Sam Paderewski is a structured credit and decentralized finance (DeFi) professional and Co-Founder of Grove Labs, a subsidiary of Steakhouse Financial building decentralized credit infrastructure within the Sky Ecosystem. His prior career spans structured credit roles at Citigroup and Hildene Capital Management before his transition to DeFi in 2022.^[5]​

Education

Paderewski attended Duke University from 2008 to 2012, where he studied Computer Science and Markets & Management Studies. ^[5]​

Early Career — Citigroup

Sam Paderewski held multiple roles at Citigroup earlier in his career. As an Associate in CLO Structuring and Syndicate, he was responsible for structuring and syndicating collateralized loan obligations (CLOs).^{[5] [6]} He also held a role in Investment Grade Credit Sales.^{[5] [6]} These roles provided Paderewski with firsthand experience in structured credit markets that Grove Labs would later bring onchain.^[5]​

Hildene Capital Management

Paderewski joined Hildene Capital Management as an Investment Analyst. At the Connecticut-based alternative investment firm, he specialized in structured credit, covering CLOs, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and Trust Preferred Securities. His responsibilities included financial analysis and evaluation of asset-based and credit opportunities, a field that Hildene Capital Management focuses on.^{[5] [6]}​

Steakhouse Financial (2022–present)

Paderewski joined Steakhouse Financial in 2022 as a Consultant focused on DeFi initiatives. At Steakhouse, he provided advisory and consulting services to DAOs and Web3 organisations, supporting the development of institutional-grade DeFi tools. His work contributed to developing tools and processes for raising, managing, and distributing capital for digital asset initiatives within the Sky/MakerDAO ecosystem.^{[5] [1]}​

Grove Labs (2025–present)

Paderewski co-founded Grove Labs in January 2025 alongside Mark Phillips and Kevin Chan. Grove Labs is a subsidiary of Steakhouse Financial and a blockchain research and development organisation focused on decentralized credit infrastructure within the Sky Ecosystem.^{[5] [7]}​

The Grove Labs team has collectively facilitated over 1 billion allocation from the Sky Ecosystem into the Janus Henderson Anemoy AAA CLO Strategy (JAAA), a tokenized onchain CLO vehicle launched in partnership with Centrifuge.^{[7] [1]} At the launch Paderewski co-authored a public statement noting the timing of the project and commenting on CLOs: "The launch of Grove comes at a pivotal time when TradFi and DeFi are converging. CLOs are just one of the many assets ripe for movement into DeFi due to their attractive yield profile and structure."^{[7] [1]}​

In May 2026, Grove launched Basin, described as a programmable credit infrastructure product intended to provide instant onchain stablecoin liquidity for tokenized real-world assets. Grove named BlackRock and Janus Henderson as initial asset management partners for Basin.^[3]​

In connection with a 2026 tokenized AAA CLO fund announcement, Paderewski was quoted regarding Grove's anchoring of the fund with $100 million.^[2]​