Steven Grossman
President & Chief Executive Officer
Steve brings 25 years of semiconductor memory business experience
to Contour Semiconductor. From 1995 to 2002, Steve served as
Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Flash Memory Business
Unit of Hynix Semiconductor (formerly Hyundai Electronics). He
managed the growth of this business from start-up to a profitable
$100-million-plus enterprise. Prior to this and from the mid-1980’s,
Steve served as Director of Marketing for the Non-Volatile Memory
Division of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), helping to establish AMD
as a leader in the EPROM and Flash memory businesses. Most
recently, Steve served as President and CEO of Etenna Corporation,
an embedded antenna supplier. Steve has also held key management
roles at Texas Instruments, Exel Microelectronics, Seeq Technology
and Mostek Corporation. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from the
Wharton Graduate Division of the University of Pennsylvania.
Sam Young
VP Marketing & Sales
Sam has founded three technology companies and has 35 years of semiconductor experience in the areas of marketing, sales, strategic planning, design and general management. Prior to joining Contour Semiconductor, Sam worked with M&A firm IDL as a Sr. VP and as a consultant to several emerging companies. From 1995 – 2002, he served as the VP of Marketing for Hynix Semiconductor’s Flash Business Unit, where he directed the sales and marketing activities to grow the business profitably from start-up to over $100 million. Sam held senior management positions in marketing and sales at Etenna, Corsair Microsystems, Alliance Semiconductor, Performance Semiconductor, Flash pioneer Exel Microelectronics and Mostek. He also worked for Dataquest as the Director of worldwide memory research and Burroughs Corporation as a memory system design engineer and chaired the EIA/JEDEC standards committee for all memory. Sam has a BSEE from Pratt Institute.
Tom Trent
VP Product Development
After a successful career culminating in VP of Research & Development as well as Chief Technical Officer positions at Micron Technology, Tom came out of retirement to lead Contour Semiconductor’s design, product and test engineering efforts. Tom started at Micron Technology as an early employee in 1980 and was involved in all aspects of memory product design, product engineering and test. He was also heavily involved in building Micron's IP portfolio through his own efforts, as well as designing programs to reward employees for patentable ideas. He retired from Micron in 1996. Prior to Micron, Tom worked at Motorola Semiconductor Products Division, from 1973 to 1980, in the Semiconductor R&D Labs and then in the Bipolar Memory Division as a Design Engineer and later Design Engineering Manager. Tom has a BSEE from Kansas State University and MSEE and MBA degrees from Arizona State University.
Dan Shepard
Founder & Chief Technology Officer
Dan began developing the Contour technology in the mid 1990s and
formed the company in 2000. A life-long inventor, he has received
multiple patents in areas ranging from industrial sewing machines
to memory architectures. Dan invented new types of financial securities
during his 16 years in the financial services industry, specializing
in quantitative analysis at such Wall Street firms as First
Boston, Lehman Brothers and UBS Securities and in Boston at Fidelity
Investments. He received a B.S. in Engineering and Operations Research,
cum laude with distinction, from Yale College in 1980 and an M.S.
from the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. in 1982. Dan returned
to Yale and received an M.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2002.
John Allwein
Vice President of Finance & Administration
John brings 20 years experience in semiconductor related businesses to Contour. Prior to joining Contour John was the CFO for Practical Engineering Inc., an early stage venture capital backed company which designs and manufactures semiconductor test equipment. From 1987 to 2004 John served as the Vice President of Finance & Administration for Omnirel LLC, a manufacturer of high reliability semiconductor modules. John joined Omnirel at start-up and managed the sale of the Company to International Rectifier in 2000. After the sale to IR John served as Business Unit CFO and completed three acquisitions growing the business unit to over $100-Million in annual revenues. John has also held senior financial management positions at a number of Boston-area high technology firms. John holds a Bachelor of Science degree in accounting from Bentley College.
