Mr. James (Jim) M. McCoy

A multi-career entrepreneur, venture investor and business development executive based in Silicon Valley. Over four decades, he has founded and grown multiple billion-dollar international companies and contributed in a broad range of industries and technologies. His work spans computer, consumer electronics, aviation, and biotech instrumentation industries. He has been a seed, founding or early stage investor and/or Board Director with over 20 successful companies. Most recently, he was Chairman of Pliant Technology, recently acquired by SanDisk. He graduated from San Jose State University, California, with a B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering and Management; and has been 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. He 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 was the VP of Marketing. They came up with 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, it was also a major disk storage manufacturer (usually #2 in market share behind Seagate), and was based in Milpitas, California near San Jose. Quantum was a manufacturer of 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. He was co-founder and CEO of 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 (Bay Partners) provided the initial $3 million 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. The DBS (Development Bank of Singapore) agreed to provide financing to help grow the company in Singapore. In 1983, the company established a liaison and procurement office in Tokyo, headed by Tatsuya Yamamoto. Maxtor's product architecture used eight disks; 15 surfaces recorded data and the final surface was where the servo track information was located. The company developed its own spindle motor, which was fitted within the casting containing the disks. This was a major departure, the motor usually being mounted external to the disks. The first product was designed to provide 190?MB of storage, but delays in getting magnetic heads to the Maxtor design resulted in the company taking what was available and the first drives were shipped with a capacity of only 140?MB. The company 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 (in a deal worth US$1.9 billion) by its rival Seagate in 2006. His longest professional interest, deepest roots, first employment and current primary business focus is in aviation. He has been an active private pilot for over 30 years.