Carl Shaulis

“I’ve had the sincere pleasure of working with Carl upon beginning at HomeAway (now Vrbo) in 2011. He was great then – knowledgeable, easy-going, kind, motivated, and inspired. And since then, I’ve seen Carl grow right along with the needs of the organization without changing that core. It’s fairly amazing to observe how truly flexible and nimble he has been in both the navigation of his own career and with the many different and varied personalities during the course of that evolution. My experience with Carl began when he was a Senior Director of our QA org, where his leadership made our Vrbo migration to the HA platform go more smoothly than it could have. From there, we’ve worked indirectly on a number of other initiatives I helped to lead (Traveler Service Fee, Merchant of Record, and a number of migrations to name a few). His influence was always immediately apparent with his people who worked on our delivery teams. And when I was unable to get the results I wanted, I was always able to count on him to help get them back on the right track. After we were acquired, we disbanded our formal QA org, but Carl moved into a Director of Engineering role, where he focused on general Agile operational excellence and the tools to facilitate that in our rapidly expanding engineering org. We began reporting to the same manager and often found ourselves collaborating on the challenges of people management, org structure, and career pathing. I got to see Carl’s direct and positive influence with the individuals on his own team as well as his thinking and input on ideas and concepts relevant to our program management team. What I enjoyed the most – and really appreciated and learned from – was the way he conducted himself across such a broad range of roles and personalities. Carl was always able to provide good insightful feedback with engineers just as easily as he could with program managers and TPMs just as easily as he could with product. It was this ability that made him such an integral part of our program leadership team and a go-to with Vrbo/EG leadership in general. I had another very memorable experience with Carl through a formal coaching training program. Very often you work with people and are only exposed to one small dimension of who they are. I’m thankful for being able to participate in that program in part because it allowed me to get a glimpse into the heart of a lot of others. Carl was one of them. It came as no surprise that I was able to confirm Carl is an absolutely outstanding person and leader. This is someone who cares just as deeply about others as he does his own contributions to work delivery. He is selfless, earnest, open to new ideas, and strongly aware of his influence as a leader. That awareness can just as often be abused as it can be put to good use. Carl fits squarely in the latter camp, where every person he has worked with benefits. I know I certainly have, as we’ve had our share of good open conversations where I”

“Not only did Carl hit the ground running, but he took pride and ownership of all his tasks. Carl did his due diligence and was always plugged into the various projects we worked on. A professional, detailed-oriented tester with a gumption for getting things automated.”