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I walked in and the first thing I saw was the bottom of the big crane boom arm with the weights. And I was like, why are there Olympic weights here? And then I was like, oh, because we've got a professional boom arm camera. This is amazing. All right, let's do it.
Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Welcome to Season 11, Episode 6 of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.
I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.
And we are your hosts. There's an incredible property of the universe where electromagnetic signals can be broadcast and travel through space at the speed of light to be received at a different point in the universe. Now, a tiny fraction of these frequencies are detectable by humans as visible light. Some other frequencies can be dangerous, like X-rays or gamma rays.
But there's a part of the spectrum that is not detectable to humans, and it's not harmful at modest doses, that can be used to transmit invisible messages all around us all the time. without any of us having any idea. It's like magic. Yeah. These frequencies have been used for over a century to broadcast TV and radio shows, presidential messages, and important news updates.
In the last 50 years, humans have gotten tremendously clever at purposing some parts of the RF spectrum to be used for cell phones. But the story of how we got from transmitting small messages on a single frequency... to having billions of humans concurrently sending megabytes or gigabytes of data every minute has been an incredible journey of invention and entrepreneurship.
The company most responsible for the mind-bending system of how it all works today is Qualcomm. And 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.
And spoiler alert for listeners, this is an incredible story. I had no idea before we dove into the research.
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