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Jacobs Interview Opens a Window to the Past

The Cal Alumni Association at UC Berkeley recently named Qualcomm Inc. Executive Chairman Paul Jacobs its 2017 alumnus of the year. The benefit to San Diego’s business community is a very readable profile article by Bill Snyder in the California alumni magazine (available online), which offers an interesting window into Qualcomm’s history. That includes the period of 2005 and after, when Jacobs succeeded father Irwin M. Jacobs as CEO. The two had very different management styles. While the elder Jacobs was a top-down leader, the younger Jacobs encouraged subordinates to make decisions, essentially telling them he was giving them a compass, not a map. The transition was apparently jarring for some employees.

Jacobs — who received bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley — also said he likes the executive chairman’s job better than the CEO’s job (Jacobs relinquished it to Steve Mollenkopf in 2014) and talked about an alternative to ViaSat’s satellite constellation. Jacobs is on the board of Arlington, Va.-based OneWeb, which hopes to launch hundreds of low-Earth orbit satellites to provide internet connectivity to remote corners of the planet. Virgin Group’s Richard Branson also sits on the OneWeb board.

Jacobs’ favorite book, according to Snyder’s piece, is Oxford physicist David Deutsch’s 1997 work “The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes, and Its Implications,” which takes up subjects such as quantum computers. Business titles aren’t on his reading list, Jacobs said, making a reference to the school of hard knocks.

Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM) might object that the article summarizes its work as semiconductor design; the San Diego company also has a big business licensing intellectual property for wireless communications.

With the new honor, Jacobs is in famous company. Steve Wozniak of Apple Inc. and Eric Schmidt of Alphabet Inc. also received recognition as Cal alumnus of the year.

Stampede to Take ComHear to Market

ComHear Inc., the business on Torrey Pines Mesa that has licensed some head-turning directional speaker technology from its neighbor UC San Diego, has a distribution deal. Stampede Presentation Products of Amherst, N.Y. will take ComHear to the pro audio-visual market, which includes theme parks, stadiums, museums, cinemas, kiosks and digital sign installations. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. The companies announced the partnership in late June.

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