Qualcomm's Road Show

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The first patent we talked about is the most valuable, but like there is a whole string of dozens, hundreds, thousands of other patents that come after this. So they start the road show pretty quickly in February of 1989. One of the largest carriers in the Southern California area, Pac-Tel wireless, put up a million dollars to fund a prototype.

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!

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