Soltech Soltech
It was never meant to be a company. It was meant to be the answer to where the engineers sit.
Soltech — Sol Technologies Marbella SL — is a consulting and app development company on the Costa del Sol. It builds and runs software, some of it mine and some of it other people's. That is the description. It began as an answer to a much duller question: where do the engineers sit?
If you are running more than one venture, the engineering has to live somewhere. You can staff each company separately and watch three small teams each solve the same problems in isolation, or you can put the engineering in one place and let it serve whatever needs building. I chose the second, mostly for unremarkable reasons — contracts, payroll, continuity — and only later understood it as a structural decision rather than an administrative one.
Why it exists
Because the scarce thing is not developers. It is people who already know how your systems work.
A team that has maintained something through two years of edge cases is worth more than a bigger team that has read the documentation.
Keeping that group intact across ventures means the knowledge does not reset every time something new starts. When Mandato needed building, it was not built by strangers — it was built by people who had already spent years inside the operational problems it addresses. That continuity is the actual asset, and it does not appear on any balance sheet.
How it is run
Soltech is where the engineering discipline lives: the standards, the review habits, the on-call reality. The ventures are the customers, and for a long time they were the only ones.
Working this way has a specific failure mode, and it is worth naming. An in-house team building for its own founder never has to win the work, which can make it slow to notice when something it has built is worse than what is on the market. Taking outside clients is the correction. Outside work is honest in a way internal work is not: it is either good enough that someone unrelated to you pays for it again, or it is not.
Where it is going
Consulting and development for clients beyond my own companies, without giving up the thing that made it work — a team that stays long enough to know what it is looking at. That is a harder balance than it sounds, and it constrains how quickly the company can grow. So far it has been the right constraint.
