Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
37 published records
01 / evaluation
“Multiple access on just a single analog frequency doesn't work, so you got to divide up and say everybody gets their own frequency, and that's the way the world evolved.”
02 / belief
“There are two other small things that happen that I think let's just skip. I'll mention them briefly but let's get into analysis.”
03 / belief
“We're going to talk more about silicon and Qualcomm as we go here. But just to paint the punchline here, today, Qualcomm's total revenue is close to $40 billion annually, I think, of which 85% is their semiconductor business.”
04 / belief
“People flipped from Qualcomm, we think really highly of you and you're a pioneer of technology and true inventors, which they are.”
05 / uncertainty
“I don't know all the model numbers, but Series 8 Gen 1 or something is the Snapdragon.”
06 / belief
“I know the handset one, but I believe both were 51% owned by Qualcomm, 49% owned by the partner.”
07 / belief
“I was like, the science start signing partners, but they're like, we really need to spur adoption. I think we kind of got to do everything ourselves.”
08 / commitment
“I will learn about consumer mobile telephony services, enter the market or we'll work on the satellite network.”
09 / belief
“We spent a bunch of time advancing through the timeline to really get to this particular point, which I think is a great place to zoom in on Qualcomm's strategic position today, is this Apple lawsuit.”
10 / uncertainty
“I don't know too many seed rounds that are happening for 5% dilution these days, but they were.”
11 / belief
“Hamilton in 7 Powers, I think he does say patents are a canonical description or a corner resource, that for sure.”
12 / belief
“Do you bet on the intelligent connected edge as the CEO Cristiano Amon would put it or do you bet on AI? They're both mega trends, AI has a far bigger potential, in my opinion than the intelligent connected edge which is wonderfully buzzed.”
13 / belief
“By the way, this, I believe, did not become declassified until 1981. That's how long it was buried inside the US government.”
14 / belief
“South Korea, for a time, was I think close to 40% of Qualcomm's revenues, and it was one of the most advanced mobile countries all just using Qualcomm.”
15 / commitment
“Today, we will dive into their entire history and strategy unpacking their products, which to the outside observer is really best described as a layered series of magic tricks.”
16 / belief
“Then in 2005, Irwin retires as CEO, I believe, and also as Chairman of Qualcomm.”
17 / commitment
“Then the next few milliseconds, someone else gets their digital packets. And we will keep round robining it between the 20 conversations that we're all having.”
18 / belief
“I think at this point, we've got enough momentum that we don't need to make our own base stations.”
19 / uncertainty
“I don't know any other chain of just brilliant, brilliant strategic decisions one after the other.”
20 / belief
“I think over the last decade, they really upset Samsung, Apple, so many people that are starting to at least make their own radios or even consider systems on a chip.”
21 / evaluation
“I think that was the right call and I'll tell you why in playbook, but we were talking about Broadcom.”
22 / belief
“To the point, I think today, Qualcomm makes on average about $20 for every smartphone sold in the world, including Apple iPhones.”
23 / belief
“People might have heard of it. It was part of Qualcomm for a long time before, I believe, it ended up getting spun out to private equity.”
24 / belief
“Cristiano is the new CEO as of last year. I think he's been on for about a year.”
25 / belief
“Maybe now that kind of is, but back then it was 3x-5x. Really, I think the right analogy is it is time sharing.”
26 / evaluation
“I've seen—I'm sure you have too—so many counterfactuals too where incredibly credible teams walk in off the streets then a miracle happens and yeah, it still doesn't work.”
27 / belief
“Whether it was Qualcomm calling in a favor, I think we can all look back in 2022 and be like, this was an enormous win.”
28 / prediction
“I think if they continue to try to run the same playbook in just the handset market that they have been, the best days are behind them because people have caught on to their games a little bit and are going to squeeze in from a bunch of different directions.”
29 / evaluation
“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.”
30 / evaluation
“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.”
31 / evaluation
“I feel reasonably confident in, I think Qualcomm during the golden years that we told the history of had real process power.”
32 / evaluation
“Another one that I thought was pretty interesting, because I mentioned I think the business actually makes sense together, the licensing business offers Qualcomm predictable high margin revenue that they can basically use to fund R&D.”
33 / prediction
“Because if you can custom design chips using the ARM ISA, but be the performance of Apple Silicon, I don't care what you're putting those in.”
34 / evaluation
“If I'm using a really low gain signal and I'm far from the base station or from the cell tower, that's an issue, because the people who are really close are going to sort of drown me out.”
35 / prediction
“I think Qualcomm wins in the short term because Apple's backup solution of Intel's modem fell entirely behind.”
36 / evaluation
“What Apple is basically doing is biting their time for there to be an actual credible competitor. They had to wait all the way up until the 4G days until they're looking at Intel and they're like, especially if we work with you and we work closely with you, we think you can be a credible competitor to Qualcomm right now.”
37 / preference
“I think just to pause and reflect, big innovation going from maybe 20x, 30x, 50x, you get a lot more capacity by saying instead of just one person gets a frequency at any given time, you now get a whole bunch of people who can use that frequency because the signal is digital because of time division.”