Board of Advisors
Board of Advisors
Finis Conner, for the length of his legendary career has consistently identified and executed winning trends in the lightning fast technology industry. Finnis’ experience in selling, designing and manufacturing hard disk drives played a major role in creating the multi-trillion dollar, global technology market that prior to him was non-existant. Finnis has been the pivotal player in migrating computing from floor towers, desktops, laptop computers and now to your back pocket with smaller an smaller devices, with higher capacity and lower costs. In 1973, Finnis co-founded Shugart Associates, where they produced and sold 8″ floppy and hard (HDD) disc drives. The company was sold to Xerox Corporation in 1977. Not unlike many of the entrepreneurs associated with 5Barz Finnis’ never ending focus on “new market trends” and “consumer needs” have served both us, the consumer and him, the career entrepreneur, very well. In 1979, Finnis correctly recognized the trend to smaller computers and conceived the original 5 1/4″, 5MB Winchester disc drive which led to co-founding Seagate Technology. Many computer manufactures at the time didn’t see the need for that much memory but Conner sought out and later sold Steve Job at Apple Computer, 95% of his first years production. Today, Seagate is the largest drive company in the world with a $12 Billion market capitalization, 50,000 employees and shipping over 50,000,000 drives per quarter. In 1986, Finis saw the eventual migration of computers to even smaller and smaller form factors and developed the 3 1/2″ hard drive. There was little interest at Seagate to develop this small of a drive at the time, so Finnis left Seagate to found Conner Peripherals, which was funded with $35M from Compaq Computer. Hence the 3 ½” Winchester Drive was completed and made available for sale in a rather short period of time Conner Peripherals was an instant success and became the fastest-growing company in U.S. history with Conner leading the growth of the company to $1.4 billion in sales in only its 4th year and $2.7 billion in its 10th year, when he engineered the sale of the company to his former company and then rival, Seagate. Finnis is noted for having nurtured and developed top management teams throughout his entire career in multiple disciplines including, sales, marketing, manufacturing and distribution. Under Conner, both Seagate and Conner Peripherals built World Class ISO 9001 high tech manufacturing facilities around the globe, including, California, Singapore, China, Vietnam, Ireland, Scotland and Italy. Over the course of his career, his companies were responsible for creating in excess of 160,000 high quality, high paying technology jobs. Finnis Conner is a visionary student of market trends, a leader in developing market-dominating companies with unmatched financial performance.
