Sébastien Grosjean
CEO - Smily
He can sit in a strategy conversation about commercial value, then go all the way down into product discovery, delivery, how to architect it, build it with his own hands, and lead a team to build it with him.
… If you can get him as a fractional CPTO, on your board or in your investor committee, take it.
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Karol led product and engineering at Smily, and he was my right hand.
Early 2025 we started talking about traveler fees and processing inbound wire transfers from Airbnb and Booking.com. That groundwork is what made everything after it possible: split payments, traveler fees, cancellation protection. The whole FinTech portfolio rests on it.
Karol led that play with a handful of his team, and he shipped it fast and stable at the same time. That combination is the one almost nobody gets right.
He did it with about twelve people across product and engineering, against competitors running engineering organisations of 250 and up. And while leading all of that, he sat down and built the new Owners Portal backend by himself in a few weeks, on a scope we had estimated in months.
What I value most about Karol is his range. He is deeply technical, and just as strong on architecture, infrastructure, product and business. He can sit in a strategy conversation about commercial value, then go all the way down into product discovery, delivery, how to architect it, build it with his own hands, and lead a team to build it with him. Very few people cover that whole span. Most pick an end and stay there.
If Karol tells you he is going to do something, it is done. You never babysit him. He is a machine, and somehow also a genuinely good communicator with humans, which is a pairing you almost never find in the same person.
If you can get him as a fractional CPTO, on your board or in your investor committee, take it. If you can get him full time as your CPTO, you are in luck.
