Jessica, co-founder and CEO of Sola, shares her journey from MIT and hedge funds to raising $21M by age 24 from top Silicon Valley investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
In this interview, she opens up about:
1. The hardest lesson she learned at Y Combinator: “Stop overbuilding. Start selling.”
2. How she and her team built Solar, an AI platform automating mission-critical workflows for Fortune 100 companies.
3. Why resilience, risk-taking, and listening to customers became her founder superpowers.
Watch to learn what it really takes to build a startup that earns the trust of some of the world’s biggest companies—while navigating the rollercoaster of being a 20-something founder.
00:00 Intro
00:57 What is Sola?
01:46 From Youngest Quant to Founder
05:44 The Oldest Inconvenience, The Biggest Opportunity
09:38 The Counterintuitive YC Playbook
12:03 Delivering Happiness
15:04 If You Can’t Do It for 10 years, Don’t Start
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