Raymie Stata is CEO of VertiCloud, a startup building a hosted development platform for Big Data applications. In his years working on Web Search and Internet Advertising, Stata observed, and helped develop, a (“big”-)data-driven, science-based, closed-loop approach to driving rapid, continuous improvement in business performance. The mission of VertiCloud is to bring that approach to all business verticals.Stata comes to VertiCloud from Yahoo!, Inc., where he most recently held the position of Chief Technical Officer. In the first half of his seven years at Yahoo, he was a technical leader in the Search and Advertising Technology Group. During this period, he sponsored Yahoo’s extensive, Open Source contributions to the Apache Hadoop project, and drove the widespread adoption of Hadoop throughout their search and advertising products. In the second half of his time at Yahoo, Stata provided technical leadership at the corporate level, where he helped the whole company adopt the Data Science techniques pioneered in search and advertising, and to adopt the Hadoop-based Big Data platform on which those techniques depended.Prior to Yahoo, Stata was an early contributor in the field of Web Search, having worked on the AltaVista search engine while he was at Digital Equipment’s Systems Research Center. He has also played a variety of roles at a number of startups, including the creation of Stata Labs, a desktop-search company which he sold to Yahoo in 2004. Raymie holds a PhD in Computer Science from MIT.