A member of the top 25 from the Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist
Following his selection as a Global Corporate Venturing Rising Star, Quinn Li’s rapid promotion to the top corporate venturing role at US-listed chip maker Qualcomm this year has come at an interesting time.
In October, Brian Modoff joined Qualcomm, reporting directly to Steve Mollenkopf, CEO of Qualcomm, to oversee strategy, mergers and acquisitions and ventures for the company.
Modoff had been managing director in equity research at Deutsche Bank Securities where he had covered Qualcomm since the early 2000s.
In this newly created role, Modoff helps define Qualcomm’s strategic direction. His relationship with Li will be instrumental in maintaining one of the corporate venturing industry’s most important units after the departure of Qualcomm Ventures’ head, Nagraj Kashyap, to Microsoft and other dealmakers, including Miles Kirby from Europe and Jack Young, who had run its healthcare fund and was another GCV Rising Star.
Until his promotion this year, Li had spent three years as the managing director for North America at Qualcomm Ventures, a role now taken by Patrick Eggen.
Li has been with Qualcomm’s venturing unit for 10 years. He started out as a senior investment manager and worked his way through director and senior director roles along the way. Before joining the unit, Li held engineering and product management positions in IBM, Broadcom and Lucent.
Selected for the GCV Rising Stars award in January before his promotion was announced, Li said the ability to make investments with a strong financial return while helping drive forward Qualcomm’s strategic objectives was one of the reasons he was drawn to corporate venturing. He also takes pleasure in helping portfolio firms grow through leveraging Qualcomm’s resources.
Li said some of the biggest challenges he has had to overcome along the way have involved finding the balance between strategic and financial objectives, while building the right team with diverse enough experience to expand investments into new areas.
Li said some of the unit’s greatest successes had been investments and exits such as A123 Systems, Fitbit, InvenSense, Xiaomi and Waze, with the North America team leading investments in InvenSense and A123 as well as Fitbit. At present, Qualcomm manages 150 companies across its global portfolio.
Qualcomm participated in a $25m early-stage funding round for Waze, a crowdsourced traffic application, in 2010. When Waze was acquired by Google for about $1bn in 2013, Qualcomm’s return was 10 times its investment, according to news provider New York Times.
And in a show of support, Modoff, in the same article for the New York Times, said Qualcomm was prepared to invest through downturns because such stakes offer a ringside seat for “the next generation of disruptive innovation around our mobile core”.
Qualcomm’s investment activity since the beginning of 2015
