Qualcomm

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2022

⏱️ 147 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Qualcomm, or “Quality Communications” — despite being one of the largest technology companies in the world, few people know the absolutely amazing technological and business history behind it. Seriously, this story is on par with Nvidia, TSMC and all the great semiconductor giants. Without this single fabless company based in San Diego, there’s almost no chance you’d be consuming this episode on whatever device you’re currently listening on — a fact that enables them to earn an incredible estimated $20 for every new phone sold in the world. We dive into this story live at the perfect venue: our first-ever European live show at Solana’s Breakpoint conference in beautiful Lisbon, Portugal!

If you want more Acquired, you can follow our public LP Show feed here in the podcast player of your choice (including Spotify!).

Links:

Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta

Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury

‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I walked in and the first thing I saw was the bottom of the big crane boom arm with the weights
0:05.7	And I was like, why are there Olympic weights here? And then I was like, oh because we've got a professional
0:11.9	Boom arm camera. This is amazing. All right, let's do it
0:30.6	We
0:32.6	Welcome to season 11 episode six of acquired the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them
0:39.8	I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund PSL ventures
0:46.6	And I'm David Rosenthal and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco and we are your hosts
0:53.9	There's an incredible property of the universe where electromagnetic signals can be broadcast and travel through space at the speed of light to be received at a different point in the universe
1:05.2	Now a tiny fraction of these frequencies are detectable by humans as visible light
1:10.6	Some other frequencies can be dangerous like x-rays or gamma rays
1:15.4	But there's a part of the spectrum that is not detectable to humans and it's not harmful at modest doses
1:22.2	That can be used to transmit invisible messages all around us all the time without any of us having any idea
1:29.3	It's like magic. Yeah
1:32.2	These frequencies have been used for over a century to broadcast TV and radio shows presidential messages and important news
1:38.8	Updates in the last 50 years humans have gotten tremendously clever at
1:43.9	Proposing some parts of the RF spectrum to be used for cell phones
1:48.8	But the story of how we got from transmitting small messages on a single frequency
1:53.9	To having billions of humans concurrently sending megabytes or gigabytes of data every minute
2:00.1	Has been an incredible journey of invention and entrepreneurship the company most responsible for the mind-bending system of how it all works today
2:08.9	Is Qualcomm and today we will dive into their entire history and strategy unpacking their products
2:14.8	Which to the outside observer is really best described as a layered series of magic tricks and spoiler alert for listeners
2:23.1	This is an incredible story
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.