Dean Forbes who rose from being a homeless teenager to become the CEO of a successful tech company, has been named the UK’s most influential black person.
The 45-year-old chief executive of software company Forterro, which is valued at €2bn (£1.7bn), has replaced the former Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful in the top spot of this year’s Powerlist.
The list was started in 2006 to showcase black role models to young people across sectors including business, science, technology and the arts.
Forbes is one of a handful of black CEOs globally to lead companies valued at more than €1bn. He is also a partner at the private equity firm Corten Capital and runs Forbes Family Group, a not-for-profit that supports a wide range of charities and causes. This year FFG raised more than £400,000 for the African Caribbean Leukaemia Trust.
Speaking to the Guardian, Forbes described the accolade as a “career and professional high”.
Forbes is joined on the Powerlist 2025 by Bernard Mensah, the president of International at Bank of America and CEO of Merrill Lynch International (MLI) and Afua Kyei, the chief financial officer at the Bank of England.
Newcomers include Emma Grede, the founding partner of Kim Kardashian’s Skims empire; Adejoké Bakare, the UK’s first Black female Michelin-starred chef; Andrew ‘Rapman’ Onwubolu, the creator of the Netflix show Supacell; and Damson Idris, the star of crime drama Snowfall.
Forbes was born in south-east London in 1978. He said his early childhood years were some of the happiest times of his life, where he remembers playing in the adventure playgrounds and at the local youth club. “Now as an adult and as a parent myself, I’ve got a much better appreciation for how economically challenged our upbringing was,” Forbes said. “We didn’t have very much. We were very poor. My mum worked when she could, but she suffers from muscular dystrophy.”
He was always business-minded, even at school. He ran a barber shop in between lessons and remembers going to Ridley Road market to buy plain belts and gold lettering. He then sold them as designer belts in class. “We were only 14, so hopefully the counterfeit police won’t come after us,” he said.
He struggled with homelessness in his later childhood, but was still able to get 10 GCSEs. He tried to pursue a career in football, but that ended after an injury. At 17, he got a job doing telesales at Motorola. He quickly rose up the ranks and went on to work at Philadelphia-based technology firm Primavera, where his career soon skyrocketed. He successfully expanded Primavera’s international division, contributing to its sale to Oracle for $550m (£424m).
As many notable and successful black people hail from sports or entertainment, Forbes’ career trajectory has made him passionate about showing young black Britons the different paths to success. “I’ve got a platform and an opportunity now to demonstrate and practise a very different narrative. So that’s become probably the biggest motivator for me over anything else that I’m doing professionally,” he said.
While he doesn’t have experiences of outright racism, he is often the only black person in the room. “If there’s another one, they probably work for me.”
The tech entrepreneur remembers being in a team meeting when it suddenly dawned on him that he was the only person of colour in the room. “I realised that at this point in my career, with everything that I’ve been fortunate to achieve … if I don’t take these opportunities to cause some degree of change, then when will I and who will?”
He paused the meeting and asked for the others to find people “who have skills, experience or aspiration to benefit from being in this room”. Those around him were initially shocked – they were discussing a multimillion pound deal – “but a couple hours later, there were two people in the room, both of whom have since left those roles and gone into bigger and better roles. They’re individually brilliant, but I think being in that room was part of their individual facilitation.”
The top 10 Powerlist 2025
1) Dean Forbes – CEO, Forterro, partner Corten Capital, chair Forbes Family Group
2) Bernard Mensah – president of international, Bank of America; CEO, MLI
3) Afua Kyei – chief financial officer, Bank of England
4) Emma Grede – CEO and co-founder, Good American; founding partner, Skims
5) Joshua Siaw MBE – partner, White & Case
6) Tunde Olanrewaju – senior partner, McKinsey & Company
7) Alexander and Oliver Kent-Braham – founders, Marshmallow
8) Adejoké Bakare – chef-owner, Chishuru, Michelin-starred restaurant
9) Justin Onuekwusi – chief investment officer, St James’s Place
10) Pamela Maynard – chief AI transformation officer, Microsoft