When good engineers leave, the systems they understood suddenly become a black box, and the company hits a wall while new hires spend months trying to figure out how they work. Vivid Seats avoided this entirely. When our founders left to start Solidstack, instead of running a slow hiring loop to backfill the roles, they kept us on as external software partners.
How it started
Our relationship with Vivid Seats started at the University of Waterloo. We joined as co-op students and came back for multiple work terms, taking on bigger problems and more ownership each time. By graduation, we were trusted with core systems that were critical to the business.
Why we stayed
When we decided to leave and build Solidstack full-time, instead of a standard hand-off, we proposed continuing our work as an external partner. Vivid Seats accepted. We changed the contract but kept the day-to-day work exactly the same. It allowed them to keep the same people solving the same complex problems without the disruption of starting over.
What we do for them now
Because that context never left, we still operate like an extension of their internal team, not a traditional agency you have to constantly brief and manage. There is no ramp-up time or discovery phase, which allows us to jump straight into high-priority tasks. Today, that means cutting infrastructure and tooling costs, automating manual mapping workflows, building complex data systems that keep their pricing ahead of the market, and shipping customer-facing product features.
Why it works
Hand-offs and engineering turnover are where software momentum goes to die. But avoiding a learning curve is only part of the calculation; deep system context is useless if a team cannot deliver. Vivid Seats did not retain us just to save time on onboarding. They retained a group that already had a multi-year track record of solving their hardest technical problems. By partnering with Solidstack, they kept both their institutional knowledge and their execution speed completely intact.