The accountant has done a wonderful job, and nobody has noticed. In Jeremy Gurewitz’s account of office life, this is practically the accountant’s job description. Some employees produce the conspicuous victories. Others prevent the expensive disasters. A company needs both, though the applause has a habit of finding the same people.
Gurewitz called these two groups Stars and Guardians. Writing in March 2021, he put himself among the Stars. He liked the work, the rewards and, with an honesty that business prose often politely mislays, the status. A year later, he would become a founder. By February 2026, his company, Solace, had raised a $130 million Series C at a reported $1 billion valuation.
That makes the earlier distinction rather interesting. The person who enjoyed being a Star now has a much larger enterprise to protect. His writing gives us a way to follow that change: an operator thinking aloud about how people work together, before the chief executive’s title made those thoughts everybody else’s business.
A quant walks into a consumer company
Gurewitz studied economics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. His early career was in quantitative finance, including work as an associate portfolio manager in quantitative equity at Lord Abbett. He subsequently moved into growth and marketing, with roles at Man Crates, Imperfect Foods and Literati.
The sequence takes him from portfolios to consumer businesses, from analyzing numbers to working on the machinery that brings in customers. At Imperfect Foods, he held head of growth and vice president of growth positions. At Literati, he was vice president of marketing. These were operating jobs with results attached, the sort of work in which a persuasive explanation eventually encounters a revenue figure.
He has explained the move in straightforward terms: venture-backed startups offered a chance to build things with a more direct effect on people’s lives. It is a useful detail because it gives the career a direction without making every earlier job an audition for the later one. Finance came first. Consumer companies followed. Founding was a further step.
The people who prevent the disaster
His Stars and Guardians framework began with a familiar workplace irritation: decisions about hiring and praise seemed disconnected from what he thought mattered. Understanding the incentives of the decision-makers helped him make sense of them.
In his model, Stars create value. Guardians preserve it. Sales and marketing usually belong to the first group; legal, accounting and human resources commonly belong to the second. The classification can change as a company grows. A job that once rewarded taking risks can become a job that rewards avoiding them.
There is something pleasingly unsentimental about admitting that the accountant’s uneventful afternoon may be a corporate achievement. The framework asks an employee to look beyond visibility. It also asks a founder to recognize when the organization needs protection as well as propulsion.
Gurewitz’s stated preference for the Star role makes this a revealing piece of self-description. He acknowledges the attractions of the visible job while explaining the importance of the quieter one. He is willing to identify his own seat in the office pecking order. The essay leaves the reader with a practical question: what does this particular role exist to accomplish?
“My personal preference is for a Star role.”
Jeremy Gurewitz · March 2021
The spreadsheet has colleagues
By December 2021, Gurewitz was writing about forecasting. His quantitative background appears in his preference for simple models with a small number of defensible variables. He explains the mathematics through tomorrow’s weather, recent trends and the way seasons repeat.
Then the people arrive. Forecasting becomes a negotiation among executives whose budgets, reputations and future explanations depend on the number they accept. Sales needs leads. Marketing needs agreement about which leads count. Everybody has a reason for the target to land somewhere convenient.
His prescription gives the CEO an active role: establish the method, structure the discussion and take responsibility for the result. The spreadsheet is only part of the exercise. Someone must also understand the incentives surrounding it.
The funny thing about a forecast is how tidy the finished version looks. A few rows, a confident total, perhaps a tasteful shade of blue. Gurewitz is interested in what happened before the file became presentable. That is an operator’s curiosity, trained on the meeting behind the mathematics. For a former quant, it is an especially useful admission that the people entering the numbers are variables too.
Kindness with an uncomfortable sentence in it
In January 2022, he turned to feedback. His argument was that a company can become so invested in an agreeable atmosphere that honest disagreement grows difficult. He called the resulting problem toxic empathy.
He worried about incentives that encourage employees to agree with the founder, and about managers who postpone specific criticism until the damage has accumulated. His version of kindness requires prompt, candid information that helps someone improve. He also says the purpose of feedback is to change behavior, rather than give the messenger pleasure in delivering it.
The distinction matters. There is a considerable difference between receiving a difficult observation while there is time to act and receiving it as an explanation of a decision already made. His argument puts a responsibility on the manager to speak.
It also puts a responsibility on the founder to hear. An organization built around one person’s convictions needs a way for inconvenient information to reach that person. Read alongside his forecasting essay, the concern becomes recognizable: what will persuade people to describe reality accurately when their own interests make accuracy uncomfortable?
“True kindness is an unhindered ability to tell the truth.”
Jeremy Gurewitz · January 2022
The boss who had no room for the details
Later that month, Gurewitz published an essay about accountability at scale. It included a recollection of taking project details to a CEO who stopped him. The executive had no room for the information; the project was Gurewitz’s responsibility.
He remembered another interruption at a board meeting. He was explaining the statistical detail of an attribution model. The board member wanted to know whether it worked and whether the company would meet its forecast.
These are small professional embarrassments with a long afterlife. Each taught him something about scarce attention. His larger argument was that an outcome needs a named owner, even when many people contribute the work. Delegation requires accepting that the person responsible will know things the boss does not.
As a picture of executive life, it has the advantage of leaving out the motivational poster. Here the education comes from discovering that the explanation you prepared is an explanation your audience cannot use. Gurewitz had experienced that mismatch from the presenter’s side. Soon he would occupy the chair in which attention itself becomes a budget.
Two years before the acceleration
Gurewitz and Sara Sargent founded Solace in 2022. He became CEO; she became chief product officer. The partnership is an important part of his account of the company. He describes frequent conversations with Sargent about decisions and the work that will move the business forward each day.
The pace surprised him. Looking back in August 2026, he said it took roughly two years for the company to take off and begin finding product-market fit. “We thought it would go faster than it did.” It is a useful sentence to place beside the later financing announcements. The rounds arrived on particular dates. Building something people would use occupied the stretches between them.
He has also spoken about wanting to help everyone perfectly, while recognizing how difficult that standard is to meet. The aspiration gives his operational interests a personal edge. A founder can set a direction in a sentence. Getting the organization to deliver on it takes repeated decisions, a working partnership and a tolerance for progress that arrives more slowly than expected.
The capital gets bigger. The questions stay concrete.
Solace announced a $14 million Series A in August 2024, led by Inspired Capital. A $60 million Series B followed in 2025, led by Menlo Ventures. In February 2026, IVP led the $130 million Series C. The three announced rounds total $204 million.
Gurewitz’s plans for the newer capital included hiring in engineering, product and design, alongside marketing. The announcement puts a larger staff and more execution behind the ideas he had been discussing years earlier. Every additional team makes the distribution of responsibility more consequential.
His public acknowledgments also make room for the people involved. After the Series C, he thanked investors and gave a specific mention to the lawyers who helped complete it. For someone who once wrote about the underappreciated Guardians, thanking the legal team has a certain consistency.
A billion-dollar valuation makes a convenient milestone. His earlier work suggests a more demanding set of daily questions. Can the team tell him something he would rather not hear? Does the forecast reflect the business? Has somebody accepted responsibility for what happens next? The founder who enjoyed being a Star now has plenty of value to preserve.
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More from Gurewitz, in his own words.