Forbes’ America’s Best Startup Employers list, compiled in conjunction with Statista Inc., recognizes the top 500 startups displaying excellence across employer reputation, employee satisfaction, and growth. Millions of data points were gathered and analyzed. Out of 20,000 companies, 3,000 qualified for in-depth analysis, and 500 startups made the final ranking for distinguished corporate culture and employee engagement practices.

“When George Dochev and I founded LucidLink eight years ago, our vision was to pioneer innovation while prioritizing our people and fostering a vibrant culture. We’ve been incredibly fortunate to attract individuals who resonate with this vision and have joined us on this remarkable journey. It’s a profound honor for Forbes to acknowledge what we’ve always believed – that the strength of a company lies in its people. This recognition reaffirms our commitment to nurturing a workplace where talent thrives and innovation flourishes”, said Peter Thompson, CEO and co-founder of Lucidlink.

LucidLink’s recognition highlights its unwavering commitment to fostering excellence and innovation. Its industry-leading technology and culture have received numerous accolades, including National Association of Broadcasters Product of the Year in 2022 and 2023 and Inc. Magazine’s Best US Workplaces in 2023.

This year’s Best Startup Employers list is the fifth such ranking from Forbes and Statista, identifying the best-performing and most innovative startup employers. For consideration, companies must be headquartered in the US, founded between 2014 and 2021, employing at least 50 employees, and exhibiting a startup structure – which excludes spin-offs of large corporations.

CNBC tells us the story of Yanolja founder and chairman Lee Su-jin, who got his start in the travel industry as a motel cleaner.

The experience inspired him to launch hotel booking site Yanolja, which means “Hey, let’s play” in Korean, in 2007. Now that it’s also a popular travel app, the brand has become a global phenomenon with more than 57 million downloads, according to its website.

This unexpected success helped Lee amass a fortune of his own. According to Forbes, his net worth today stands at $1.2 billion, due to the fact that he, along with his wife and two daughters, owns nearly a third of Yanolja. This spring, he debuted on the publication’s “Korea’s 50 Richest” list.

Despite being among the richest people in the world today, Lee’s childhood was very difficult. He was orphaned at a young age and lived with relatives for most of his childhood, according to Bloomberg. When Lee was 23, he began cleaning rooms at a “love hotel” – a type of motel known for offering short-term lodging on an hourly basis – in exchange for a steady paycheck and a place to stay.

Despite the difficulties, Lee doesn’t give up and is constantly thinking of ways to make his life better. He saves his money and invests in stocks. He even started a salad business, according to Bloomberg, but it wasn’t long before he suffered a setback and went back to the hotel business – but this time fate was smiling on him.

When South Korea passed an anti-prostitution law in 2004, Lee worried that the motels that gave him security would go bankrupt.

So he decided to rebrand the love hotels. In 2005, he set up a hotel review platform, which two years later became Yanolja. His goal was to modernize the hotels and convince young couples and travelers that they were safe, comfortable and cost-effective.
Kim says that Lee’s job as a cleaner, where he was able to observe guests’ experiences in love hotels, was actually an advantage: it gave him the opportunity to adapt the platform to users.

In June 2019, Yanolja became South Korea’s eighth “unicorn” startup, achieving a valuation of more than $1 billion during a funding round.

Two years later, investment firm SoftBank Vision Fund 2 bought a minority stake in Yanolja for $1.7 billion at a valuation of $6.7 billion, according to Forbes.

The SoftBank deal has sparked much speculation about a potential IPO of Yanolja. However, the company has yet to go public, and Kim even stated in a July 2022 press release that Yanolja is in no rush to announce an IPO as the hospitality industry is still recovering from the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In 2021, the company is launching Yanolja Cloud, a proprietary artificial intelligence software for other hospitality and entertainment platforms. Today, 19 million combined users use Yanolja’s software platforms for reservations, travel and property management operations, according to the company’s website.

Lee is not only proud to have achieved the unachievable, but he has also changed people’s attitude towards this type of motel.

“We are deeply troubled by TikTok’s recurring pattern of providing misleading, inaccurate or false information to Congress and its users in the US, including in response to us during oversight hearings and letters,”

the senators wrote.

The letter from Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn draws attention to how sensitive data about US users may be stored in China and how officials there may have access to it.

Recent reports by The New York Times and Forbes raise questions about statements made during testimony before Congress in March by Shaw Chu, TikTok’s CEO, and during an October 2021 hearing that included Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s head of public policy for the Americas. TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

“We are reviewing the letter. We remain confident in the accuracy of our testimony and responses to Congress.”

said Alex Haurek, a spokesperson for TikTok.

The entertainment platform has been working for years to convince the U.S. government that it can separate its U.S. operations and ring-fence U.S. users’ data amid concerns that the company could provide that information to Chinese authorities.

Stay tuned for details.

A Forbes features the ways members of the Forbes Technology Council detail how their teams are keeping up with new technologies and trends.

Here are some of the ways:

Hold Regular Meetings Focused On Tech Trends

We have a scheduled weekly tech trend meeting and announcements. Each member of the team shares their knowledge of new and trending technologies. I also encourage members of the team to join known technology groups, forums and chat groups and to attend events and webinars. One other strategy is to regularly invite original equipment manufacturers and technology vendors to come and share knowledge on new and innovative technologies and improvements. – shares to Forbes Technology  Dr Samuel Mbonu, Tangerine Africa.

Allocate Time For Personal And Community Projects And Sabbaticals

World-class organizations that want to foster curiosity and innovation in their engineering cultures often allocate time in their resource plans for personal projects, community or open-source projects, and sabbaticals. It’s a time-tested approach used by think tanks and universities around the world. – shares to Forbes Technology Dan Branco, GSI Solutions.

Include All Teams And Cover Multiple Topics

We use Slack across the board, including all teams within our company—field, product, engineering, HR and sales—and covering a wide range of topics, including well-being, mental health and so on. This helps us to align and drive collaboration. But this is just one among the many tools and resources we use to drive the dissemination of information, including intranets, wikis and so on. The only issue becomes maintaining all of these different communication tools! – shares to Forbes Technology Navaid Khan, Cohesity.

Implement An ‘Innovation Intake’ Process

We have implemented an “innovation intake” process wherein anyone and everyone in the company can make recommendations or highlight new trends. It’s important to understand why a tech trend or a new technology caught someone’s attention, to detail and understand the features they liked, and to assess the value that could be delivered. This helps us prioritize our roadmap accordingly and empowers us to be tech enablers for the firm. – shares to Forbes Technology Karthik Ranganathan, SupportNinja.

Build Learning Into The Culture

If you’ve built learning into your culture, more individuals will not only “keep up,” but more critically, they will help share and evangelize organically. This not only helps spread knowledge naturally and sustainably, but it also reinforces the culture of learning. – shares to Forbes Technology Andy Lin, Provoke Solutions.

The first woman in tech to appear in Forbes’ annual ranking of the world’s wealthiest people doesn’t show up until the No. 57 spot, where Laurene Powell Jobs sits with a cool $18.5 billion net worth.

1. Laurene Powell Jobs — $18.5 billion

Ranking on Forbes’ list of world’s wealthiest: 57

Age: 55

Country: United States

Source of wealth: Jobs has significant stakes in Apple and Disney that she inherited from her late husband, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. She founded a social impact firm in the early 2000s called Emerson Collective, which now has a majority stake in The Atlantic.

2. Dagmar Dolby — $4.1 billion

Ranking on Forbes’ list of world’s wealthiest: 479

Age: 77

Country: United States

Source of wealth: Dolby is the largest shareholder of Dolby Laboratories, a producer of surround-sound systems and noise reduction technologies. She owns about 38% of the company that her late husband founded in 1965.

3. Judy Faulkner — $3.6 billion.

Ranking on Forbes’ list of world’s wealthiest: 592

Age: 75

Country: United States

Source of wealth: Faulkner is the founder and CEO of Epic Systems, a software company for electronic medical records. The company, founded in 1979, stores the medical information of hundreds of millions of Americans in its software.