Silicon Valley’s Top Investors Bet on This 22-Year-Old Founder | Sola, Jessica Wu

I was actually the youngest quant

researcher at a pretty big hedge fund

today and so had started my career in

finance but had seen a lot of different

areas very thesis driven to just pure

numbers and numbers crunching. You know

when I was working in corporate finance

I would work uh I don't know 9 10 hours

a day and uh 5 days a week and then if I

was called in on a weekend I would

honestly be very miserable. It just felt

like it it wasn't my own thing. Now I

work well every waking second uh and 7

days a week, but I've never been

happier. And I think I think I'm young,

so that's one piece that gives me a

little bit more optionality. When it

comes to what you want to do, though,

this sounds very simple, but it's really

just what feels right. The team feels

that way, too. It's really like when you

own a piece of something and you're

you're really growing it from ground up,

it's easy to feel excited. And so my

advice for like stable career versus

startup is if you have the optionality

to I think you know whatever makes you

feel happy, whatever makes you feel like

you're excited to go to work every

single day and that you feel very

fulfilled in what you're doing. Hi, I'm

Jessica, co-founder and CEO of Sol. Sol

is an agentic process automation

platform. We help businesses automate

their most critical and operational

workflows using AI in a much easier and

faster way than traditional RPA. Solus

started out of YC about 2 years ago.

Since then, we have raised a seed round

led by Sarah at Conviction. Most

recently, we raised a series A led by

A16Z following an enormous amount of

traction from our enterprise customers.

We have 5xed our revenue this year.

Execution volume on the platform is

doubling month over month since the

beginning of this year. And we're proud

to partner with some of the largest

companies in the world, including the

Fortune 100, Amlaw 100, and some of the

largest private businesses in logistics

and healthcare.

Uh, I grew up doing a lot of very

competitive things. Played competitive

piano and I did competitive math and

things like that. I think that gives you

a pretty hard will. It probably makes

you very disciplined. I think I'm good

at taking risks and putting myself out

in places that I don't feel comfortable.

And I think that builds up a lot of

resilience. Like doing something even if

you don't feel like you're 100% ready. I

do that a lot. And just jumping into

things and really going for it. I think

that builds up a lot of character.

When I was in high school, I had visited

MIT a couple of times. I think it does a

great job of the whole, you know, you're

the dumbest person in the room kind of

thing. It's always the most fun when

you're surrounded by a lot of people you

can learn from. I think MIT is a very

unique place. It's the only place where

it's really exactly as it portrayed in

the movies. You have people building

roller coasters in the front lawn and

you have people training models in the

dorm basement and things like that and

it's every bit as real as as it's

described. I think that MIT really puts

a ceiling on how technically difficult

things get. I've been working on this

company for about two years now and have

experienced a lot of different things

since college, but never have I had to

use like so many brain cells to just

think about a really hard problem. I

think the most important thing you

should do is jump into everything as

quickly as you can. And MIT does a great

job of showing you exactly what's on the

forefront of what you should be paying

attention to. You should absolutely go

learn about all the new things that

people are doing research about. You

should absolutely spend as much time as

you can with people that are doing said

research. And I think that if you create

a habit around trying to learn as much

as you can and intake as much what's on

the frontier as possible, then you're

better equipped, especially now to to

learn and to work in an environment like

today where things change so rapidly and

there's so many things happening in the

tech world. I think the thing that you

get from just a very technical

background is you can break things down

very easily. If you can communicate what

you're trying to solve in a very simple

way, it makes it a lot easier to solve

and that just gives you a really good

framework around solving things,

especially in a landscape like today

where new model basically comes out

every single week and things are

constantly changing. I think there's a

lot of value in always centering back to

like what are you trying to solve for

your customer or for your user, whoever

that is, and then just building on top

of that. And I think once you look and

sort of narrow things down to the root

problem, not just the problem that

people are saying, then you can deliver

an enormous amount of value to the

people that are interfacing with what

you're doing.

Before I worked on Solola as a startup,

I had no idea that I wanted to do a

startup. I had tried a lot of different

things. I had worked in venture. I had

worked at a couple hedge funds. I was

actually the youngest quant researcher

at a pretty big hedge fund today.

Finance was an interesting choice. I had

an adviser who recommended to me that

it's actually pretty good to spend some

time in finance because it teaches you a

way of thinking that's pretty special,

especially if you're doing trading.

Teaches you to be very objective, that

you should always calculate odds for

things. I think I am someone who's

guilty of not thinking in a very

numerical or like standardized way all

the time. And so I think working in

finance for a couple years gave me a lot

of perspective on being objective, being

able to calculate and just think through

things in a very rational way. And

that's something that stuck with me.

Doing a startup can be very emotional

and I think always going back to first

principles thinking and trying to think

in a more like statistical way can be

pretty helpful in terms of making

decisions even like in a startup lens.

Maybe you're looking at a super huge

deployment and that's something you have

to really weigh or someone is really

looking at features like all of those

things can be mapped out in a way that's

more rational. You can say, you know,

what are the odds that this particular,

you know, this isn't perfect math. This

particular customer converts by this

particular day. What are the things that

I'm trading off? And it gives you a very

statistical framework to think about

these decisions without just I really

like this customer, so I want to work

with them. People tell you that you can

learn a lot from playing poker and that

applies a lot to the startup world. I

think that's true. A lot of it is just

odds, being rational, and then, you

know, making decisions in the best

direction. And it's actually very useful

when you work on a startup.

At one of the hedge funds we worked at,

they had a lot of manual work around

interacting with this really old

brokerage software that they built on

top of. At the time, I had been using

RPA tools to try to automate that. I

didn't really know how big the space of

RPA was. So, RPA stands for robotic

process automation. RPA tools basically

automate manual work by replicating

workflows the way humans do. So moving

the mouse, typing things in, clicking,

and interfacing with browser and desktop

applications the way humans do. What I

did know was that there is a lot of

manual work at these larger companies.

There's no good tools out there that are

really easy to use. And even though I

have a computer science background, it

was still really hard for me to just

build a simple browser or desktop

automation. That was sort of where the

the seat of the problem happened. My

co-founder actually had a really similar

experience. He was building out hospital

systems at MGH. they had used some very

old tooling and he was also surprised by

how brittle it was and how hard it was

to implement. I think those were really

good glimpses for us into what real

world work looks like. Um, when you're

at MIT, you live in a very tech-forward

world and you're surrounded by tools

that are very easy to use, that

everything has APIs that plug into each

other, you can build automations very

easily. But in the real world, when

you're looking at most companies out

there, they're doing really manual work.

People operate across a ton of different

systems that don't connect. As you can

imagine, people doing operations will

touch spreadsheets, internal portals,

external systems, they will touch files,

and just about everything in between.

Those were two really lucky glimpses I

think that we had into what that

actually looked like. From there, when

we went through YC, like I mentioned, we

kind of came in without too much of an

idea. We spent about the first month or

so just figuring out what we wanted to

build. I think the RPA space was very

exciting to us because we understood

very well what that problem looked like

and how we wanted to solve it. Obviously

RPA is very big and I think that piece

is exciting to us. The ambition of

automating all digital work is a

perennial and obvious one and I think

the aspects of like being able to marry

AI in the real world for enterprise

companies and all the technical and

model improvements on the flip side of

things was a very exciting sort of

combination for us.

Solo's MVP was very simple. We had a

recorder just like today. That part's

the same that lets you take a recording

of your workflow. You could upload it,

but uh different from today. Didn't

really do a great job of laying out what

your workflow did. You could also run it

and it would just run on your own

computer and repeat back the same steps.

Not quite as intelligent or easy to use

as we had hoped. And since then, we've

kept a lot of things the same. So, you

know, you can still record a workflow,

you can still upload it to the platform,

but now you can run it hundreds of VMs

at scale. You can edit it and change

things in very fine granularity. You can

add logic. You can add information on

top. And you have a lot of optionality

on how you want to orchestrate and run

these things at scale. One thing we had

probably underestimated was just there

were a lot of trade-offs that we had to

make. But it it is a big question of,

you know, existing tools offer

everything under the sun and they've

been building this tool for 20 years.

Like how do you actually get up to

speed? One thing that we found to be a

pretty big balancing act is just getting

to the point where we can be helpful for

customers but also, you know, being able

to do so in a pretty timely fashion.

There are a couple hard moments that I

can think of in the early days where we

had to give up really exciting early

revenue. It was just a point where we

had to really focus on building this

core product, but we had to turn down

customers the very beginning. Turn down

people when we were, you know, almost

there, but not quite. And that was that

was very difficult. I think in the early

months you get pulled in a lot of

different directions. There were some

hard conversations where we had to say

no to some huge names that we were very

excited about. It didn't feel aligned

with the direction that we wanted to go

down. We were capacity constrained and

it would mean giving up or sacrificing

too many other things and other areas of

the business.

I'm pretty big on advisors. I'm someone

that asks for a lot of advice. I like to

surround myself with people that I think

have a lot more experience. So, whenever

I get panicked or I'm under pressure,

the first thing I'll do is just go to my

all of my resources and get people's

takes on things. I think usually that

puts me in a pretty good place. We chose

YC because we had heard really good

things about it and that was also the

advice that we got early on, which is

that you're going to be surrounded by a

lot of really amazing people and you're

going to have 3 months to lock in. YC

tells you to try and they really push

you to try and sell something. This

means that even if you don't have a

working product, you can put up like a,

you know, use lovable or something to

put up a fake fake front end and then

you should try and go sell it. And the

good thing about that is a lot of the

times when you build something, I don't

know if this applies as much to solo,

but in general when you build something,

you don't know if you're going down the

right direction. Most clear way you know

you're building something that people

want is if they'll pay for it, right?

And if they'll keep paying for it. YC

does a good job in really pushing you to

sell even if you may not be there. You

know, don't spend 6 months to build a

product. First try and sell something.

See if it works. You might burn a couple

bridges doing that, which is why I'm

saying your mileage may vary, but at

least you have very clear picture of I

know this person would pay for this. I

know a lot of people would pay for this

and they would depend on it a lot or I'm

solving some really meaningful problem.

First cell is not good when you get a

little bigger like you know don't sell a

fake feature. It still is a pretty good

mindset to operate behind which is even

once you're working on the right product

there's a lot of directions you should

go try and experiment build different

mockups of things try and talk to

customers get something out there and

then go from there and iterate and

polish it afterwards I think we met our

first customer actually very early on it

was around YC we were in the phase of

doing the thing where we sold the

product that didn't really exist the

good thing was we were pretty honest

with them and we told them this thing

doesn't exist but it will exist in a

couple months and they were like okay

well come talk to us when it does I

think it's really hard advice. It's very

unintuitive. You know, you're taught

your whole life to finish something and

then go sell it or then go present it or

whatever it is. And this is almost the

entire opposite. It's like put up the

most minimal fake version you probably

can of something and then go sell it and

then if it's good then go back and build

it. I think it's not for the faint of

heart for sure. And sometimes, you know,

maybe you really succeeded and you

actually sold the thing and now you have

to deliver. And YC's advice there is

probably like spend a week in the

basement coding so that you can get it

out. It's not easy advice to take and

selling without actually having the

thing is not very intuitive, but I think

it it at least puts you on the right

direction. It gives you a very clear yes

or no for if this is something you

should be doing at all.

One of my favorite books is called

Delivering Happiness. It's quite good.

It's about like sort of how the little

things matter and how customer delight

is kind of a north north star, but it

doesn't just come in one form factor of

like I I did this thing on time. There's

a million other ways you can build that

up. If your customers are happy, most

other things fall in place is something

that we've tend to found. You know,

especially when you're building very

critical software for a company, you're

asking a company that's been around for

decades or maybe even centuries to trust

you to do their most critical

operations. That is by no means easy. To

this day, uh most of Sol's customers

come through word of mouth. And that's

because existing customers have felt so

happy with the experience. You're small,

you're early, so what can you do to make

up for being a much newer tool? And

that's usually one build a really great

experience and really solve their

problems. That's the obvious one. Second

is to ship fast and really take in good

feedback. This goes both ways. So you

know you want to pick customers that

will give you good feedback and you also

want your customers or you also will

want to take in the feedback that they

give you and move very quickly on what

they're asking. There's a lot of ways

that are more traditional than just

building good tools where you can win

enterprise companies over. You can be

very supportive. You can listen to

people. Listening is the most important

thing you can do for customers. For some

of our early design partners, we still

do. We hop on a weekly call with them.

We basically take in their feedback week

over week and then we try to deliver at

a pretty fast rate. And that's the sort

of thing that will make people pick the

startup over the really old legacy

incumbent. Aside from just the tool

being better,

one of our largest customers wanted to

do a deployment of Sol last year. They

wanted to do it during the most quiet

period of the year, which was on

Christmas day because they don't get a

ton of volume then. I hope that we don't

have to ask this of the team again. We

all came in, we worked that week. They

had been using Solo for a long time and

they had been championing it internally

and were very excited. We were like,

"Okay, if the deployment is going to

happen on Christmas, like we're going to

do it." There have been moments like

that. I think in general, we try to

really go above and beyond. People are

trusting us to run their operations. So,

they'll use sola to send their invoices

and do their accounts payable or they'll

use it to actually send out shipments or

they will enter in patient data. So all

these things are very critical like uh

one thing that we realized when we built

solar is like we can never go down. That

actually means that a real business out

there who has hundreds or thousands of

employees like their their billing is

going to be late that day. We've done a

lot to basically maintain that. It's one

of those things where it's a little bit

different from like a consumer tool or

something that's AI that's generating

copy or you know finding sales leads

like these things. If your tool goes

down it's a big deal and it disrupts

people's work but it's not the end of

the world. the nature of our business

when we go down is sort of the end of

the world. So, we've done a lot for our

customers. We stay up and running all

the time. We've spent a million weekends

and a million different holidays in the

office. But, I think along the way, it's

it's been good. Like, there's a little

bit of, you know, we're extremely

thankful to the people who trusted us to

take care of these workflows and made

the bet on an early new startup. And

hopefully, we can continue to deliver on

everything that we've promised.

I think building a startup is really

really unimaginably difficult. You're on

a roller coaster and you're constantly

experiencing very high highs and very

low lows and then it's also compressed

and so it's happening, you know, morning

might be your best day ever and then 2

hours later you're suffering from

probably the worst news you've ever

heard. And this happens uh pretty much

every day. um maybe every week, maybe

not like an exact moment, but I think as

a founder, you really just learn to you

learn that things sort of return to the

norm. You have this comfort in your head

that things will be okay even if they

don't feel okay because they always end

up being okay provided that you are

building in the right market and also

that you have the right people around

you. And with those two things, you

might have some huge incident happens.

Really bad news like someone leaves the

team. Maybe a customer is your champion

who you were selling to left and in the

middle of the sales process. Like these

things feel really bad. And then once

you get a little bit more used to them

and they've been happening so often, you

learn to take a step back and you're

kind of able to process a lot more of

the things happening at a startup um

than before. And I think the early team

also kind of learns that as well and be

able to look at the big picture and that

tends to be much more helpful in terms

of just mental piece when you're doing

this.

What we're trying to build is a really

big mission. So there will be no problem

of us having 10 years to spend on it. I

think it's an enormous problem space.

The other is that I I really do believe

in what Solola is trying to accomplish.

Um, I think that there's a lot of work

that people shouldn't have to do that's

very manual and very tedious. And if we

can free people up, they can do things

that are very fulfilling and creative

and very interesting. And I hope that,

you know, businesses can start running

on sola and relying on sola to do the

things that are manual and wrote and

that people don't really want to do and

instead spend time on things that are

exciting and think through leadership

and strategy and decision-m and all the

more interesting parts of work.