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Oct. 5, 2004 — This past July, the chief executive of an exciting young nanotechnology startup met over an Italian lunch with a colleague to give away his job. It’s not that the CEO was unhappy with his job. In fact, he’ll be staying with the company. Rather, he said, it was simply time for the company to bring someone onboard with the experience and connections to take the firm to the next stage of product commercialization.
In large, established corporations, such planned successions occur after many years, sometimes even decades. But in the case of a rapidly moving startup, such as molecular memory developer ZettaCore Inc. of Denver, Colo., such a change might occur after just a year or two.
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The outcome of the July lunch meeting was officially released today: Subodh Toprani has replaced ZettaCore’s Randy Levine as CEO. The transition became effective Sept. 15.
In addition, the company has appointed Ritu Shrivastava as vice president of manufacturing technology. Levine will remain a director of the company and will stay on to investigate additional markets for its technology outside of the memory space.
“The benefit of me joining the company is that I’ve been in the chip business for a long time,” Toprani said. Whereas Levine specialized in moving the raw technology out of the academic lab and into an industrial setting, Toprani is all about the next step.
He joined ZettaCore from Infineon Technologies North America, where he was a senior vice president and general manager running the wireline communications business.
Toprani also spent six years as an executive at memory technology company Rambus Inc. and worked for more than a dozen years for Advanced Micro Devices. As a result, he says, “I understand the semiconductor side very well.”
ZettaCore, which now numbers 31 people, makes memory devices using molecules called porphyrins that can hold a charge. If the company or its future partners can manufacture devices cheaply and make the technology work reliably, it holds promise to dramatically increase the capacity of memory chips while decreasing their electricity requirements.
Unlike current memory, which requires constant electricity to hold its information, molecular memory of this sort would only require a periodic jolt. Approximately 80 percent of ZettaCore’s current staff is serving in technical, scientific or engineering roles.
Although the company is still at the point of what Levine calls “characterizing and developing the technology,” Toprani said he anticipates that the company will soon begin early discussions with entrenched semiconductor companies.
Though it may come as a surprise that a new CEO would come onboard so early in the life of a startup, such transitions are not uncommon. Nanosys co-founder Larry Bock quietly stepped aside as chief executive earlier this year to make way for Calvin Chow when Nanosys moved from a period of fundraising, where Bock was an expert, into a more product-oriented phase of its existence, an area in which Chow specializes.
The transition for ZettaCore is also part of a larger management build out. The company’s new manufacturing VP, Ritu Shrivastava, will be responsible for guiding the technology’s integration and manufacturing strategy, as well as for building relationships with semi manufacturers and foundries.
Like Toprani, Shrivastava brings a wealth of memory industry experience, most recently at Alliance Semiconductor Corp. where he managed the ramp-up and rollout of SRAM, DRAM and flash memory products. In addition, he worked at Cypress Semiconductor for more than a decade.