Stephen Snyder, managing director of Sky VC, is one of our top 50 Emerging Leaders in corporate venturing for 2026.
Many corporate VCs are familiar with their parent company’s business, but few know it as thoroughly as Stephen Snyder, managing director at Sky VC, which invests on behalf of aircraft provider Sky Leasing.
Sky VC was previously JetBlue Ventures, the CVC arm of air carrier JetBlue, and Snyder endeavoured to learn everything he could about airlines, to the point that he was trained as an airport ground handler. It all fits into a greater ability to understand the end user of the technologies he sees.
“I have a good sense of how the business units’ end customers would think about implementing that type of technology and where they saw value in it. I could speak the language of a lot of different parts of the business,” he says.
“We are having really great conversations with a lot of strategics who are going to participate as LPs in our fund”
“A lot of people in an ivory tower just think: ‘throw an iPad at the problem and insert this new technology here and there’. Having been there with boots on the ground, I can tell you that in cold operating conditions, where you are wearing thick gloves and dealing with the elements, not every technology is going to fit into every workflow.”
Previously a strategic planning manager, Snyder joined JetBlue Ventures as an operating principal in 2020 and was promoted to managing director the following year, managing a $150m capital expenditure budget.
The unit was transferred to Sky Leasing in May last year and is now seeking a broader range of limited partners across the entire air transport industry for its next fund. Snyder is excited about the range of opportunities working with more partners is going to open.
“We are having really great conversations with a lot of strategics who are going to participate as LPs in our fund,” he says. “When we have got five, 10, 20 partners we are working with, then we can diversify the opportunities and diversify the learnings that come from that as well.”
The Emerging Leaders are mid-career corporate venture professionals who are making an outstanding contribution to their teams and the industry.
See the full list of Emerging Leaders here.
