Don McGuire

But then the dark days came down upon us, as we like to call them.

And that was about eight months into my new gig at Qualcomm.

And, you know, one by one, all these adverse conditions fell upon us.

the US government coming after us through the FTC.

We had one of the biggest companies in the world trying to kill us.

We had that company planting narratives into regulators all over the world, false narratives about who we are and what we stood for and why we didn't matter.

for their own agenda.

And then we ended up being the, I say the victim, but in a hostile takeover situation.

And so all these things sort of happened a little bit sequentially, but kind of they were going on all at once.

Most companies don't go through one of these things.

let alone three at the same time altogether.

So it was an interesting time period, but it was clear to us at some point the light bulb went off.

And what made it worse for us in all three of the situations is we hadn't told our story.

And the people that were making decisions, whether it's juries or regulators or whoever, or shareholders, about what to do in a situation where it's us versus somebody else,

didn't know who we were.

And so the people who were trying to attack us got to set the narrative, which then put us on the defensive.

And then we had to come from behind to tell our story.

So the big learning out of that, to just shortcut it to the end, is we told ourselves never again.

Never again will we put ourselves in this position.

And I told myself it's going to be my mission