Qualcomm has successfully invested in both Zoom and InvenSense, two very successful companies. Quinn believes that these successes were due to an experienced and passionate entrepreneur, the quality of the idea, the execution, and the synergy between Qualcomm’s business and the entrepreneur. 
Qualcomm Ventures’ Quinn Li — Levering an “Unfair” Advantage
May 14, 2024
Interviewed by Nicolas Sauvage on October 27, 2021
In their bestseller In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman urge businesses to “stick to the knitting,” that is, keep doing what they do well and not worry about diversifying into areas where they lack expertise. On the surface, this advice may seem irrelevant for Corporate Venture Capital organizations. After all, part of the mission for most CVCs is to learn about and gain access to new, innovative technologies that stretch the scope of the corporate parent’s R&D.
But Senior Vice President and Global Head of Qualcomm Ventures Quinn Li told Corporate Venturing Insider that he makes it a point to play to the fund’s and the corporate parent’s strength.
“We want to invest in areas where we have unfair knowledge,” Quinn stated. “We generally invest in deep tech, where because of the size of the (parent) company and the role we play in the industry, we have more knowledge than other folks.”
It’s a philosophy Quinn nurtures within his firm and adapts to a disciplined investment strategy founded on skills he began accumulating even before joining Qualcomm Ventures.
Early Days
Quinn Studied engineering as both an undergraduate and grad student, focusing on communication systems design during the 3G days.
“I read a lot of books by Qualcomm’s founders and, after graduate school, went to work at Bell Labs,” he said. “Beyond the technical work, I was involved in 3G technology development, and I had the opportunity to participate in standards bodies. So we were making proposals to the standards organization. We were working with other companies (within) the ecosystem as well as customers to define what the 3G wireless standard was going to look like. Both the technical side and the interaction with the other parties…was very rewarding.”
And because the work necessitated preparing and delivering proposals, it gave Quinn a crash course in negotiation and showed him the broader realm of entrepreneurship and technology development. Seeking a larger role, Quinn earned an MBA from Cornell, where he gained his first exposure to venture capital. He worked as an investment professional for a student-run VC firm. And while the aim was more educational than financial, the small team evaluated and invested in several early-stage startups.
Post-MBA, Quinn gained project management experience at IBM before landing at Qualcomm Ventures, his dream company, in 2005. After rising through the ranks to US team leader to eventually overseeing the entire investment team, Quinn could fully utilize the evaluation skills, negotiation tactics, business-development acumen, and coalition-building abilities he had learned.
Qualcomm Ventures’ Investment Approach
Quinn noted that while Qualcomm Ventures can act on its own, without formal sponsorship or approval from the corporate mothership, he still likes to get buy-in from an interested business unit. That’s because the team most often invests in sectors that encompass a wide variety of technologies, such as 5G, automotive, IoT, and AI technologies, that could potentially leverage Qualcomm’s internal development.
“A lot of times in the beginning, the BU’s near-term focus may not be on this particular area,” Quinn explained. “That happens quite a bit. Maybe there’s not an immediate interest to engage, but over time that interest materializes. We do as much as we can to make the connection with the Qualcomm business unit and then help the companies with business development efforts or other things beyond just the capital.
Regardless of whether an opportunity meshes with a business unit’s immediate focus, Quinn and his Qualcomm Ventures team adhere to a thesis-driven methodology, looking for investments in companies that either relate to the mothership’s current ecosystem or have the potential to enter it. The strategy has been successful from the beginning. Li’s first investment at Qualcomm Ventures was in InvenSense, which went to IPO before being acquired by TDK in 2017.
“We looked at a lot of technologies that we thought would make their way into the smartphone ecosystem — motion sensors, fingerprint sensors, gyroscopes, cameras,” Quinn explained. “In the motion-sensor category, we found InvenSense had good technology. Our view of the world back then was as these devices all converged, all the functionalities from the digital cameras as well as navigation devices, would be integrated into the smartphone at some point.”
The system paid off again with Qualcomm Ventures’ Series A investment in Zoom. Quinn noted that at the time of the investment, Zoom faced stiff competition from videoconferencing incumbents.
Zoom “was not a perfect fit with a particular business unit, but it fit in the broad scheme of video communication that was going to be important to us,” he said. “One of the things that got us interested is that Zoom is a great user of a lot of wireless data, whether through an enterprise network or a cellular network. We could help them optimize the end-to-end experience running on devices powered by our process.”
After an initial focus on mid-stage funding, Qualcomm Ventures now invests across the board, issuing $2 million to $10 million checks in lead and follow-on commitments.
Qualcomm Investment Team and Scope
Sticking to the knitting requires the Qualcomm team to exercise discipline, Quinn said. He wants to fully understand both the technology behind an opportunity and the dynamics of the sector in which a prospective portfolio company operates. The next step is to build teams and relationships that generate success for the startup and the investment.
“We want to make sure that we back in companies that have good investors and good management teams building a highly differentiated product,” Quinn said. “Because over time it’s the team behind the business that makes the business work. We work with great funding teams, so we have good investors around the table to support the company. Our approach is systematic; we don’t get carried away by the external noise. We need to be careful with valuation to make a good return on investment.”
Discipline proved valuable as the venture team expanded in number and scope since Li’s arrival 20 years ago. In 2005 investments centered on the United States and had just begun to explore China. Since then, Qualcomm Ventures has established a presence in Europe, Japan, Korea, Israel, India, and Latin America, a reflection of the globalization of the startup ecosystem, Quinn said. At the same time, the technology age opened the door to Qualcomm’s expansions well beyond smartphones to include automotive, IoT, robotics, and other AI-driven verticals.
This expansion emphasized to Quinn the importance of building strong leadership. The first person hired to lead an international expansion must have the confidence to implement team goals while working independently, he said. He has found success in both relocating people from existing offices to run new locations and in promoting local personnel to head in-country offices, thanks to the methodical approach he has instituted.
“The venture game is an apprentice-type of business,” he said. “It requires a lot of coaching and help from the team. As long as you have that framework, then people joining the team can learn it over time to figure out how to make investments.”
Value to Startups and the Mothership
Because of its structured investment approach, Qualcomm Ventures can often leverage the mothership’s technology and industry savvy to promote its portfolio companies’ interests. Its unfair advantage in deep tech sectors bolsters the fund’s image as an enabler, Quinn said, empowering it to deliver support to startups according to their needs and development stages. These could include connections with Qualcomm product groups or introductions to potential customers such as mobile operators.
“We provide technology to a variety of industries and spend a lot of time in technology selections,” Quinn said. “Xiaomi is a leader in the smartphone business, but back when they were very small, we were able to identify them as an emerging customer and work with them very closely to jointly develop products.”
He said Qualcomm’s annual CEO summits and matchmaker events solidify interactions between his team and both its investor base and its portfolio companies. “We find these events to be very helpful both from a brand and marketing perspective and to reconnect to make sure that people know us in our ecosystem.”
Value is a two-way street, of course, and Quinn ensures the venture team provides actionable insights to the corporate parent, as well. He distributes quarterly reports to several senior managers to update them both on investment team activities and potential rockstars emerging in their spheres. He augments these written reports with “sync-ups” whenever Qualcomm Ventures is considering an investment that might interest a particular business unit.
