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Find your super-power, own it, and develop the ability to tell your story well, alumna Nicole Stata advises business students.

NICOLE STATA ’91

As a recent member of the Grossman School of Business Board of Advisors, Nicole Stata ’91 has helped Dean Sanjay Sharma enhance experiential learning and create events such as the Dean’s Lecture Series, in which successful alumni return to campus to talk with students and faculty.

Last October 10, it was Stata’s turn to bring her own story to the front of the class, in this case Ifshin Hall’s Keller Room, packed with students eager to learn from the general partner and co-founder of Boston Seed Capital, provider of seed-stage funding for consumer digital and data start-ups. Stata also founded Deploy Solutions in 1996, leading the web-based human resources company for eleven years as CEO through its sale to Kronos. Past honors include being named one of the top twentyfive most influential women in tech in Boston in 2013, and, in 2015, she received the “Rising Star Venture Capitalist” award.

Over the course of her noon-hour talk, Stata informally recounted her life and career story, along the way sharing bits of advice that a senior about to embark on a business career would be wise to highlight.

Entrepreneurialism runs deep in the Stata family. Nicole’s father, Ray Stata, along with the help and support of her mother, Maria, co-founded Analog Devices. Her brother, Raymie, sold his first company to Yahoo where he went on to be Yahoo’s CTO until leaving to start Alti-Scale, which he then sold to SAP. Frank about both the advantages and the challenges of being surrounded by such savvy and success, Nicole Stata told the UVM gathering, “Early on I started to develop something that has helped me throughout my career—a big, big, big chip on my shoulder. So as my parents became more and more successful, I got in my head that I could show them, and when it was my turn, I didn’t need any help from them, I was going to go out and crush it.”

Though her CV includes founding two companies and prior corporate experience, Stata built the foundation of her work ethic long before. Early in her teen years, she spent the summer packing and shipping computer chips at Analog. Stata loved the sense of team, hard work, and pride in that work—all lessons that would shape her career. Another job you won’t find on her LinkedIn profile, but also formative: waitressing at Rasputin’s, a Burlington bar popular with students in the late 1980s and still going strong today. It was there that Stata found that personally connecting with customers, and hustling hard all evening, meant that on twenty-five cent beer night she’d get handed dollar after dollar after dollar and told “keep the change, Nicky.” Simple math: hard work pays.

Today, at Boston Seed Capital, Stata and her colleagues sift through thousands of business pitches a year. Among very early concepts, how do you decide who is ready to take it to the next level, one student asked. Stata said that, far more than innovation or market niche, it comes back to the founder/CEO and team. “We always pick the person(s). That’s it. End of story. That’s the secret.” For example, Boston Seed was one of the very first investors in DraftKings, a fantasy sports betting business now rumored to be worth over $1 billion in value. “The reason we invested in DraftKings, against potential obvious headwinds, was because of their three-person leadership team,” Stata said. “We were blown away by them.”

That personal metric guiding Boston Seed jibes with another core message Stata shared—as a person and as a professional, find your “super-power,” own it, and develop the ability to make it abundantly evident by telling your story well. Speaking of her own experience, and to great extent her own super-power, Stata said, “Find exceptional people and convince them to work with you. Tell them a story, make them like you, and get them to come on board. If you can do that, you can do anything.”