This week she is somewhere in the middle of the country, in a conference room without a view, sitting across from a founder who runs a dental practice management business. Or a physical therapy SaaS. Or a vertical accounting platform. The kind of software whose user base would be invisible at a Bay Area cocktail party and indispensable on the Tuesday morning the cloud goes down. She has been doing this since 2006. She still seems to enjoy it.
Stoner is a General Partner at Battery Ventures, a tech investment firm that has been quietly profitable since 1983 - longer than most LPs have been alive, and certainly longer than most of the funds that get the magazine covers. Battery does not have a single thesis it shouts. It has a set of overlapping ones it whispers. Application software. Industrial technology. Healthcare IT. Consumer internet. Infrastructure. Stoner's slice is the boring half of that list, which has turned out to be the lucrative half.
Her track record is the kind of list venture investors normally print on a postcard and hand to LPs in person. Avalara, the unsexy tax compliance software, public on the New York Stock Exchange. Glassdoor, sold to Recruit Holdings. Groupon, public on the Nasdaq. Guidewire, the insurance software backbone, public on the New York Stock Exchange. Intacct, acquired by Sage. Marketo, the marketing automation suite, public and then bought by Vista Equity. RealPage, the property management platform, public on the Nasdaq. WebPT, the physical therapy software, sold to Warburg Pincus. Brightree, ClearCare, Data Innovations, PageUp. The pattern is that there is no pattern, except boring.
She joined Battery from a route that does not appear on a recruiter's algorithm. Northwestern, chemical engineering, with honors. Then Accenture, where consulting taught her to size up an industry in six weeks. Then Merrill Lynch, including a stint in Hong Kong, which is the kind of detail that explains the international mindset without her having to mention it. Then Classified Ventures, then Key Principal Partners in private equity. Then a phone rang in 2006 and she went to Battery and never really left.
A people person and a recovering chemical engineer.
That self-description is the one she uses on the firm's website. It is too good to leave in a bio. A chemical engineer can model a reaction. A people person can read a room. The combination is what makes her unusual in venture, an industry that often rewards one of those skills at the cost of the other. Stoner's particular talent is for sitting with a founder long enough to know whether the team will still be working at midnight when the contract everyone needs is up for renewal.
Listen to her on the Goldman Sachs Exchanges podcast in late 2024 and the story sharpens. Asked where she finds the good companies, she does not name a coast. "In areas like the Midwest, or the Southwest, I often find bootstrapped companies that are simply scrappier, hungrier and more focused on bottom-line financials," she said. "Some of these companies feel like underdogs, trying to compete with better-funded companies from the coasts - and often succeeding." Read that twice. It is a thesis about geography, finance, and personality, compressed into two sentences. The whole posture of her investing is inside it.
This is what people in the business call being stage agnostic, and what Stoner has practiced for two decades. Battery does seed checks. It also writes growth checks. It does buyouts. It will partner with a founder for ten years before the exit shows up on a press release. The firm's portfolio reads like a museum of patient capital. Stoner is one of its curators.
Healthcare IT, before the category was a category.
She got there early. Brightree, the post-acute care software, eventually sold to ResMed. ClearCare, the home care platform, picked up by WellSky. WebPT, sold to Warburg Pincus. Today her boards include Redox, the interoperability layer that connects health systems to modern software, and ContinuumCloud, which serves human services organizations. Curve Dental sits there too. So does Maxio, the subscription billing platform born of the SaaSOptics and Chargify merger, and Ontra, the legal automation company formerly called InCloudCounsel, and TrueContext, the field workflow platform. She is an investor in Honeybook on top of that.
Look at that list with a long lens and it becomes obvious. Every one of those companies sells software to a specific kind of buyer that does not look like the people building the software. Dentists. Therapists. Caseworkers. Field technicians. Lawyers. Operators. The software hides behind their work. Stoner's career, more than anything else, is a thirty-year experiment in believing that hidden software is more durable than the visible kind.
Recognition, mostly accidental.
The accolades follow. Forbes Midas Hot Prospects. Business Insider's twenty-three top venture capitalists in enterprise tech. GrowthCap's Top 25 Healthcare Investors. None of these lists were the goal. They are the residue of a long, patient run.
Stoner sits on the engineering school board at Northwestern, and on the Private Equity Council at Chicago Booth, where she got her MBA in 2003. She advises the Cleveland Clinic on healthcare technology. She has held a position with the National Venture Capital Association. The pattern is that the engineer never stopped being an engineer. She just changed the system she was optimizing.
Diversity, mechanical.
On the same podcast, she described one of Battery's internal practices in language that sounded suspiciously like a chemical engineer specifying tolerances. The firm requires "50% diverse candidates in order to even kind of move forward in the process." Not a goal. A gate. The kind of policy that does not need a slogan because it does its work by existing.
This is a quietly Stoner-ish way to run a firm. The talk in venture circles about diversity tends to live in the imperative tense and the future conditional. She prefers the present indicative. Set the rule. Hire the right people. Move on.
What stays the same.
Twenty years at one venture firm is rare. Twenty productive years is rarer. Most investors burn out, raise their own fund, defect to private equity, or simply stop returning calls. Stoner has done none of these things. She still writes the checks. She still flies anywhere. She still picks up the phone.
Asked what she looks for in a team, she tends to repeat one phrase. "True grit and creativity." It sounds like a Hallmark card until you remember the companies she has backed and notice that almost all of them were unsexy at the moment she met them. Tax compliance. Job reviews. Insurance underwriting. Physical therapy notes. Then they became something else, and the magazines arrived.
The next move is presumably the same as the last move. Find the bootstrapped operator in a city the Bay Area can't pronounce. Listen for the kind of detail that says they have lived inside their customers' problem. Write a check. Stay on the board for a long time. Repeat. There is no shortage of those companies. There is, it turns out, a real shortage of investors with the patience to find them.