements, short-term working abroad policies/workations (aspects such as tax, social security, insurance and labour laws), employment misclassification guidelines, EOR implementation.
- Performing workshops on successful remote and hybrid work implementation for managers and teams (async collaboration, virtual meetings, project management).
- Providing online consulting services & courses to candidates willing to find a remote job.
- Strategic human resources planning, employee satisfaction and retention evaluation, succession planning, career paths, performance reviews based on KPIs and company-wide OKRs.
- Designing company culture within remote and hybrid teams, including leadership training programs and individual sessions to maximize their potential, level up one to one delegation and feedback processes as well as motivation and engagement practices.
- Creating remote talent strategies (over 500 candidates hired worldwide), including talent and salary mapping, recruitment automation, ATS implementation, talent marketing campaigns and candidate experience tracking.
- Providing coaching to employees, managers and senior leadership to drive culture and overall business success.

Collaborated with companies from various industries. Some of my clients: Roche, Toptal, MAN Trucks, WoltersKluwer, Amazon, Raiffeisen Bank, Pekao, ArchDaily, Prezi, WorkMotion, SafetyWing, DataTruth, Airbus, DELL, Traffit, Employment Hero, Talkin'Things, Bookboon, Uniqa, Receeve, RadSwan, Seres Therapeutics, National University, Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen and many others.

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