Stephen Sklarew is the co-founder and chief executive of Synaptiq, an AI development, implementation and consulting firm in Portland, Oregon, that he started in 2015 with Tim Oates. He studied freshwater ecology in Virginia before turning to software, and he has built Synaptiq around helping companies outside the technology industry turn their own data into AI products.
A Fly-Fishing Website in Virginia
He planned on a career outdoors until an injury left him in bed for several months. His father brought him a computer and a book, he taught himself to build websites, and he made a fly-fishing site where Virginia anglers posted fishing reports and weather conditions. Seeing that site help people led him into technology and to a job at Ernst & Young, where he built software systems for companies in New York City and Boston, Massachusetts (Oregon Business).
Meeting Tim Oates in Northern Virginia
He later co-founded a Virginia company that collected business contact information for marketing departments. As its chief technology officer he hired Oates, a data scientist who also teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, to make sense of the company’s data, and the two worked together for several years.
He then moved his family to Oregon, where he worked at the software company Sage and later as VP of product at Veelo, a sales performance startup that was acquired in 2019 (GeekWire).
Building Synaptiq in Portland
When an AI project came his way, he called Oates again. By 2017 Synaptiq earned enough for him to leave his day job and run it full time. “What we realized a couple of years in was the hard part isn’t training the models; the hard part is the data,” he told Oregon Business. The firm began offering data strategy services in 2019.
He is also a co-founder of Medicine in Motion, a Synaptiq spinout that uses smartwatch data to suggest exercise, and he teaches a graduate class to MBA students at Portland State University.