Management Team

Petro Estakhri, President & CEO:
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.

Dr. Rajiv Ranjan, CTO:
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 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.

Eric S. Whitaker, Exec. Vice President & General Counsel:
Eric S. Whitaker has served as Avalanche's Executive Vice President, Business Development and General Counsel since October 2007. Prior to Avalanche, Mr. Whitaker was Executive Vice President, Corporate Strategy, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary at Lexar Media, Inc. In that role, Mr. Whitaker was responsible for Lexar Media's long range planning and business strategy development as well as overseeing legal affairs as general counsel and secretary. Mr. Whitaker executed strategic agreements with virtually every major semiconductor company and developed a long term strategy to protect and monetize Lexar's fundamental intellectual property. Prior to Lexar Media, Mr. Whitaker was an attorney with Latham & Watkins, specializing in intellectual property and antitrust litigation. He was a Fellow for the Coro Foundation which provides intensive training in public policy and urban politics. He served as a legislative assistant for U.S. Senator Warren Rudman, acting as primary contact on all legal and tax issues. Mr. Whitaker graduated cum laude from Princeton University with an A.B. in Politics and earned a J.D. from the Stanford School of Law, Stanford University.

Technology Team

Dr. Yiming Huai, VP Technology:
Yiming Huai joined Avalanche in September 2008. Dr. Huai is a highly accomplished expert in magnetic and semiconductor technologies, and most recently was co-founder, board member, CTO and VP of Engineering of Grandis, Inc, a pioneer in the Spin Torque Transfer MRAM (STT-MRAM). While at Grandis, Dr. Huai successfully raised over $25M in private and government funding. He also established the Grandis experienced engineering team and patent portfolio. He has played critical role for Grandis establishing strategic partnerships with Renesas and Hynix. Prior to Grandis, Dr. Huai served as Senior Director of Thin Film of Manufacturing at Read-Rite Corporation (now Western Digital), where he led the development and volume production of industry leading GMR heads for hard disk drives from 1996 to 2002. He previously worked as a Staff Scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada. He received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, both in Physics, from the University of Montreal in Canada. He has published over 90 papers in scientific journals, holds over 60 U.S. patents and has more than 20 patents pending. He has given more than 25 invited talks on STT-MRAM technology over the last six years and has served as Conference Chairman and Organizer for major international magnetic conferences and workshops. In 1996, he received the prestigious R&D 100 Award with his peers for his outstanding work on Ultra-High Density Magnetic Sensors.

Ebrahim (Ebi) Abedifard, VP of Engineering:
Mr. Abedifard has served as VP of Engineering for Avalanche Technology since September 2008. Mr. Abedifard has more than 21 years of experience in the design of non-volatile memories. Most recently he served as Director of Design Engineering at Micron Technology, where he led multiple design teams on key high speed non-volatile memory products for Micron including the fastest NAND Flash (200MB/S, 8Gb, 50nm) and 143MHz Synchronous NOR Flash memory. His most recent project was leading the design of Micron's 34nm 32Gb NAND flash, he also successfully designed and transferred to production multiple other high volume NAND flash memories. He holds more than 50 U.S. patents with many additional patents pending. Prior to Micron he served as Design Manager for Xicor Inc. for their EEPROM and NOVRAM products. Mr. Abedifard holds a B.S.E.E. from Utah State University and a M.S.E.E. from California State University, Fullerton.

Parviz Keshtbod, Chief Scientist:
Parviz Keshtbod has served as Chief Scientist for Avalanche Technology since October 2006. An expert in semiconductor process development, device physics and high frequency analog circuit design, Mr. Keshtbod has held senior level positions at several leading memory companies over his 35 year career. He began his career at Intel as an analog circuit designer. After Intel, he managed the nonvolatile memory design team at Philips Semiconductor. Later, he also designed memories for Cypress Semiconductor and Cirrus Logic. More recently, Mr. Keshtbod held director of circuit design positions at Lexar Media and Maxim Corporation. He holds over 25 patents in non-volatile memories and circuit design.

Marketing & Sales Team

Greg Matson, VP Marketing:
Greg Matson has served as Avalanche's Vice President of Marketing since April of 2008 and has worked in the high technology industry for over fifteen years. Prior to joining Avalanche, Mr. Matson was a co-founder and Vice President of Marketing at ConGo Technology, a mobile content start-up. Previous to ConGo, Mr. Matson built and managed the product marketing and communications team at Intel's Flash Memory Group. He was responsible for architecting multiple world-wide new product introductions including the Intel StrataFlash Memory line which represented over $3B in revenue. In early 2007, he collaborated with Mr. Simmons on the Intel Value Solid State Drive launch, paving the way for Intel's entry into the solid-state storage drive market. Mr. Matson also held senior roles in international business development for Intel, where he managed over $650M in annual revenue from North American and European cellular customers, and grew business from Japanese and Korean consumer electronics customers by over 80%. Prior to Intel, Mr. Matson managed product marketing for new products at DST Innovis (now AMDOCS). He holds B.S. and M.B.A. degrees from the UC Davis Graduate School of Management.

Max Simmons, VP Sales:
Max Simmons has served as Avalanche's Vice President of Sales since April of 2008 and brings over sixteen years of business development and sales expertise. Most recently, Mr. Simmons was a co-founder and Vice President of Sales at ConGo Technology, a mobile content startup. While at ConGo Technology, Mr. Simmons managed customer engagements and market development. Prior, Mr. Simmons managed multiple business development teams for the Intel Flash Memory Group. He built the business development team for the NAND flash group, which ramped to over $150M in its first year, and for the NOR group, he managed the world-wide cellular team which he grew to $2B in annual revenue. Mr. Simmons also spent time in the field growing Intel's market segment share at Motorola to nearly 90% and took Korean cellular OEMs from 0% to over 40% share. Prior to Intel, Mr. Simmons was a sales manager in the steel industry. Mr. Simmons holds a B.A. from UC Santa Cruz and an M.B.A. from the UC Davis Graduate School of Management.