HHCIB 023 Stefania Mallett & The ezCater Story

My guest this week is ezCater Co-Founder and CEO Stefania Mallett. Stefania has spent over 25 years building and growing technology-enabled companies that solve real business problems. She co-founded and successfully sold InSite Marketing Technology to what is now KANA on NASDAQ, and prior to that led National Logistics Management (a broker for $225M in transportation services) to profitability for the first time in 4 years. As the COO of IntraNet (now ACI Worldwide,) Stefania revamped the firm and vaulted it to #1 in its market, a position it has maintained for 15+ years. What I find remarkable about Stefania is not only the depth of her competence but the breadth of her interests. A self-proclaimed “systems thinker” and engineer, she emerged from a difficult and non-traditional childhood determined to make sense of the world, proceeding through a hugely successful and entrepreneurial career to do exactly that through a series of executive management roles across a dizzying array of industries and company types. Far from the overly-intellectual engineer stereotype, though, she’s managed to remain a warm and insightful person who clearly cares deeply for the people she’s working with the build ezCater, a neat little company which itself has a story worth telling. We’ll spend our second segment doing just that, walking step by step through the unexpected yet highly typical twists and turns that characterized ezCater’s beginning, through the disciplined approach to management that’s created one of Boston’s most successful and thriving marketplace businesses. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​, the world’s leading Enterprise Data-as-a-Service platform. Deliver your data just like your applications and infrastructure... as a service available instantly, anywhere. For hybrid cloud, faster DevOps, and better business resiliency, Actifio is Radically Simple.