David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…It seems more difficult because if you were to pitch me this idea a priori, as an investor, I would tell you immediately, no, because I see 15 different needles, all of which you must thread perfectly, a story that's entirely path dependent. You're not going to get one thing until you get the previous thing, and that was a needle that you were threading. The likelihood of success is unbelievably low. And yet, here we are talking about Qualcomm. They knew two things at the outset of founding. (1) This is a massive opportunity that they eventually wanted to pursue. It was bringing their expertise to bringing terrestrial cell phone networks into the digital era and building the dominant gorilla company in this soon to be massive industry. (2) They knew they couldn't do it yet. They actually started in the same fashion that Linkabit did. They're like, okay, we're going to bootstrap up by doing consulting work. One of the first consulting projects they do is with Hughes, one of the defense primes. Hughes like Howard Hughes, pretty awesome, on a proposal to the FCC for a mobile satellite network. I will learn about consumer mobile telephony services, enter the market or we'll work on the satellite network. We're talking like Jurassic Park sat phones.…

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