Quinn Li, the new head of Qualcomm Ventures, was selected by Global Corporate Venturing as one of the most promising executives ahead of his promotion today, for our Rising Stars supplement due to come out next week.
Li has been with Qualcomm’s venturing unit for 10 years. He started out as a senior investment manager and worked his way through director and senior director roles along the way. Before joining the unit, Li held engineering and product management positions in IBM, Broadcom, and Lucent.
Li said the ability to make investments with a strong financial return while helping drive forward Qualcomm’s strategic objectives was one of the reasons he was drawn to CVC. He also takes pleasure in helping portfolio firms grow through leveraging Qualcomm’s resources.
Li said some of the unit’s greatest successes had been investments and exits such as A123 Systems, Fitbit, InvenSense, Xiaomi and Waze, with the North America team leading investments in InvenSense and A123 as well as Fitbit. At present, Qualcomm manages 140 companies across its global portfolio.
Li’s ambition is to continue building Qualcomm into a world-class CVC. He said some of the biggest challenges he has had to overcome along the way have involved finding the balance between strategic and financial objectives, while building the right team with diverse enough experience to expand investments into new areas.
Li thinks CVC can become a stronger industry through the sharing of best practice. He also believes CVCs needed to take a long-term investment stance and demonstrate lasting commitment to investment programmes.