Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's such an amazing case study in bootstrapping an industry. Yes, yes. Similarly, they had a clever tactic in their IP strategy. At Qualcomm, where I think they have something like 17,000 patents now, there's a decision every time there's a novel piece of technology about whether they should patent it or keep it a trade secret. There's enough things patented so that you can't achieve any of these things, these magical things we've been referring to all episode, these layers of magic without paying Qualcomm. But they don't patent everything because they want to keep an advantage for consulting revenue, implementation fees, or signing big deals where they say, not only do you get access to our patents—which may expire at some point—but if you work directly with us, you get access to the trade secrets and you can pay us to generate services revenue for you to work with our engineers. I was thinking about this for playbook as we're going to, there's this really interesting dynamic to this industry that lends itself well to the IP and patent monetization scheme that Qualcomm has adapted which is that the successive generations of wireless network Gs happened just fast enough that it's within the patent lifetime. So that all that core CDMA, all those patents are expired now, but it doesn't matter because we're so many generations beyond that those patents are now worthless. You get all the useful life during the protection period of the patent. It's not like a generic drug where Advil, Tylenol, or whatever is still useful.…

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