The story of technology company Qualcomm’s founding and development was related in an entertaining fireside chat earlier this month in a rare joint public appearance of two of the company’s key historical figures.
Irwin Jacobs, the co-founder of Qualcomm, and his son Paul Jacobs, current executive chairman of Qualcomm, challenged entrepreneurs and technology executives to have “vision”.
Paul Jacobs said: “Having visions which are out there allows people to have creativity… The main force of a company is shaped by a vision.”
Irwin Jacobs related how the company had opted to begin developing Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology, one of the key radio systems used in mobile phones.
When the company was founded in 1985, Jacobs said: “We did not have a business plan and we did not have a product in mind.”
Over the next few years Qualcomm opted to develop CDMA, with the company’s decision to do so based on a one-page client paper which argued if the capacity gains of CDMA were true, it could lead to an “interesting” business.
The pair argued that the key management lesson was to have belief in products which could change the world. Paul Jacobs said: “CDMA became the next thing. We believed it was going to change the world then it did. When we started think about wireless internet we believed it would be bigger than the wired internet.”
The pair were interviewed by Nagraj Kashyap, the head of its corporate venturing unit Qualcomm Ventures, speaking at the unit’s annual CEO Summit.
Kashyap joked about how Qualcomm Ventures is still looking to meet one of Paul Jacobs’ challenges to the unit, when the group was founded, which was to ”make more money than my [Jacob’s] biggest hit.” Paul Jacobs had personally overseen investments in mobile internet company Openwave and portable device company Handspring, both of which secured multi-billion dollar valuations during the IPOs.
The pair’s appearance capped off a day of presentations from other luminaries including Craig Venter, who sequenced the genome with private money, and Steve Allen, head of SVB Analytics, the information services unit of the bank, as well as Qualcomm Ventures’ portfolio companies including content delivery network CloudFlare and augmented reality business Blippar.
During the event Qualcomm Ventures crowned South Korean entreprise software company Toss Labs as the fifth winner of its annual early stage competition QPrize.
Qualcomm Ventures also demoed the first batch from the Qualcomm Robotics Accelerator, power by accelerator Techstars. This highly exciting group of companies can be seen here, with a promotional video here.
Houman Haghighi, who leads the robotics accelerator, said it was intended to “complement our dedication to robotics and showcases our thought leadership in the space.”
Haghighi added: “It was not a requirement for any companies to utilise any Qualcomm technologies. The companies had a varying level of interest in Snapdragon and other technologies. Yet many of them used or intend to use some sort of Qualcomm technology in their solution.”
Kashyap is the co-chair of the advisory board for our Global Corporate Venturing and Innovation Summit in Sonoma County on 27 and 28 January.