Building Sollos: Hiring Carefully
4 min read
Hiring, Team Building, Venture Building, Leadership, Startups, Sollos
Moving from a venture build to a real company meant hiring for pressure, ambiguity, and cultural fit, not just skills on a CV.
Building a team for an early-stage venture?
As Sollos moved from a venture build into something more permanent, the shape of the work changed. Consultants could take us a long way, but a real company needs a real team.
That meant hiring across the board. Product. Engineering. Growth. Creative. Partnerships. Operations. Leadership. Every function mattered, and every hire would have an outsized impact.
Over a few intense months, I personally interviewed more than sixty candidates. Part of that was practical, these weren’t people joining a finished product. They were stepping into a live system mid-build, with unclear edges, high expectations, and very real pressure. But the bigger reason was personal. Sollos was something I’d been building for years, and I wanted to know it would be left in safe hands.
The other complexity was culture. This wasn’t just hiring for a startup, it was hiring for a startup inside a corporate, inside the music industry. Those are three different operating environments, and they don’t always mix naturally.
In music especially, cultural fit is real. People tend to either “get it” or they don’t. I’ve hired strong candidates in the past based purely on capability, while ignoring the warning signs on cultural fit, and it has gone wrong every time. For Sollos, that wasn’t a risk we could afford.
We needed people who could operate with startup mentality, move fast, tolerate ambiguity, and take ownership. But we also needed people who understood the music world, how decisions get made, how relationships work, and why protecting creative intent matters.
Some roles came together quickly. Others took weeks of back and forth. A few times, we got close and then started again. That wasn’t wasted time, it was the cost of making sure the team could carry the venture forward without friction.
Hiring carefully slowed things down in the short term. In the long term, it gave the venture stability. The team that came together was able to take ownership, absorb pressure, and keep moving as the business evolved.
Early-stage hiring isn’t about filling roles quickly. It’s about setting the conditions for everything that comes next.