Sebastian Solano and the party that kept changing businesses

Sebastian Solano once helped organize college parties so elaborate that the money went straight back into the evening. There were buses, nightclub arrangements and a group of friends convening around a table to decide what came next. They called themselves the Committee. For an enterprise devoted to having a good time, it was a wonderfully bureaucratic name.

The parties became Life in Color, a touring dance-music business with a signature paint blast. Then came Jeeter, the cannabis brand Solano co-founded and now leads with Lukasz Tracz. The distance between those companies looks considerable on a business card. Follow the people, and the journey becomes easier to understand.

Solano has repeatedly built around a familiar circle. His identical twin, David, is part of Jeeter. Lukasz has an identical twin, Patryk, who is involved too. Add their friends and collaborators, and the founding story begins to require a seating plan. Across the ventures, Solano has kept returning to an audience and a question: what will make this worth showing up for?

A committee with a cleaning bill

Born in Bogotá, Solano moved from Colombia to the United States as a teenager. South Florida became home before college took him to Tallahassee. His eventual business partners included fellow immigrants from Poland. Their backgrounds converged in Florida, where friendships became the working relationships that would shape two careers.

In the early Committee days, entertainment was a hands-on occupation. A successful party meant arranging where people would go, how they would get there and what they would encounter on arrival. Solano remembered spending the receipts on the production itself. The balance sheet may have objected. The guests had fewer reasons to complain.

Paint gave the operation something people could immediately recognize. Dance music supplied the soundtrack; the audience supplied an enormous collection of white clothes waiting to be ruined. Life in Color eventually combined DJs with aerial performers, fire acts and other stage elements. A concert could leave its customers wearing evidence that they had attended.

By the time Solano appeared on the 2015 Forbes music list of entrepreneurs under 30, Life in Color was producing more than 200 electronic concerts annually. The company had been acquired by SFX Entertainment in 2012. A college social enterprise had become a touring operation with schedules, venues and obligations spread across borders.

Friends need job descriptions, too

Growing up together as entrepreneurs brought its own negotiations. During the Life in Color years, the partners had to work out who belonged in which role. Being close did not prevent disagreements or missed meetings. It made their consequences more personal. Solano observed that lateness feels different when the late friend is also your business partner.

That is a less photogenic detail than a stadium full of paint, and a useful one. The friendship required an operating structure. Someone had to make decisions; someone else had to accept them. The group could share an ambition without sharing every opinion about how to deliver it.

Solano’s responsibilities widened. In 2015, SFX appointed him CEO of ID&T North America / Made Event, adding oversight of festival brands including Electric Zoo, Mysteryland and TomorrowWorld. He had moved from assembling parties with friends to managing businesses inside a larger entertainment company.

The change also altered what he wanted from work. He later described feeling a diminishing sense of entrepreneurship and wanting another chapter. There is a particular restlessness in that admission. A larger title had arrived, but the attraction of making something with his own people had survived it.

The California reset

California offered the next opening. Solano and his partners moved into cannabis as the state’s legal market developed. His previous success gave him experience in building an audience. It did not give the new enterprise permission to skip the difficult beginning.

DreamFields started with distribution and wholesale activity before Jeeter’s California launch in 2018. The brand that would occupy the company’s future began as a quicker project while the founders considered a more elaborate concept. Entrepreneurship occasionally has the manners of an understudy: the part you expected to be temporary walks off with the show.

In 2019, the company faced a cash shortage. It had $35,000 available against $260,000 in payroll and mortgage obligations due that week. Solano and Tracz used their cars and watches as collateral to obtain financing. Whatever the earlier festival success had provided, the new company still needed money by Friday.

It is a revealing interruption in the story. The same people who knew how to stage a memorable night were now trying to keep a different kind of operation going. A reputation built in one industry offered no automatic relief from the bills in another.

Australia could wait

For all the continuity between the businesses, Solano did change his approach. Looking back at Life in Color’s international growth, he singled out the decision to enter Australia first. It was a distant opening for a young American operation. The excitement of going somewhere new could distract from the work of becoming stronger at home.

At Jeeter, he argued for establishing the brand in California before pursuing invitations elsewhere. Interested partners were useful, but they did not have to determine the calendar. He wanted expansion to follow a position the company had earned in its existing market.

There is a quieter ambition in that choice. Solano had already experienced the pleasure of adding countries to a touring map. Now he was talking about the value of concentration. A second company gave him an opportunity to reconsider which parts of the first company’s playbook deserved another outing.

Jeeter ranked No. 144 on the 2022 Inc. 5000, with reported three-year growth of 3,346 percent. That distinction belonged to the business, but it also marked a consequential turn in Solano’s career: the next chapter had become substantial enough to stand on its own.

Something to keep after the evening

The entertainment instinct remained visible in the objects Jeeter released. A collaboration with the Marley family arrived in May 2024 inside a small leather guitar case. Details referenced Bob Marley’s music and habits. Solano and Tracz said they had visited Jamaica to connect with the culture behind the project.

The case is an instructive object. A standard package performs a job and leaves. A collectible asks to stay. It gives the customer something to show someone else, something that can sit on a shelf after the original purchase has served its purpose. The packaging takes on a little of the work once done by a concert souvenir.

Collaborations also gave Solano ways to bring other people into Jeeter’s orbit. In 2024, a dinner built around product reveals included an acoustic Bob Marley tribute by his grandson, Skip Marley. The structure resembled entertainment programming: an occasion, a sequence of reveals and a performance linking the parts.

“You have to continue to give people a reason to buy your brand.”

Sebastian Solano / 2023

He has pointed to Red Bull’s presence in sports and music as an example of how a consumer brand can acquire meaning beyond its main product. The ambition helps explain Jeeter’s calendar of events and commemorative releases. It also places a continuing demand on its founders. An audience offered something new will eventually expect the next thing.

Jeeterday gave that relationship an annual date. In 2021, Solano described it as a thank-you to customers who sought the brand out by name. The idea connected a retail release with a celebration and packaging customers could keep. He also wanted the product to feel considered without becoming something only a narrow group could afford. For someone trained in ticketed events, it was a different way to think about who could join in.

Back behind the velvet rope

Jeeter launched in New York on September 5, 2025. Solano said the founders had moved there themselves. For a company whose early story unfolded in California, the eastern expansion became another personal relocation. The business kept taking its people along with it.

That December, Jeeter Live debuted during MJBizCon week in Las Vegas. Solano described a production assembled in roughly four weeks. Invitations moved through existing industry networks, and the event reached about 1,800 RSVPs. David performed as DJ, bringing another piece of the brothers’ earlier lives into the newer venture.

By 2026, Solano’s conference biography described a company employing more than 1,500 people across multiple states. That scale gives his familiar talk of friends and experiences a different weight. There are many more people involved in making the next event or release happen than could ever fit around the Committee’s original table.

When Solano talks about the company’s effect on his own life, he has also turned to the people working inside it. He has described relatives working alongside one another and employees advancing through internal promotion. That interest adds a practical dimension to the family language surrounding the founders. An operation built by friends now offers other people careers of their own. The view from the stage is only one part of what he has helped build.

Still, the line through the career is recognizable. A young immigrant found a circle in Florida, helped turn its parties into a business, then built again with much of that circle intact. The product changed. The geography changed. Solano kept finding work in the arrangements that make people want to gather.

For a founder who began by spending the party money on the party, the return to live production has a certain symmetry. There are schedules to keep, guests to admit and another room to get right. The Committee has a larger agenda now.