* Apple co-founder.

* Philanthropist.

* Computer geek, cult icon. grade-school teacher.

* Adviser to Salt Lake City-based Fusion-io.

"Woz," as he is more popularly known, is serving up advice on market trends, research, growth and branding in return for an equity stake in the computer-storage device maker.

"It's a pretty wide-ranging conversation. Steve is a pretty impressive individual," Fusion-io CEO Don Basile said Friday.

The talks began last summer at a Fusion-io sales office in Redwood City, Calif., in Silicon Valley. Basile said he meets "regularly" with Wozniak, but would not elaborate.

"Steve is one of the foremost technical thinkers in the industry, and we are honored that he would look at our small company and say, in his words, that we 'win in almost every way at the same time, in terms of speed, capacity, reliability, endurance, power usage and simplicity,' " Basile said.

Wozniak was unavailable for comment.

Fusion-io's computer memory cards hold enormous quantities of data that the company says can be stored and accessed at speeds equal to the fastest storage networks on the market, but are small enough to fit into the palm of a hand.

Conventional mechanical storage disks can perform 100 to 200 data "read" or "write" operations per second; a Fusion-io processor can do more than 120,000 reads or writes per second, an improvement that Basile said is so market-transforming that it drew Wozniak to the company.

The company began shipping its first product in May. Within three months, Fusion-io had a customer list of more than 300 companies, including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Boeing and General Motors.

"We went from zero to seven-figure monthly revenue in three months," Basile said.

pbeebe@sltrib.com