James (Jim) M. McCoy

Co-founder and CEO of Maxtor, which became a leading disk drive manufacturer after pioneering the market for high-performance 5.25-inch disk drives, McCoy has built multiple billion-dollar international companies over four decades as an entrepreneur, venture investor, and business development executive based in Silicon Valley. His work has spanned computer, consumer electronics, aviation, and biotech instrumentation industries. McCoy has served as a seed, founding, or early-stage investor and/or Board Director with over 20 successful companies. Most recently, he has served as Chairman of Pliant Technology, subsequently acquired by SanDisk.

McCoy graduated from San Jose State University, California, with a B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering and Management and was issued five patents. He joined IBM in 1967 while still in school, and in 1970 he went to work for Cartridge Television, the first manufacturer of the home video recorder, the Cartrivision. He helped to set up a manufacturing operation in Singapore, where he was one of the first magnetic recording people to offshore a manufacturing operation.

Later, he joined Shugart Associates, which by that time had become a world leader in making diskettes. McCoy then moved from Shugart Associates to co-found Quantum Corporation, along with other executives and designers from Shugart Associates, IBM, and Memorex. At Quantum he served as VP of Marketing. The team developed an idea for an 8-inch hard drive that would achieve decent performance without the cost or complexity of using a full closed-loop servo system—a difficult task before the advent of dedicated servo ICs and readily available DSPs.

From its founding in 1980 until 2001, Quantum was also a major disk storage manufacturer, usually ranking second in market share behind Seagate, and was based in Milpitas, California, near San Jose. The company manufactured tape drive, tape automation, and disk-based data deduplication backup, recovery, and deduplication storage products for physical, virtual, and cloud environments. It also sold scalable file storage systems and archive software and appliances for managing data. Quantum sold its hard disk drive business to Maxtor in 2001.

McCoy co-founded Maxtor along with Jack Swartz and Raymond Niedzwiecki—graduates of the San Jose State University School of Engineering and former employees of IBM. They began the search for funding in 1981. In early 1982, B.J. Cassin and Chuck Hazel of Bay Partners provided the initial $3 million in funding, and the company officially began operations on July 1, 1982.

Maxtor Corporation became a leading disk drive manufacturer after pioneering the market for high-performance 5.25-inch disk drives. Maxtor shipped its first product in February 1983 to Convergent Technology and immediately received an additional $5.5 million in its second round of funding. The company also began negotiations with the EDB (Economic Development Board) of Singapore for favorable terms before committing to Singapore as its offshore manufacturing location, and the DBS (Development Bank of Singapore) agreed to provide financing to help grow the company there. In 1983, Maxtor established a liaison and procurement office in Tokyo, headed by Tatsuya Yamamoto.

Maxtor's product architecture used eight disks, with 15 surfaces recording data and the final surface reserved for servo track information. The company developed its own spindle motor, fitted within the casting containing the disks—a major departure from the norm, as the motor was usually mounted external to the disks. The first product was designed to provide 190 MB of storage, but delays in obtaining magnetic heads to the Maxtor design resulted in the company shipping with a capacity of only 140 MB. Maxtor received an additional round of financing of approximately $37 million in 1984 before going public in 1985, with Goldman Sachs as the prime underwriter. The company was purchased by its rival Seagate in 2006 in a deal worth US$1.9 billion.

McCoy's longest professional interest, deepest roots, and first employment lay in aviation, which has also remained his primary business focus. He has been an active private pilot for over 30 years.