Qualcomm, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Qualcomm comes up
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:47:37 David Rosenthal And this is a partnership with HTC, Motorola, Samsung, LG, T-Mobile, Sprint, Qualcomm, Intel, Broadcom, and Texas Instruments.
Indian Premier League Cricket (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:03:46 Ben Gilbert It was Qualcomm, by the way.
- ▶ 2:03:48 David Rosenthal Ah, Qualcomm.
Rolex (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 4:25:13 Ben Gilbert There's a chance this thing's worth more than American Express, or Goldman Sachs, or Adobe, or Pepsi, or Disney, or Qualcomm, or AT&T.
TSMC founder Morris Chang · Acquired
- ▶ 0:50 Ben Gilbert After becoming obsessed with semiconductors from our TSMC episode four years ago, David and I wound our way through the rest of the industry, studying fabless companies like Nvidia and Qualcomm, architecture companies like ARM,
- ▶ 13:28 Ben Gilbert And Qualcomm was, I believe, another like that.
- ▶ 13:31 Morris Chang Qualcomm was also, yeah.
- ▶ 13:33 Morris Chang And Qualcomm, the top customers, uh, didn't change very much since, uh, since then, except for maybe one, yeah.
- ▶ 29:59 David Rosenthal Yeah, not just NVIDIA, but Qualcomm and Intel.
- ▶ 1:00:35 Morris Chang Take Qualcomm, I'm quite sure that they use, uh, you know, the most advanced, uh, and, uh, or even Apple, I think they use.
- ▶ 1:55:42 Morris Chang Uh, uh, so let me tell you the IBM Qualcomm story.
- ▶ 1:55:48 Morris Chang Uh, now Qualcomm, uh, we consider the Qualcomm to be a, uh, prime, uh,
- ▶ 1:56:06 Morris Chang Uh, we, we really wanted Qualcomm because we knew they were a, a technology house.
- ▶ 1:56:20 Ben Gilbert And they were part of that initial wave of fabless companies.
- ▶ 1:56:25 Morris Chang They started, uh, Erwin Jacobs started Qualcomm.
- ▶ 1:57:07 Morris Chang Qualcomm to be a customer.
- ▶ 1:57:12 Morris Chang And, um, you know, I saw their operations VP, that's what they call, that's what our customers call their purchasing people, operations VP, operations senior VP.
- ▶ 1:58:27 Morris Chang And, uh, our business with Qualcomm, the business that Qualcomm gave us pretty rapidly increased after that, after the 97, 98 period.
- ▶ 1:58:58 Morris Chang But their main business was really supplying to, uh, Qualcomm and a few other very small companies, very small, fabulous company.
- ▶ 1:59:17 Morris Chang So I immediately knew, uh, IBM was in trouble because they were losing Qualcomm.
- ▶ 2:28:37 Ben Gilbert There's Qualcomm.
- ▶ 2:53:27 Ben Gilbert We did a great live episode several years ago on Qualcomm.
- ▶ 2:53:48 Ben Gilbert So if you want to understand how all of our cell phones work, go check out the Qualcomm episode.
TSMC · Acquired
- ▶ 0:47 Ben Gilbert They make the chips for a whole bunch of other fabless companies like Qualcomm, AMD, Broadcom, and hyperscalers like AWS.
- ▶ 3:18 Ben Gilbert If you're excited at all about Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, or even any of the chips that Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple are making,
- ▶ 1:06:24 Ben Gilbert So today, I think Apple, NVIDIA, Qualcomm.
- ▶ 1:17:16 David Rosenthal You know, little companies like Qualcomm, Broadcom, Marvell, NVIDIA, these are all started with TSMC.
- ▶ 1:34:31 David Rosenthal You know, Qualcomm, Broadcom, MediaTek, Apple.
Renaissance Technologies (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 54:31 Ben Gilbert We talked about it a lot on the Qualcomm episode, father of information theory, really the center of gravity for attracting tons of talent to MIT, and kind of
Holiday Special 2023 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:10 Ben Gilbert So if you liked the programming and assembly language on air from NVIDIA, or I guess assembly language pseudocode, or our Qualcomm episode where we tried to describe how the CDMA protocol works, we're still here for you.
Costco (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 11:12 David Rosenthal There's no Qualcomm.
Nike (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:33:09 Ben Gilbert And in fact, there's a great analogy here to the NVIDIA and Qualcomm's of the world and Nike.
Holiday Special 2022 · Acquired
- ▶ 2:05:47 Ben Gilbert Like, I did a ton of Qualcomm research on The Verge, because they've done so much reporting on Qualcomm over the years.
- ▶ 2:07:59 Ben Gilbert It was painful for me to read the whole Qualcomm book, but the only way to get it was a paperback book.
Enron · Acquired
- ▶ 23:17 Ben Gilbert I was gonna say, I remember reading this and looking it up and being like, okay good, woof, it's not our Qualcomm Erwin.
- ▶ 23:21 David Rosenthal I first heard about this other bizarro Erwin Jacobs when doing the research for the Qualcomm episode, because every time I type it into Google, I would occasionally get
- ▶ 44:58 Ben Gilbert Think about our Qualcomm episode.
- ▶ 3:24:22 David Rosenthal We had some lined up for, uh, the Qualcomm episode, but we literally got yanked offstage.
Qualcomm · Acquired
- ▶ 2:09 Ben Gilbert Is Qualcomm.
- ▶ 2:11 Ben Gilbert And today, we will dive into their entire history and strategy, unpacking their products, which, to the outside observer, is really best described as a layered series of magic tricks.
- ▶ 2:53 Ben Gilbert He was kind enough to invite us and, uh, and really fun to do it there, especially given Solana's tie to Qualcomm with Anatoly having worked there for over 10 years.
- ▶ 6:05 David Rosenthal Which is not well known, but is the definitive history of Qualcomm and ranks right up there with among the best business books that business histories that we've used as a source on Acquired throughout the whole history of the show.
- ▶ 6:46 David Rosenthal How Qualcomm came to rule the wireless industry.
- ▶ 7:50 David Rosenthal So with act one of the Qualcomm story, we start in Austria, here in Europe,
- ▶ 8:14 David Rosenthal Uh, and we start, you might think, if you know anything about Qualcomm history, you think in mid-thirties, you're like,
- ▶ 8:20 David Rosenthal oh, I didn't know Erwin Jacobs, co-founder and CEO of Qualcomm, was born in Europe.
- ▶ 8:49 Ben Gilbert I remember we reached out to the NZS Capital folks and said, hey, you know, do you have any great resources on, on Qualcomm?
- ▶ 12:15 David Rosenthal So Hetty teams up with her new Hollywood neighbor, a composer, a music composer, named George Antheal, bear with us here, I promise this is getting to Qualcomm, uh, who is a film music composer, and they, with her ideas and his musical…
- ▶ 13:12 David Rosenthal So if you're familiar at all with like the wireless world or Qualcomm or anything, you hear spread spectrum and you're like, oh, that sounds familiar.
- ▶ 20:54 David Rosenthal Um, the, so where this all comes together in act three of our story here, which is going to be a little longer cause we're going to get into Qualcomm as part of this.
- ▶ 23:14 David Rosenthal He would credit that year and a half with really helping him start first link of it, his first company, and then Qualcomm get out of academia and become an entrepreneur because he actually learned about like business
- ▶ 25:11 David Rosenthal Without what's gonna come later in Hedy Lamarr, that he would start Qualcomm.
- ▶ 29:40 David Rosenthal He missed out on founding Qualcomm.
- ▶ 29:43 David Rosenthal Well, he actually ended up okay because instead of founding Qualcomm, he founded the internet.
- ▶ 39:09 Ben Gilbert They wouldn't have had Qualcomm if they didn't sell the company.
- ▶ 43:30 David Rosenthal In July of 1985, with seven, seven in total, Andy, Erwin, and five other of the best Linkabit engineers, they meet at Erwin's house, and they decided to start this new company, and they name it Qualcomm.
- ▶ 43:46 Ben Gilbert Quality Communications.
- ▶ 43:47 David Rosenthal Which is short for Quality Communications, which I had no freaking idea when we did the research, but then you're like, oh, duh.
- ▶ 46:13 David Rosenthal The business history of Qualcomm, just like Bill Gurley said on the blurb of this book,
- ▶ 46:52 David Rosenthal And yet here we are talking about Qualcomm.
- ▶ 52:41 Ben Gilbert Over to Qualcomm, so they're, they're thinking about doing this, this satellite communication thing, and remember, Erwin studied with Claude Shannon, so he's always thinking about what is the most efficient way to use all the way up to the…
- ▶ 56:41 David Rosenthal In 1986, well before, years before Qualcomm gets actually directly involved in the cellular industry at all, they patent the method and technique for code division multiple access applied to terrestrial
- ▶ 57:10 David Rosenthal Like literally they played such a long game and they threaded needle after needle after needle, and that was just the first.
- ▶ 58:10 David Rosenthal Okay, so, Qualcomm founded in 1985.
- ▶ 58:25 David Rosenthal Uh, Qualcomm doesn't enter the wireless industry until 1989.
- ▶ 58:39 David Rosenthal Uh, so they get approached to bid on another contract, fledgling Qualcomm does, from a company called OmniNet.
- ▶ 58:48 David Rosenthal Which has this idea that they think the Qualcomm folks are going to be perfect to implement.
- ▶ 59:18 David Rosenthal Qualcomm and Erwin are like, great, we're gonna bid on this contract.
- ▶ 1:00:27 David Rosenthal Qualcomm and OmniNet merge in 1988.
- ▶ 1:00:40 David Rosenthal It was part of Qualcomm for a long time before I believe it ended up getting spun out to private equity.
- ▶ 1:02:22 Ben Gilbert This is Qualcomm saying, we need money so badly to fund the development of Omnitracks for this, this customer, OmniNet, that the most attractive option for us is to sell half the equity in our company.
- ▶ 1:05:21 David Rosenthal But the Qualcomm guys, they know about Moore's law, which like most people didn't know about at that time.
- ▶ 1:09:15 David Rosenthal Um, the Qualcomm folks, of course, they eagerly anticipate the release of the spec and they look at it and they're like,
- ▶ 1:10:10 David Rosenthal So the spec that the CTIA publishes, the Qualcomm guys, it just must have just been, like, beaming ear to ear, uh,
- ▶ 1:14:21 David Rosenthal Qualcomm immediately, like, goes to Washington, like, Erwin and Andy, they go, they go to, they go to DC, and they're like, hey, just to make sure, we just want to, like, be crystal clear, can you confirm to us that even though this other…
- ▶ 1:15:34 David Rosenthal And, uh, you know, it was literally only the Qualcomm folks who thought it would work.
- ▶ 1:18:55 Ben Gilbert Chips, powerful power management, um, and you've got Qualcomm pitching the industry that they're gonna do this, and people are like, wait, but you have to turn down the gain on anybody really close to the towers and turn up the gain on…
- ▶ 1:19:42 Ben Gilbert Modify a signal based on what you're currently hearing from that signal, and then Qualcomm comes in way over the top and says, oh, also, there's this new thing called GPS that is coming out, and we're gonna start- Which they knew about…
- ▶ 1:21:05 David Rosenthal Qualcomm, for the rest of the year, works on this.
- ▶ 1:21:21 David Rosenthal They've got vans driving around the city, and then, like, a base station back at Qualcomm HQ, and they're gonna make it all work.
- ▶ 1:22:41 David Rosenthal And, uh, Qualcomm's like, okay, how about New York?
- ▶ 1:22:46 David Rosenthal So in February of 1990, they do a successful demo in
- ▶ 1:22:52 David Rosenthal On the back of that, they sign, uh, Ninex, Ninex Mobile, which is one of the largest New York carriers.
- ▶ 1:22:59 David Rosenthal Um, and then in August, they sign Ameritech, which is one of the largest- Chicago, I think.
- ▶ 1:23:05 David Rosenthal Um, uh, and then, like another brilliant move, they start going international.
- ▶ 1:23:18 David Rosenthal They're like, what if we go out to countries
- ▶ 1:23:19 David Rosenthal Where it's just tabula rasa, like clean slate, and we pitch this as, like, the obvious best technology, and famously, South Korea, back to the, like, government-mandated standards, the South Korean government is like, yep, this is clearly…
- ▶ 1:23:46 David Rosenthal Uh, time was, I think, close to 40% of Qualcomm's revenues, because the whole country, like, and it was one of the, you know, most advanced mobile countries, um, all just using Qualcomm.
- ▶ 1:24:06 David Rosenthal Um, in, uh, December of 1991, on the back of all this, they go public.
- ▶ 1:24:42 David Rosenthal At that point, Qualcomm does a secondary offering.
- ▶ 1:25:54 David Rosenthal Qualcomm, they're like this, you know, still relatively small San Diego, you know,
- ▶ 1:26:24 David Rosenthal You know, Qualcomm's got that for sure.
- ▶ 1:26:59 David Rosenthal Qualcomm's for sure got number one covered.
- ▶ 1:27:03 David Rosenthal Qualcomm's like, you know, they start signing partners, but they're like, you know, we really need to spur adoption.
- ▶ 1:27:20 Ben Gilbert Which is quite interesting, because despite, I mean, none of us are buying Qualcomm phones today.
- ▶ 1:27:26 Ben Gilbert Like, no, Qualcomm branded phones.
- ▶ 1:27:28 David Rosenthal Today, spoiler alert, Qualcomm today is the largest fabulous semiconductor company in the world.
- ▶ 1:27:46 Ben Gilbert Qualcomm is the biggest.
- ▶ 1:28:10 David Rosenthal I know the handset one, but I believe both were 51% owned by Qualcomm, 49% owned by the partner.
- ▶ 1:28:54 David Rosenthal I, I actually had a Qualcomm handset back in the day.
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