Kasia Kowalska

"We hire people for what they know and we fire them for who they are" I build the people side of companies where the talent bar is brutal and the market never closes. For five years I've led People & Talent at Keyrock, a digital assets market maker serving clients like Ripple and Bitpanda across 100+ marketplaces — named among Europe's fastest-growing fintechs by Sifted. I scaled the team from 46 to 200+ people, 70% of them distributed across 45 countries, while keeping retention above 90% and engagement above 8/10. Along the way we became one of the 10 most progressive Rust engineering employers globally, competing for the same engineers as Amazon and Oracle, and hired across some of the hardest talent markets that exist: HFT, quant trading, crypto compliance. Before Keyrock I built the European HR function at bitFlyer (one of Japan's largest crypto exchanges) from 13 to 30+ people, recruited for Amazon EU, and started at GSK. I'm a psychologist by training (MSc, Work & Organizational Psychology, plus a systemic psychotherapy counsellor course) — which shapes how I think about performance, leadership and healthy high-performing teams. I speak at industry events (Binance Women in Crypto, Brussels Blockchain Week, Web3 Connect Geneva) and write - amongst other things - about agentic organisational development and what AI really changes in org design - and what it doesn't. Multilingual (five languages). I take on a small number of advisory engagements each year with crypto, fintech and deep-tech scale-ups. If your hiring plan is ambitious and your talent market is unforgiving, get in touch: kasia.hr4startups@gmail.com