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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Jessica Wu, co-founder and CEO of Sola, shares her journey from being the youngest quant researcher at a hedge fund to building an AI-powered process automation platform. Sola helps businesses automate critical operational workflows more easily than traditional RPA tools. The company has raised funding from A16Z and Conviction, achieving 5x revenue growth and serving Fortune 100 companies. Wu discusses the challenges of building enterprise software, the importance of customer delight, and lessons learned from Y Combinator about selling before building. She emphasizes how her technical background and finance experience helped her approach startup challenges with analytical thinking and risk assessment.

Silicon Valley’s Top Investors Bet on This 20-Something Founder | Sola, Jessica Wu