Founder Notes

I spent last week in New York meeting with founders and hiring leaders across the city, and it reinforced something that's becoming increasingly clear:

When people ask why I built Solara, the answer is simple. I wanted to improve the candidate experience. Everything started with the job board. Not the recruiter tools, not the dashboards, not the Chrome extensions. The job board and the candidate experience came first. That was the foundation.

In the last few years, the role of a tech recruiter has changed more than ever. Startups move faster, candidate expectations are higher, and hiring managers want signal, not noise. But most recruiting software feels stuck in a different decade. The tools do not talk to each other. Critical insights get lost. Recruiters spend more time juggling tabs than evaluating talent.

This was one of the biggest build weeks I've ever had with Solara. We shipped real, structural features and I'm not talking cosmetic updates. These were foundation-reshaping changes:

Before I get into the story, a bit of context. Solara Talent is my founder-led recruiting practice focused on helping startups hire great software engineers. I work closely with early-stage teams, usually founders and first-time hiring managers, and I blend the old school craft of technical recruiting with the new wave of AI tools that I build myself. This piece explains how I ended up rebuilding the job board and resume experience from scratch, and why I think the future of startup recruiting looks very different from the past.