Pliant Technology was formed by several of the foremost experts and innovators in the data storage industry. The Pliant executive team collectively has more than 100 years of storage industry experience developing new technologies, bringing products to market, rapidly capturing dominant market share, and providing significant returns to investors.
Jim McCoy, Chairman of the Board
James M. McCoy is the chairman of the board at Pliant Technology. Prior to joining Pliant, McCoy co-founded Maxtor and Quantum Corporations. At Maxtor, he was president of the company from its inception and later spent 12 years as chairman of the board. At Quantum, McCoy served as vice president of marketing. McCoy has served on numerous public and private company boards of directors for more than 20 years. He has also been involved in more than twenty multi-million dollar private and public equity, debt and convertible financings and M&A transactions. Companies he has founded and managed have created multiple billions of dollars in both profitable operating annual revenue and market capitalization. McCoy received a B.S. in industrial engineering and management from San Jose State University and holds five U.S. patents.
Amyl Ahola, Chief Executive Officer
Amyl Ahola brings more than 40 years of storage industry experience to Pliant Technology. Prior to joining Pliant, Amyl served as president and CEO at TeraStor Corporation. Ahola has also held several executive management positions at Seagate Technology, including vice president and general manager, Tape Products, vice president of corporate development, vice president of marketing and vice president of product line management. Previously he served as president and CEO of WangDat and of Optical Storage International (OSI). Prior to OSI, Ahola held a number of executive positions with the pioneering storage and supercomputer company, Control Data Corporation. He holds a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota.
Mike Chenery, President/Co-Founder
Mike Chenery is a co-founder and president of Pliant Technology. Before founding Pliant, he served as the vice president of advanced engineering at Fujitsu Computer Products of America. At Fujitsu, he developed and managed the creation of an advanced architecture development group, as well as the design and introduction of three new serial interfaces. Under Chenery’s leadership, the launch of these products helped dramatically enhance the market perception of Fujitsu’s technical leadership capabilities. He has more than 35 years of experience in the storage industry, and has held senior management positions with Memorex, Unisys, Andor Technology, and Micropolis Corporation. Chenery holds the equivalent of a B.S. in Electrical Technology from the South-East London Technical College.
Doug Derwin, IP Attorney/Director
Douglas Derwin graduated from UCLA in 1980 and from Harvard Law School in 1983. He has practiced high-technology intellectual property law in Silicon Valley since 1983, beginning with Fenwick & West. From 1985 through 1993 he worked at Skjerven, Morrill, MacPherson, Franklin & Friel, becoming a partner in 1989. From 1994 through 1997 he was a partner in the Silicon Valley office of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, heading the firm's High Technology Intellectual Property Group. In 1997 he founded Derwin & Siegel, and began working part-time as senior vice president for Intellectual Property at Intertrust Technologies Corp., where he was involved in generating a patent portfolio for Intertrust and then headed up a litigation team that asserted those patents against Microsoft, resulting in a settlement of $440 million, one of the largest patent recoveries on record. He is currently of counsel to Taylor & Co., a San Francisco law firm.
Barry Eggers, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Barry is a founder of Lightspeed and focuses primarily on investments in the areas of infrastructure technologies, communications and networking, digital media and semiconductors. He has eleven years of venture capital experience and ten years of operating experience. Prior to joining Lightspeed, Barry held senior business development and operational roles at Cisco Systems from 1991-1997. While at Cisco, Barry was responsible for establishing several of the company's largest distribution channels with OEMs, system integrators and VARs. Also at Cisco, he developed the initial merger and acquisition process and directed the first wave of Cisco's acquisitions and integrations. Barry has been named multiple times to the Forbes Midas List of top venture capital investors. Barry holds a BA in Economics and Business from UCLA and an MBA from Stanford University.
Mark has been with Menlo Ventures since 1996. His main areas of focus are next-generation datacenter infrastructure and cloud computing, software-as-a-service and mobile applications. Mark’s current board seats include 3PAR (NYSE:PAR), mywaves, Pliant Technology, RNA Networks, Voltage Security, SpeedDate and Schooner Information Technology. Prior to joining Menlo Ventures, Mark was a product manager for Oracle Corporation’s Massively Parallel Processing Group. In this role, he was part of the team that developed and deployed one of the first true massively parallel and multi-threaded commercial software offerings – the Oracle Parallel Server. Eventually, Mark started and managed a consulting group at Oracle dedicated to customers of this product. Mark then went on to work for Netscape Communications Corporation from the first year of the company’s inception through its IPO. Mark is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S. in Physics with Electrical Engineering) and the Stanford University Graduate School of Business (M.B.A.), and currently serves on the Dean’s Advisory Council of the MIT School of Science.
