In a world where artificial intelligence is reshaping industries overnight, few journeys capture the spirit of innovation quite like Jessica’s. Once the youngest quant researcher at a major hedge fund, she traded spreadsheets and market models for code, customer calls, and the chaotic thrill of building a startup from scratch. Today, she’s the co-founder and CEO of Sol, an agentic process automation platform that’s quietly transforming how Fortune 100 companies, top law firms, and healthcare giants operate.
This isn’t just another tech success story—it’s a deeply human tale of risk, resilience, and redefining work itself. And it all began with a simple frustration: Why is so much of enterprise work still painfully manual?
The Spark: When Finance Met Frustration
Jessica didn’t wake up one day and decide to launch a startup. In fact, she had no intention of becoming a founder at all. Her early career was steeped in high-stakes finance—first in venture capital, then at hedge funds where she honed a razor-sharp, data-driven mindset.
“Finance taught me to think objectively, to calculate odds, to strip emotion from decisions,” she recalls. “That discipline became my secret weapon in the emotional rollercoaster of startup life.”
But despite the prestige and intellectual rigor, something felt off. Working 9-to-5 (plus weekends when called) left her unfulfilled. “It just didn’t feel like my thing,” she admits. The turning point came when she tried to automate repetitive tasks at her hedge fund using existing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools—and failed.
Even with a computer science background from MIT, she found the tools clunky, brittle, and nearly impossible to scale. “I was moving a mouse, clicking buttons, typing into legacy brokerage software—just like a human. But the tools couldn’t adapt when the interface changed by a single pixel.”
That frustration wasn’t hers alone. Her future co-founder, working on hospital systems at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), faced the same nightmare: outdated, disconnected systems forcing skilled professionals to waste hours on rote tasks.
They realized something profound: the real world isn’t like MIT’s tech-forward bubble. Outside elite labs, most companies run on spreadsheets, ancient portals, and duct-taped workflows.
And that gap? It was a billion-dollar opportunity.
Birth of Sol: A Startup Story Rooted in Real Pain
Sol emerged from Y Combinator (YC) in 2023—not with a polished product, but with a bold hypothesis: What if AI could automate not just clicks, but judgment?
Unlike traditional RPA—which mimics human actions pixel by pixel—Sol uses agentic AI to understand intent, adapt to changes, and execute complex workflows across disconnected systems (email, ERP, CRM, PDFs, legacy databases) without breaking.
Their MVP was humble: a browser recorder that replayed your actions. But even then, the vision was clear—automate all digital work, freeing humans for creative, strategic thinking.
“We didn’t wait to build the perfect product,” Jessica says. “YC pushed us to sell before we were ready. We told our first customer, ‘This doesn’t exist yet—but it will in 90 days.’ And they said, ‘Great. Call us when it’s ready.’”
That early honesty—and relentless execution—built trust. Today, Sol boasts:
- 5x revenue growth in one year
- Month-over-month doubling of execution volume
- Partnerships with Fortune 100, AmLaw 100, and leaders in logistics and healthcare
But getting here wasn’t glamorous.
The Hard Truths of Startup Life
Jessica doesn’t sugarcoat it: building a startup is unimaginably hard.
There were moments when Sol had to turn down huge enterprise deals because they weren’t aligned with the core product vision. “Saying no to dream customers when you’re burning cash? That’s brutal,” she admits.
Then came the Christmas Day deployment. One of their largest clients needed a critical go-live during the holiday lull. “We all showed up. No one complained. Because if Sol fails, their entire billing cycle stops. That’s not just downtime—it’s existential.”
This isn’t a consumer app where a crash means a bad review. For Sol’s clients, reliability is non-negotiable. A single outage could delay patient data entry, halt shipments, or freeze payroll.
So the team built for zero downtime: redundant systems, 24/7 monitoring, and a culture of over-delivery. “We’ve spent a million weekends in the office,” Jessica says with a tired smile. “But our customers trust us with their operations. That’s sacred.”
MIT, Math, and the Mindset That Built Sol
Jessica’s background reads like a founder’s blueprint: competitive piano, Olympiad-level math, and MIT’s hacker culture.
“At MIT, you’re the dumbest person in the room—and that’s the point,” she laughs. “People build roller coasters on the lawn and train AI models in dorm basements. It’s real.”
That environment instilled two superpowers:
- First-principles thinking: Break problems to their root.
- Comfort with discomfort: “I jump into things even when I’m not 100% ready. That builds resilience.”
In startup land, that means asking: What is the user really trying to solve? Not the surface request (“automate this form”), but the deeper need (“stop my team from working weekends”).
This mindset helped Sol avoid feature bloat. Instead of copying legacy RPA suites with 500 checkboxes, they focused on intelligence, adaptability, and speed.
Today, users can:
- Record a workflow in seconds
- Edit logic with natural language
- Scale across hundreds of virtual machines
- Add conditional branches, data validation, and error handling
All without writing code.
Why Enterprises Choose a Startup Over Legacy Giants
In a market dominated by incumbents like UiPath and Automation Anywhere, why bet on a two-year-old startup?
Jessica’s answer is simple: delight.
“We read Delivering Happiness early on. It taught us: customer joy isn’t one thing—it’s a thousand small promises kept.”
For Sol, that means:
- Weekly calls with design partners
- Shipping fixes in 48 hours
- Saying ‘yes’ when others say ‘Q3 next year’
One healthcare client needed a custom integration for patient intake. Sol built it in three days. “They cried,” Jessica recalls. “No vendor had ever moved that fast.”
That’s the startup advantage: agility as a service.
And it’s working. Most of Sol’s growth comes from word-of-mouth—a rare feat in enterprise sales.
The Mission: Freeing Humans from Digital Drudgery
Behind the metrics and tech specs lies a deeply human mission.
“So much work today is manual, tedious, and soul-crushing,” Jessica says. “People spend hours copying data between systems that should talk to each other. That’s not what humans are for.”
Sol’s vision? A world where businesses run on AI agents, handling repetitive tasks so employees can focus on:
- Strategy
- Creativity
- Leadership
- Human connection
“I hope in 10 years, no one has to enter the same data into five systems,” she says. “That’s not efficiency—that’s waste.”
And with AI evolving weekly, Sol’s agentic architecture is built to evolve too. “New models drop every Tuesday. Our job is to plug them in—so our customers don’t have to.”
Advice for Aspiring Founders: Jump Before You’re Ready
Jessica’s parting wisdom?
“If you have the optionality, chase what makes you excited to wake up every day. Stability is great—but fulfillment is rarer.”
She urges young builders to:
- Talk to users before coding
- Sell the vision, even if the product isn’t ready
- Surround yourself with advisors who’ve been through the fire
- Embrace the emotional whiplash—“Your best day and worst day can be two hours apart. That’s normal.”
And above all: solve real pain.
“Don’t build for the tech. Build for the person drowning in spreadsheets at 2 a.m. That’s where magic happens.”
The Future Is Agentic—and Sol Is Leading It
As AI shifts from chatbots to autonomous agents, Sol is positioned at the frontier. With backing from a16z and Conviction, and explosive traction in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, law), the company is scaling fast—but staying focused.
“We have 10 years of work ahead,” Jessica says. “This isn’t a sprint. It’s a mission.”
And for the former quant who once dreaded weekend calls from the office? She now works “every waking second, 7 days a week”—and has never been happier.
“When you own a piece of something you’re growing from the ground up, it’s easy to feel excited.”
That’s the heart of every great startup story: not the funding rounds or the logos on the website, but the quiet conviction that work should be meaningful—for everyone.
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