A philosophy major who carried a rifle, traded telecom bonds, and now sells executives a quieter way to know what's actually working.
Most founders pick a lane and stay in it. Laz Fuentes has worn three uniforms in one career - infantry fatigues, banker pinstripes, and the now-standard founder hoodie - and the throughline is the same in each one. Find the signal. Move on it. Don't wait for the deck.
At SQOR.ai, the New York company he started in 2022, that instinct is the product. SQOR pulls data out of every SaaS tool a company already pays for - Stripe, Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, the rest of the alphabet - and renders it as a real-time KPI feed an executive can act on. No new data team. No nine-month implementation. No 40-slide board deck.
The pitch is simple enough that a busy CEO can finish reading it in an elevator: decision intelligence, not business intelligence. The execution is a wager that the modern operator is exhausted by tools that report and ready for tools that recommend.
SQOR.ai now counts more than 280 companies as customers, a roster that runs from small businesses through venture-backed startups all the way to private equity portfolio companies. In 2024 the team announced its first European partnership and shipped ESA AI Plus, which the company markets as the first plug-and-play KPI prediction automation in the category.
He commissioned as an infantry officer in the 10th Mountain Division. Most pitch decks open with "we are passionate about data." His opens with the quieter assumption that bad information gets people hurt.
After Columbia he spent five years on the Smith Barney and Salomon Brothers desks, covering telecom, media and technology. The same desk that taught Bloomberg terminals to dominate finance taught him what executives actually look at.
Before there was a metaverse, there was HipChicas - a virtual world for tween girls he built as Managing Director at Hip Venture Co. A footnote on the resume; a tell about the founder.
The middle act: digital and linear media operations at Warner Bros., SVP of data strategy at YouGov, EVP of strategic partnerships at Synup. Three of the most data-rich seats in modern media, all played from the operator's chair.
The major was philosophy, economics and political science. Reads like an undergraduate seminar. Sells like a SaaS company. Probably the right preparation for selling a product called "decision intelligence."
Three letters. Bears a medal emoji. A useful signal that he has been online since before the rest of us figured out usernames mattered.
What if I get it wrong? What will it cost me, my people, my investors?Laz Fuentes - on the questions decision intelligence is actually meant to answer
SQOR.ai pulls data out of every SaaS system a company already uses, harmonizes it, and turns it into a single, real-time view of KPIs. The product replaces the BI sprint, the consultant deck and the quarterly scramble with a continuous executive heartbeat. Customers authenticate their tools; SQOR does the plumbing.
In 2024 SQOR launched ESA AI Plus, billed as the first plug-and-play KPI prediction automation AI in the category. The marketing claim is brave; the underlying bet is braver. Predict the KPI before the meeting, not after it.
"With our new AI, we're revolutionizing the way businesses relate to their data."
Posted by SQOR_AI on X, 2024
"What if I get it wrong? What will it cost me, my people, my investors?"
A line he returns to when describing why decision intelligence matters.
The infantry teaches a discipline about information you don't unlearn. Incomplete signal beats waiting. Bad signal kills people. SQOR's obsession with real-time, harmonized data has a fingerprint on it.
Five years on a Wall Street desk teaches you which numbers an executive will actually look at, and which ones they will politely ignore. SQOR ships fewer charts on purpose.
Most of his middle career was spent inside companies wrestling with the exact problem SQOR sells against. The product is built for the executive he used to be.
x.com/laz. Three letters. A medal emoji next to the name. The internet equivalent of a name plate that was waiting for him.
Political philosophy. The undergraduate degree most likely to write a manifesto, least likely to ship one. Fuentes did both.
HipChicas, a virtual world for tween girls, in the era before "virtual world" was a category. He has been early before.
16 East 34th Street, Manhattan. A Midtown address for a company whose product mostly lives in browser tabs.
Nineteen people, ~280 customers. The ratio is the bet: small team, large surface, AI doing the heavy lifting.
He doesn't call SQOR a BI company. He calls it decision intelligence. The semantics matter to him; the customers seem to agree.