Soal Labs began with a single managing director. The first two weeks were structured, recorded interviews that walked through past deals to surface how that MD actually reasoned — what they looked at first, which red flags overrode positive signals, and which patterns they had learned to trust. Those sessions became a v0 persona, made retrievable alongside the firm's IC decks and deal data, and were tested immediately on a live deal heading into committee. The next two months were iteration. The naive persona surfaced useful angles but also exposed gaps: judgments too contextual to encode from a single example, and heuristics MDs stated in interview that diverged from what they did when shown a real deal. Each testing round fed back into both the interview methodology and how the personas were structured. Once the approach worked on one MD, the team scaled to five more, deliberately chosen for sector coverage so every vertical had a senior voice encoded from day one. First useful results came within the opening weeks; the full six-persona phase one landed over roughly two months.