Ray Stata has known electronics since he was a child. His father ran an electrical contracting business in his hometown of Oxford, Pennsylvania. “My dad was a small town electrical contractor in Oxford, PA, so I saw what it was like to run your own show,” he told the Massachusetts Institute of Technology press office in 1997. So it took no one by surprise when he went off to study electrical engineering at MIT, graduating in 1958 with a Masters in the subject.

After MIT, Stata spent three years working for Hewitt Packard, which was then becoming the electronics and computer giant it remains today. While at HP, Stata absorbed the famed HP work ethic centered on enhancing quality control and employee teamwork. After leaving HP, Stata teamed with former MIT classmate Matthew Lorber to found his first company, Solid State Instruments, in 1962. The company, which made devices for testing gyroscopes, was run from the basement of the apartment building in which the two lived. The company was not a financial success, and it fell to Stata’s wife Maria, a schoolteacher, to keep the family afloat while her husband and his partner tried to build an electronics business in the basement. Nevertheless, within two years Stata and Lorber were able to sell the business to Kollmorgen Corporation’s Inland Controls Division for about $100,000 in Kollmorgen stock.

The sale of Solid State Instruments didn’t make them rich, but it provided Stata and Lorber with enough money to found a new company, Analog Devices, in 1965. While trying to build Solid State Instruments they had discovered a market for off-theshelf amplifiers, circuits that boost electrical signals, and now they tried to position Analog Devices to take advantage of that demand. They found themselves without competition in the field and the business took off, generating more than $5 million in annual revenue by 1968. In March 1969 the company went public. By 1979, it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

In the early 1970’s, the company began producing integrated circuits, which converted analog signals into digital form, as well as semiconductors, small chips that replaced much larger components like transistors for analog to digital conversion. This put Analog Devices in a perfect position to take advantage of the explosive growth in computer- related technology that began in the mid-70’s. With a rapidly growing demand for integrated circuits and semiconductors to fuel the consumer and industrial electronics industry, Analog Devices flourished, opening operations in a variety of overseas locations including Ireland, Germany, Scotland, China, Spain, Israel, and India. By the early 1980’s, semiconductors comprised almost half of the company’s $156 million in annual sales.

In the mid-1990’s, the company introduced a variety of new products, including tiny sensors used in automobile airbag deployment systems, digital signal processors that could process digital video used in personal computers and video recorders, and tiny temperature sensors for both commercial and industrial applications. By 2006, the company that began in an apartment building basement employed about 10,000 people worldwide and had net sales of $2.5 billion.

In a 2006 article in Business Today, Stata explained why Analog Devices had prospered. “The reason why it has grown so much is the underlying principle of having respect for people and providing them a framework and suitable environment to work in,” he explained. “A lot of people working in hi-tech areas while not being entrepreneurs in their own right nevertheless like freedom from authoritarian types of management. They need the space to be creative and [Analog Devices] offer[s] that.”

“I keep coming back to the issue of trust,” Stata told MIT’s alumni magazine, Spectrum, in a 1999 interview. “The most important driving principle is to conduct yourself in a way that you’re always winning the trust and confidence of the people and organizations with which you’re engaged. If you could do just one thing, it’s winning that trust.