He runs Gyfted and lists his job as "Village Idiot ie. CEO." Underneath the joke sits a recruiting platform built on Stanford psychometrics, designed to hire people on who they are - not the resume they padded.
Most founders inflate their titles. Robert Kowalski deflates his - then goes and closes a Fortune 1000 team-wide deal in two months. The self-mockery is the tell: here is someone who finds the theater of hiring absurd, and built a company to end it.
Gyfted is a recruiting platform that refuses to start with your CV. Instead it starts with a question most hiring software never asks: who is this person, and what team will they actually thrive on? The engine runs on psychometrics, AI and behavior design - matching candidates to roles and to managers on personality, culture fit and ability. Kowalski's pitch is blunt. The recruiting industry is broken, and he intends to flip the table.
The motivation is personal. Kowalski has said he experienced recruitment discrimination himself, and that the experience convinced him bias is not a bug in hiring but a feature of how humans read each other. "Consciously or unconsciously," he says, "everyone falls into the trap of recruitment bias procedure." Gyfted is his attempt to design that trap out - to let two psychometric profiles, candidate and team, find each other before a hiring manager ever forms a first impression.
The product line wears its science lightly. Alongside serious culture and ability assessments, Gyfted ships playful diagnostics like a Startup Mindset Test and a Four Quadrants of Conformism Test - the kind of thing a job seeker shares for fun and a recruiter quietly takes seriously. That dual audience is the whole strategy. Founders and team managers get faster, fairer remote hiring; students and career changers get free tools for self-knowledge and the job hunt. Both sides feed the same matching machine.
Kowalski runs the company the way he talks about it - remotely, leanly, and with a healthy suspicion of his own importance. He coordinates a distributed team on ClickUp, preaches regular one-on-ones, and tells other founders the lesson he learned the hard way: concentrate not just on product but also on distribution. It is the kind of advice that sounds obvious until you have shipped something brilliant that nobody found.
Robert Kowalski - CEO. Economist, operator, distribution obsessive.
Michal Kosinski - Chief Scientist. Stanford computational psychologist who has testified before an EEOC body on AI and workplace bias.
Adam Szefer - CTO. Ex-Bloomberg engineer from the distributed-systems and ML world.
Gyfted began as a friendship. In 2015, Kowalski was studying at the Stanford Graduate School of Business when he met Michal Kosinski, then a postdoctoral researcher in Stanford's Computer Science department. Both were Polish. Both were fascinated - and frustrated - by how labor markets actually work. They kept circling the same conversation: why is it so hard to match the right person to the right team?
That conversation took five years to become a company. Gyfted was, in the founders' words, "designed and built in California and Poland" across 2020 and 2021, with Adam Szefer joining to handle the engineering. The split geography is not incidental - it is the thesis. If talent is distributed everywhere and opportunity is not, then a remote-first hiring engine is the fix, and a remote-first, two-country team is the proof of concept.
The mission they wrote down is almost disarmingly plain: "Simplifying recruiting and job markets to make candidates and teams happy." No jargon, no moonshot grandiosity. Just the idea that hiring should leave both sides better off, and that the tools to make that happen already exist in behavioral science - they simply have not been pointed at the job market yet.
Two of Gyfted's assessments do the marketing that ads cannot. The Startup Mindset Test asks whether you are built to thrive in chaos. The Four Quadrants of Conformism Test maps how people split along two axes - whether they follow rules and whether they think for themselves. People take these for fun, share the result, and unknowingly hand Gyfted exactly the behavioral signal it trades in.
It is distribution disguised as a personality quiz. Which, given Kowalski's one piece of repeated advice, is entirely the point.
For someone who built a company to ignore credentials, Kowalski has a stack of them. The irony is the point: he knows exactly what a glittering resume hides, because he assembled one across three continents.
Led business development for institutional digital-asset custody - learning how enterprises actually buy before he tried to sell them a hiring engine.
Consulted for the life-sciences startup, including work on its Y Combinator application - a front-row seat to how startups get funded.
Turned a Stanford friendship and a personal grievance with biased hiring into a behavioral-science recruiting platform spanning two continents.
His official title at Gyfted reads "Co-Founder, Village Idiot ie. CEO." A founder who pokes fun at founders.
His chief scientist, Michal Kosinski, is one of the world's most cited computational psychologists - and has testified on AI and workplace bias.
Schooled in London, California and Beijing, he runs a fully remote team and still swears by the humble one-on-one.