Avadis "Avie" Tevanian, a former Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple from 1997 to 2003, has joined a bunch of former Steve Jobs apostles at private equity firm Elevation Partners, where he will be a Managing Director.
At Elevation Partners Tevanaian will be working with former Apple CFO Fred Anderson. Elevation is the largest investor in Apple phone rival Palm, whose CEO is Jon Rubinstein - another NeXT/Apple bigwig.
Tevanian came to Apple in 1997 from NeXT, where he was vice president of engineering.
He began his professional career at Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a principal designer and engineer of the Mach operating system upon which NEXTSTEP is based. He was instrumental in developing Mac OS X.
Shortly after leaving Apple Tevanian joined the board of directors of Tellme Networks.
Elevation Partners invests in intellectual property and media and entertainment companies. The firm has $1.9 billion of assets under management.
Another Elevation staffer is U2 singer Bono, who joined the company in 2004. The firm is named after U2's song "Elevation".
Bono has appeared in ads for both Apple and BlackBerry, but works for a firm with a stake in the Palm Pre rival smartphone.
On June 4, 2007 Elevation Partners announced an investment of $325m for a 25 percent stake in Palm, Inc..
On December 22 2008 the deal was followed up with an additional $100 million equity investment in Palm, and is made with newly issued preferred stock of convertible type.
Rubinstein left his position as senior vice president of Apple's iPod division in 2006. He became executive chairman of the board at Palm, Inc. after Elevation Partners completed a significant investment in the handheld manufacturer in October 2007.
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