Board of Directors

Eric Stang:
Eric Stang has served on the Avalanche Board of Directors since October 2006. He also currently serves as Chief Executive Officer of Ooma. Prior to Ooma, he was President, CEO and member of the Board of Directors at Reliant Technology, Inc. He joined Reliant from Lexar where he was Chief Executive Officer, President, and Chairman of the Board of Directors. Eric played a leadership role in taking the company public, effectively enacted a turnaround strategy, led its growth and entry into new markets, oversaw the development of a consumer brand, and established Lexar products in over 70,000 storefronts worldwide with 2005 revenues in excess of $850M. Prior to Lexar, Eric served as vice president and general manager of ADAC Laboratories. Previously, he was director of operations at Raychem Corporation. Eric co-founded Monitor Company Europe Limited, an international strategic consulting firm. He has also worked for McKinsey & Company and Ford Aerospace (now Loral). He holds a B.A. in Economics from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Graduate School of Business, Harvard University.

Petro Estakhri:
Petro Estakhri co-founded and has served as Chief Executive Officer for Avalanche Technology since August 2006. Prior Mr. Estakhri served as the Chief Technology Officer of Lexar Media, Inc. which he founded in 1996. Lexar Media is a pioneer in flash memory technology for the digital photography, consumer electronics, and communications markets and grew from a private start-up to the 55th largest company in Silicon Valley prior to its acquisition by Micron Technology, Inc. in June 2006. From 1993 to 1996, Mr. Estakhri served as the Senior Director of Mass Storage Controller Engineering at Cirrus Logic, Inc., a supplier of semiconductors for Internet entertainment electronics, where he developed one of Cirrus Logic's primary micro-controllers and co-founded the mass storage memory group. Mr. Estakhri also worked at IBM and National Semiconductor. Mr. Estakhri has served as a member of a number of boards, including Lexar Media's as well as Silicon Stor, a company that Mr. Estakhri co-founded in 2002. Mr. Estakhri is a co-author of over 95 patents related to magnetic media, flash storage controller and systems architecture. Mr. Estakhri holds a B.S. and an M.S. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California at Davis.

Rajiv Ranjan:
Rajiv Ranjan co-founded and has served as Chief Technology Officer at Avalanche Technology since August 2006. Prior, Dr. Ranjan served as the Executive Director of R&D at Seagate where he led the technology development which fueled a doubling of revenue to over $10B. His technology pioneering efforts have led to the productization of low-noise media perpendicular media and laser texturing. These technologies are now widely used in storage devices which revolutionized the data storage industry. Dr. Ranjan was recognized by both the United States Congress and the Prime Minister of India for his outstanding research in the field of magnetic recording, where he holds over 75 patents. Prior, he directed Komag.s R&D team, which under his direction pioneered the granular and oriented media technology enabling revenue grow to over $600M. Dr. Ranjan received his PhD. in Material Science and Engineering from Iowa State University on a full United States Department of Energy scholarship. He received the prestigious SIMS-86 award from the Instrument Society of America for his design of a transducer for magneto-acoustic detection. Rajiv graduated from the India Institute of Technology, Kharagpur as a Silver medalist in the field of Metallurgical Engineering. He has published over 60 papers in the magnetic recording field and has lectured at UC Berkeley, Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University on magnetic recording technologies.

Will Stewart:
Mr. Stewart has served as a Avalanche Board Member since October 2006. He is Chairman of Sand Hill Capital and specializes in providing debt and equity financing to venture backed IT companies. Mr. Stewart is co-Founder and Managing Director of the Sand Hill Capital Sakura Fund which provides equity financing to the Sand Hill Capital portfolio of companies. Concurrently, he is founder and President of Asia Pacific Ventures and has advised over 300 U.S. venture backed IT start-up companies in the Japan/Asia marketplace, raising more than $2 billion in equity, debt and joint venture financing over the past 15 years. Mr. Stewart is also the founding General Partner of APV Technology Partners I, II and III with over $200 million in early stage venture funding under management. Prior to founding the Asia Pacific Venture companies, Mr. Stewart was a senior executive for NEC in Japan. Mr. Stewart has a B.A. in Economics from St. Anselm College, where he is also on the Board of Trustees. In addition, he has an MBA in Finance from Suffolk University.