CATEGORY
Chief Technology Officer
RECIPIENT
Josef Starýchfojtů, Mews
By DAVID EISEN
Josef Starýchfojtů never met a problem he didn’ t think he could figure out. Growing up in the Czech Republic, he was fascinated by challenge and the satisfaction that comes from overcoming it. The more difficult, the better. He’ s never lost that passion.“ I’ ve been curious about solving hard problems my entire life,” he said.
Starýchfojtů, like distinguished and fellow countryman, the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, was a bit of a wunderkind: He made his first dollar at the age of 12 from coding. Forbes placed him on its“ 30 under 30” list in the Czech Republic.
Today, he is chief product and technology officer at Mews, a hospitality operating system that is valued at around $ 2.5 billion after it raised $ 300 million in a Series D round this past January. He has been with Mews for eight years, having started there as a software engineer. Embracing technology as a career, he said, comes from its fast feedback loop, where actions are measured immediately and results are used to adjust the next steps.“ Building something from scratch and then iterating is addictive,” he said.
Applying technology to the hospitality space— that’ s a different test case altogether.“ The hospitality industry surprised me. It’ s an industry built entirely around human experience, and yet the technology underneath it was built
62 hotelsmag. com September 2026