Ray Stata

Overview

Brief Biography of Ray Stata

Raymond Stuart Stata is a native of Pennsylvania. Ray is married to Maria. Ray and Maria married in June, 1962. The two reside in the Greater Boston Area, where they raised their son Raymie and daughter Nicole. Raymie, who graduated from MIT and founded Stata Labs which was acquired by Yahoo!. In 2004 Yahoo! Named Raymie CTO in 2010, subsequently, Raymie founded Altiscale. Nicole is also a serial entrepreneur having started Deploy Solutions which she sold to Kronos before funding Boston Seed Capital, a seed VC that invests in early stage startups.

Stata earned BSEE and MSEE degrees from MIT. In 1965 he founded Analog Devices with MIT classmate Matthew Lorber in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Before founding Analog Devices, Stata and Lorber, together with Bill Linko, another MIT graduate, founded Solid State Instruments, a company which was acquired by Kollmorgen Corporation's Inland Controls Division. Besides ADI and Solid State Instruments, Stata is founder of Stata Venture Partners,[2] a venture capital firm in the Boston area that funded many Boston area startups like Nexabit Networks, acquired by Lucent for $960M at the high water mark of the dot-com bubble in June 1999.[3]

Stata is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and was the recipient of the 2003 IEEE Founder's Medal.

Background Information

Family and Schooling

Raymond Stuart Stata was born on November 12, 1934 in the small farming community of Oxford, Pennsylvania to Rhoda Pearl Buchanan and Raymond Stanford Stata, a self-employed electrical contractor. During the summer, in his early years he worked on his grandparents’ farm. In high school, Ray worked as an apprentice for his father. Ray’s mother was a factory worker. Ray’s sister, Joan Stata, was five years older and worked as a nurse in Wilmington, Delaware.

Ray’s family moved around a lot. From first through eighth grade, Ray attended seven different schools. In the first grade, Ray attended a one room school with one teacher serving eight grades. Then, his parents moved to the outskirts of Baltimore to work at an aircraft factory during WWII. With schools in Baltimore being overcrowded, Ray failed the third grade.

It was not until high school that Ray finally experienced educational and social continuity and stability. Ray attended Oxford High School for four years. At Oxford High School, Ray had access to a library and guidance from the school Librarian for the first time. Ray began to read classic novels recommended by the librarian, and was especially interested in books about the history of science, which sparked his curiosity in science and engineering education. Despite having a bit of catching up to do in high school and with little guidance from his parents regarding his education, Ray set out to achieve the ambitious goal of attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his undergraduate degree and was successful.

Even though, no member of Ray’s family had a college degree, Ray was in no doubt influenced by his father’s work and by his grandparents, who as farmers were self-employed. From his high school years, Ray knew that one day he would start a company. He was motivated by his familial history as well as his desire to be his own boss so that he would be in control of his own destiny.

Career

Analog Devices, Inc (1965 - 2015)

[The following are selected excerpts directly from the Analog Devices Annual Report 2015 which describe the company’s history, products, finances, and revenue model.]

Company Overview

Analog Devices, Inc. is a world leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of a broad portfolio of solutions that leverage high-performance analog, mixed-signal and digital signal processing technology, including integrated circuits (ICs), algorithms, software, and subsystems. Since our inception in 1965, we have focused on solving the engineering challenges associated with signal processing in virtually all types of electronic equipment. Our signal processing products play a fundamental role in converting, conditioning, and processing real-world phenomena such as temperature, pressure, sound, light, speed and motion into electrical signals to be used in a wide array of electronic devices. As new generations of applications, such as the Internet of Things, evolve, new needs for high-performance analog signal processing and digital signal processing (DSP) technology are generated. We focus on sensing, measurement, and connectivity challenges that apply to a diverse set of customers and markets. We combine data converters, amplifiers and linear products, radio frequency (RF) ICs, power management products, sensors based on micro-electro mechanical systems (MEMS) technology and other sensors, and processing products, including DSP, micro controllers and other processors, into technology platforms that we adapt to specific customer and market needs, leveraging our engineering investment across a broad base of customers.

We focus on key strategic markets where our signal processing technology is often a critical differentiator in our customers' products, in particular, the industrial, automotive, consumer and communications markets. Used by tens of thousands of customers worldwide, our products are embedded inside many different types of electronic equipment.

We were incorporated in Massachusetts in 1965. Our headquarters are near Boston, in Norwood, Massachusetts. In addition, we have manufacturing facilities in Massachusetts, Ireland, and the Philippines, and have more than thirty design facilities worldwide. Analog Devices revenues in 2015 were $3.4 billion with 9700 employees worldwide.

Principal Products

We design, manufacture and market a broad line of high-performance ICs that incorporate analog, mixed-signal and digital signal processing technologies. Our ICs are designed to address a wide range of real-world signal processing applications. We sell our ICs to tens of thousands of customers worldwide, many of whom use products spanning our core technologies in a wide range of applications. Our IC product portfolio includes both general-purpose products used by a broad range of customers and applications, as well as application-specific products designed for specific clusters of customers in key target markets. By using readily available, high-performance, general-purpose products in their systems, our customers can reduce the time they need to bring new products to market. Given the high cost of developing more customized ICs, our standard products often provide a cost-effective solution for many low to medium volume applications. We also focus on working with leading customers to design application-specific solutions. We begin with our existing core technologies, which leverage our data conversion, amplification, RF and microwave, MEMS, power management and DSP capabilities, and devise a solution to more closely meet the needs of a specific customer or group of customers. Because we have already developed the core technology platform for our general-purpose products, we can create application-specific solutions quickly.

Analog Products

Our analog and mixed signal IC technology has been the foundation of our business for over four decades, and we are one of the world's largest suppliers of high-performance analog ICs, including operational amplifiers. Our analog signal processing ICs are primarily high performance devices, offering higher dynamic range, greater bandwidth, and other enhanced features.

Converters

We are the leading supplier of data converter products. Data converters translate real-world analog signals into digital data and also translate digital data into analog signals. Data converters remain our largest and most diverse product family and an area where we are continuously innovating to enable our customers to redefine and differentiate their products.

Amplifiers/Radio Frequency

Within this product portfolio we provide precision, instrumentation, high speed, intermediate frequency/RF, broadband, and other amplifiers. We also offer an extensive portfolio of precision voltage references that are used in a wide variety of applications. Our analog product line also includes a broad portfolio of high performance RF ICs covering the entire RF signal chain, as phase locked loops, frequency synthesizers, mixers, modulators, demodulators, and power detectors, to highly integrated broadband and short-range single chip transceiver solutions.

Other Analog areas

Our MEMS product portfolio includes accelerometers used to sense acceleration, gyroscopes used to sense rotation and inertial measurement units used to sense multiple degrees of freedom combining multiple sensing types along multiple axes. The majority of our current revenue from MEMS products is derived from the automotive end market.

Digital Signal Processing Products

Digital Signal Processing products (DSPs) complete our product portfolio. DSPs are optimized tor high-speed numeric calculations, which are essential for instantaneous, or real-time, processing of digital data generated, in most cases, from analog to digital signal conversion. Our DSPs are designed to be fully programmable and to efficiently execute specialized software programs, or algorithms, associated with processing digitized real-time, real-world data.

Markets and Applications

The breakdown of our fiscal 2015 revenue by end market is set out in the table below:

End Market Revenue Percent of Fiscal 2015 Revenue
Industrial 44%
Automotive 15%
Consumer 21%
Communications 20%

Sales Channels

We derived approximately 50% of our fiscal 2015 revenue from sales made through distributors. These distributors typically maintain an inventory of our products. Some of them also sell products that compete with our products, including those for which we are an alternate source.

Segment Financial Information and Geographic Information

We operate and track our results in one reportable segment based on the aggregation of six vertical market segments. Through subsidiaries and affiliates, we conduct business in numerous countries outside the United States. During fiscal 2015, we derived approximately 61% of our revenue from customers in international markets

Revenue by geographic region, based on the primary location of our customers' design activity for our products, for fiscal 2015 was as follow:

Geographic Area Percent Fiscal 2015 Revenue
United States 39%
Rest of North/ South America 3%
Europe 27%
Japan 9%
China 15%
Rest of Asia 7%

Philanthropy & Community Leadership

Overview

As co-founder and the first President of the Massachusetts High Technology Council, Stata advocated that engineering education and university research funding were a shared responsibility of government and industry. MHTC also advocated for state government policies to make Massachusetts the best state in which to live and work. Stata has long been active in initiatives to reform K-12 education as it related to urban communities and to nurturing interest in math and science.

At the federal level, he served on the Executive Committee of the Council on Competitiveness from 1987 to 2005. Stata's service on the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Board of Overseers stemmed from his professional commitment to total quality management.

He served on the Board of the Semiconductor Industry Association from January 1, 1996 to November 7, 2013.

Stata was also a founder and Chairman of the Center for Quality of Management, a group of Boston-area CEOs who learned from each other by sharing best practices and by developing and delivering TQM training programs to help their companies become more competitive.

He was actively engaged in the stewardship of MIT, his alma mater, in several roles. Until 2010 he was the Chairman of the Visiting Committee of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In 1984 he was elected to MIT's Corporation and served as a member of its Executive Committee. From 1987-1988 he served as President of the MIT Alumni Association.

In 1997, Stata made a significant contribution to the construction of a new academic complex on the MIT campus called the Ray and Maria Stata Center. The building was designed by Frank Gehry.

He was a life trustee of the Boston Symphony Orchestra where he and with his wife in August 1999 endowed the Ray and Maria Stata Music Director chair.

Honors and Awards

Learning & Knowledge

Learning

Ray Stata is frequently asked: how did he as an engineer with no MBA degree learn to lead and grow a company that exceeds $1 billion in sales? While it is not a formulaic and straightforward answer, Ray is transparent about the different sources of knowledge and learnings that may be instructive for those who wonder how they can achieve the same. For Ray, it was and continues to be a step by step process to keep up with or slightly ahead of the needs of his company, Analog Devices. For Ray and many others, ADI served as a vehicle to stimulate personal growth.

Some steps along the way that Ray highlights as seminal learning experiences include his time at MIT not only his studies in electrical engineering but also his studies in Humanities. Exposure to the great thinkers served as a stimulus to lifelong learning regarding the nature of human beings and the purpose of life. It is through this learning that Ray developed his leadership skills and understanding of how to manage and lead others.

As for building his knowledge and skill base, Ray credits his first job at HP as his “mini-MBA”. At HP, he learned how business operates and the famous way of HP – a commitment to employee welfare and the development of their full potential as a cornerstone to building a successful company. Ray put the values he learned at HP into practice and adopted HP’s Corporate Objective as a guide to his understanding of corporate purpose.

Ray learned the fundamentals of management from a course given by the American Management Association. He recruited the best instructor from that course, himself a CEO, to become a Director of ADI and for many years to teach a management course at ADI

Ray adapted a Theory Y style of management as articulated in Douglas McGregor’s seminal book, “The Human Side of Enterprise”, and as he saw it practiced at HP. Accordingly, by advocacy and by example, he established a positive view of the human nature as the foundation for how others at ADI thought about management and human behavior.

Knowledge

The following are a few examples of thought leaders and experiences Ray had that helped him gain knowledge and skills over the years:


Books and readings that have inspired Ray over the years, by category:


Publications

Publications by Ray Stata

Interviews with Ray

References

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