The Consumer Demand for Car Phones Was Insane

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There were wait lists years long for consumers to get car phones installed in the 80s. The fledgling carriers at the time, only had so much bandwidth they could fit because there was no efficient use of channels. When you think about how many radio stations there are, like it's not much more than that. Qualcomm found a new company in July of 1985 with seven total, seven in total, Andy, Erwin, and five other of the best linkable engineers. They decided to start this new company and they name it Qualcomm.

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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