#280 – Cristiano Amon: Qualcomm CEO

Look, everybody's going to say Pelé. And actually, I was born during the game of Brazil and Italy that Pelé gave Brazil the championship. My dad tells me the doctor had a TV on at the delivery room. But everybody will say Pelé, but I really like Ronaldo, the first Ronaldo. I really like him. That's my favorite player.

Yes.

Brazilians will say Pelé. Yes, there's other countries around that region that may disagree a little bit.

Absolutely. Look, one of the reasons I think I love this company is we know that the technology we develop can change the world. And I'll tell you one more thing. Beyond the amount of processing power that you have now in the palm of your hands and being everyone in the world that's connected with broadband technology, the smartphone is also mankind's largest development platform. There's nothing like it.

Both.

Well, what I'm going to tell you is you have this contrast of incredible development of technology but then you see some of the things that are happening right now which is probably you would not expect them to happen on the 21st century, just what is happening in Ukraine. So I think that will be a more puzzling question for the aliens, I would imagine.

That's correct.

When we set ourselves to develop 5G, you know, we look at every generation of technology had a problem to be solved. Right. So you mentioned 2G, the challenge of CDMA was can we give every person on Earth a cell phone. 3G was about the ability to connect that to the internet. 4G was broadband and with 4G we had the ability for you to have a computer in the palm of your hand. 5G the challenge was a little bit different: how do we build a technology for a society that is going to be 100% connected to the cloud? How do we provide a technology that is going to be the last mile connectivity for everything? So 5G has basically been designed to eliminate all issues with data congestion, whether you are in a stadium, everyone should have ability to access broadband. So deal with congestion, deal with the fact that not only people but billions of things need to be connected. Create a technology that for the first time in wireless you could deliver mission critical services. Wireless used to be best effort. In 5G, it can guarantee that you're connected with the cloud. And then the last point is provide this fabric that will allow us as a society to look at things that are not connected and say that's the exception. That's why we made the comparison in the early days of 5G that it's going to be like electricity. Right now you don't have a discussion about what is the use cases for electricity. You just assume it's there. And that's how we think about everything connected to the cloud. That's what 5G is and that's the role of 5G.

You know, I don't think the refrigerator over there, it looks kind of smart, but I don't think it's connected yet.

The full space of everything is it's uh maybe going back to where you start defining Qualcomm. Qualcomm is about communications and advanced computers for low power devices. And can we make everything smart? It can range from the robot you have right now on the floor to your refrigerator to a camera to machines in manufacturing, to retail, etc. I can give you some examples. When we think of something as simple as going to the grocery shop, we see technology now with electronic shelf labels, the ability for you to have smart cameras that can look at shelves and the camera smart enough to say some product needs to be replenished. So it's about really providing processor connectivity and artificial intelligence to everything. And I think that's one of the largest addressable markets we have for technology because you can't really define everything.

Great topic conversation. So, let's talk about this. When I meet with regulators across the globe, I tell them resistance is futile. Allocate every spectrum to wireless. Every spectrum needs to be allocated to wireless. The reality is when we start moving from CDMA to OFDMA, we knew that this industry has done a lot to get more bits per hertz. But the reality is the massive amount of improvements that is required in capacity and in speed, you need more spectrum. You know, there's not so much we can rely on more bits per hertz. You just need more spectrum. And if you look, for example, what carriers since the 2G era, they participate in different license auctions and every spectrum they accumulated from 2G or 3G or 4G, all of that you may be able to get one or two channels max of sub6 which is a channels about 100 MHz or 200 MHz, and that's it. So we need more spectrum. So 5G has been designed to work across every spectrum from the low frequency bands, we call it the sub6, but you needed more, you needed to go to the millimeter wave. So that's why 5G is a technology that you can deploy from 450 MHz as an example or 600 or 700 all the way to 42 gigahertz, and that's where millimeter wave comes into the picture. Now let's now connect this to your question about coverage of 5G. The easiest thing to do is to deploy 5G in the new spectrum you can get, which is in the sub6 you see bands being auctioned across the globe in the 3.5 GHz. There's nothing special about the band, it's the only one that was available because everything else being used for 4G, and you can deploy on that go into existing cell towers and just put a new equipment without having to build new towers. But when we go to technologies such as millimeter wave, then you have to build more dense networks, you need to build more stations because a deployment in that case looks like a Wi-Fi deployment, almost like Wi-Fi access points. When you need to build more stations, you need permits, you need to build fiber, so it takes more time to densify. So what you see happening is coverage has been built fast with sub6 across the globe. Now the United States also have the sub6, so that gets you to coverage very fast, but millimeter wave it's moving. And if you will say for example Verizon in United States has had a leadership in building millimeter wave, it takes time. I'll say cities like Chicago, Manhattan starting to get coverage. It will be a process over a number of years as you build those different access point type networks. But it's inevitable. There's not enough spectrum. So every 5G operator, just a matter of time, will have millimeter wave as well.

But answering the question about what it takes to build all this technology, I think regulators across the board understood the importance of 5G. I have not met a regulator that said it's really important to be late on 5G. I don't think anybody wants to be late on 5G. And as a result, we've seen enormous amount of progress in getting spectrum allocated to 5G. I think the real issue is the time that it takes to build infrastructure. You know, investment in 5G infrastructure, especially millimeter wave, it's like building roads and ports. It's critical infrastructure and those things take time. Like one of the number one obstacle you're going to hear from operators is site permit. You know, sometimes they have to negotiate municipality by municipality about permits to get new cell sites. But you know, the networks will be densified and you're going to need all of that capacity for the promise of the fully immersive augmented reality that will replace phones and everything being connected 100% of the time.

Look, I have a very simple answer to this question. As we build new capabilities such as 5G, power is going down. Especially when you think about reducing the number of base stations, the networks becoming more dense. So as you do that, the power becomes lower. If your phone radiated power from the phone and from the tower, as you get closer to the tower, you don't need that much power to reach the tower. So as we move from 4G to 5G, I think we see a reduction in the amount of power required to close the radio link. Now also you have a number of organizations. The FCC for example has rigorous programs which they do a lot of tests to validate the safety of some of those devices, and I think that has been a model for other countries to also adopt the same things. Cellular has been around for a number of decades now. I think smartphone is our most beloved device today and I would argue it's difficult to answer those questions because you uh but I'll argue that the data to date we've seen in 3G and 4G has shown that a lot of the initial concerns were not valid. We look at 5G even though it's new, it's just less power. So we look at from a physics standpoint.

It's a great topic of conversation actually. So let me give you my perspective on this and you started to see some things actually happening right now. So let me step back and let's talk about the fact that we are in a fully interconnected society. When you look at the situation today, we talk about smartphones, largest development platform, so much now of our life we are connected to the smartphone and as a result we are all connected and we're building digital twins of everything, right? So when you look at that picture, when you look at the picture of this connected society, you started to have the following thoughts which I think are very healthy, which means in the same way that in the physical world you're entitled to some rights, you have obligations and there's a lot of things that protect your integrity. I think as a rule we're going to see the society evolving so those things extend to your digital being of people and things and I think it's just natural. It's just a natural path and you started to see things like that for example the Europeans has done a lot in this area. I'll say the Europeans probably ahead in the United States in thinking about privacy laws, digital privacy law. Most recent the DMA, the Digital Markets Act, which I think is a great thing. I think we believe there's incredible thought into the ability to regulate the digital market so that there's innovation and competition and not a single company can control all the data and then decide how things going to work on the digital realm. And even if we think about the potential of things like the metaverse as we're connecting physical and digital spaces, so I think it's a natural evolution. Of course regulation and laws always follow technology, but the fact that we're moving to an interconnected society, there's no going back. We are a fully interconnected society, but there is opportunity to think about how the digital twin should be people and government should think about it so that we get the best of a technology without any downside.

I think it's a valid point. As I said before, I think the Europeans probably have a very good framework, but you know the way I'll think about it, we depend on having the ability to innovate. We depend on the free markets. We depend on the ability to create technology that will be disruptive. But at the same time, I think the tech companies probably should spend time helping governments understand ahead of time so that they can be better prepared.

The way I would describe it and I think the reason we have been successful with it is to really understand how to build a platform, a single chip that will have every single capability if you want to make this smartphone in the palm of your hand, something that has all of your computing needs. And it was the ability to get from an engineering standpoint, ability to get into a single chip of not only all possible connectivity technology from cellular to Wi-Fi to Bluetooth to every single constellation of satellites for position location, but at the same time, a very power efficient single threaded, multi-threaded CPU, a GPU for all of your graphic demands. Gaming, fastest growing segment for gaming is mobile gaming, an artificial intelligence processor which we call the neuroprocessing unit, and then a video engine, a multimedia engine for every single application, audio, everything. So it's a single chip that has every single computing technology you need in the phone. And what's exciting about it is what we already knew. For example, when you think about camera or computer vision, you see that the advancements in the technology now happens in the smartphone first versus additional camera. So the beauty about the Snapdragon is we always have this thing within Qualcomm. The phone it's small. You have to be able to hold it. You're going to touch your face so you cannot be hot. You have to manage thermals. You expect to have a full day of battery life. But then you wanted to not be sending data at 10 or 100 megabits. You want gigabits. You wanted to be able to have eight core processors. You want to have a GPU with ray tracing. You want to have all of the things that you can only get into sometimes a desktop PC. And to do all of that in your phone and be able to be in the leadership position generation after generation is an incredible thing and we're very proud of that at Qualcomm.

And your battery has to last all day. Yeah. So think about that from a company like Qualcomm, we have to be good in each and every one of those technologies. We can't just say, 'Oh, we're a CPU company or we're a GPU company or we're an AI company.' We have to do everything.

I'm of course very partial about it. I've been at this company for probably more than 26 years. But I will argue that there are a couple things that are ingredients for the success. So we talk about the fact that you have all those different technologies. They evolve at their own pace and you have to be good in each one of them and you need them then to make them work together. So you need to have an engineering organization with an incredible collaboration culture because everybody has to be working. The train is going to leave the station. Every cart needs to be there right when it leaves the station. It needs to leave on time. Especially in the phone business, you can't change Christmas, you cannot change Black Friday, you cannot change all of the selling seasons. So the phones are going to launch on time and every technology needs to be there. The engineers need to work as one and we do have that at Qualcomm. The other thing you have to have incredible discipline because those are very complex systems. So in one way you have to design with quality because in many cases we're going to be ramping production and even before we have the silicon back, you have to rely on our simulation models and you have to rely on the fact that you design for commercial applications that takes a while to build. And it's probably been the history of a semiconductor business at Qualcomm.

No wonder our name has quality communications. That's...

We don't have to outcompete Google. Exactly. If you look at our mobile strategy today and one thing I was very clear when I became CEO, I think there's a lot of confusion in the market. Our mobile strategy is very clear. We are focused on making Snapdragon synonymous with premium Android experience. That's what Snapdragon is.

Yes. I just have a love for Android. No, I'm constantly talking trash to iPhone people. Sorry. Go ahead.

I do have multiple phones, but I do use Galaxy S22.

Before I answer that question, let me just step back a little bit because I'm sure we can talk more about those things, but the reality is Qualcomm is changing a lot and we use... I know we spend a lot of time talking about 5G and smartphone and Snapdragon and I think that has been what had...

Defined Qualcomm for many years, but the reality is even consistent with that 5G conversation, which is a technology to connect everything. Qualcomm is also changing. Our technology that was in many cases designed for phones, and we said it in the beginning: connectivity and processing is going to virtually every industry. As a result, Qualcomm is really changing with it and expanding to a number of different addressable markets. Some of those markets is the PC, as you talk about it, the convergence of mobile and PC. The reason I'm excited about this is because you see a lot of things happening that bring this right front and center when you think about the future technology. What we learned with the pandemic is that the number one use case of personal computers is communications. It's interesting when you think about that as the number one use case on a PC today is communications. It's actually funny because in the cellular industry, let me step back in the telecom industry, we've been chasing this killer application of video telephony for decades. I remember back then in the landline, even before the internet and IP, ISDN, you remember those AT&T desk phones with a little screen and they said you can do video telephony. We don't watch that in Back to the Future feature too. Then when we started developing 3G, people said what's the application for having data to a cell phone? All video telephony. Then we started doing 4G, and in the beginning people said well why do you need all this broadband? All video telephony. But it took a pandemic to make video telephony the killer application, and that's now the number one use case on a PC. So now think about that for a second. Personal computers now, technologies that people when they were going to buy a PC they didn't care much about, now they do. Camera, how good is the camera? The audio, is it connected? How good is the connectivity? Do you have the latest and greatest Wi-Fi and cellular? What's the battery life because you're going to be working from anywhere? Sometimes you're not. So all those things, what's the portability like? Those things started to change how we should think about the PC. But I won't stop there. Let me talk about another trend. It all came as a result of what we saw the pandemic. Let's say that you are an engineer. You do computer-aided design. You have an advanced desktop computer or workstation in your office, but you want to work from home someday. So you're not going to move that to your home. So what do you need to do? You're going to have to rely on that. You're going to run that on the cloud. You need high bandwidth because you almost want the cloud to be the same as your computer for that use case. That's the 5G on-demand computing use case. You use 5G, it's almost a link between two computers. But then you know CIOs are saying my workforce is going home for certain days. I want all the data to be in the cloud. You look at for example Microsoft OneDrive or the ability to collaborate, you need the bandwidth. So when you put all of those things together, you start thinking about what is the next generation PC, and that's the opportunity for Qualcomm. I'll just give an example. Back at Mobile Congress recently, Lenovo has a line of enterprise laptops called the ThinkPad. I'm sure you're familiar with it. So they announced the ThinkPad based on Snapdragon with 5G on 28 hours of battery life.

So that's next generation.

You have the camera capabilities and let me go one step more. Microsoft talking about some of the features they're doing now using on Windows 11 using Snapdragon. Remember we talk about a Snapdragon has an AI processor inside there. So one of the cool features Microsoft's talking about is you can be on a Teams call and you can make sure your eyes are looking at the camera 100% of the time.

You do that with AI.

Let's hope not.

I will argue we are already an automotive company today. But let me tell you what I would like Qualcomm to be remembered and recognized for. I think everyone that knows Qualcomm immediately, pun intended, connects us to connectivity and wireless. But the reality is we've been actually the company providing intelligence and processing to everything on the edge. Everything outside the data center. Those billions of devices are going to be connected. And that's kind of explained when we talk about the connected intelligent edge, beyond phones, cars, PCs, and all of those, and the broader IoT. Everything will be connected and intelligent, and that's what we want Qualcomm to be recognized for. For people who are not familiar, there's some technical jargon, but people use the word edge like edge computing. It's basically everything that's not a giant thing that makes a lot of noise in a building somewhere. So it's mobile devices of all kinds. A refrigerator is not mobile but it would be edge. Edge computing is the edge of that expanding space that Qualcomm is trying to connect and enable with computation. Here's a simple way to describe what the edge is. As we think about the evolution of the data center, you need to bring the computation closer to where the device is. Also, when you put the computation together with the connectivity at the same time, you're going to see a lot of advancement of artificial intelligence happening closer to or at the device. Remember in the beginning of this conversation, we talked about in the 4G era, broadband and mobile computing evolved side by side. If you're going to have broadband, you might as well have a computer in the palm of your hand. So we needed to invest in those two technologies. In 5G, AI develops side by side. You're connected to the cloud 100% of the time. You have high bandwidth and you have now a smart and intelligent thing that can make decisions in real time, provide context information to the cloud to make the models more accurate, and compare and contrast with the cloud. So there's going to be an exponential development of AI happening with all the edge devices, the devices that are outside the data center, and computation is going to go alongside that. A great example is the car. We haven't talked much about the car, but Qualcomm is now, you could argue, as much an automotive company as a wireless company, working with 26 global brands. It's easy to see if you look at our mobile heritage: form factors, thermal, battery life. You're not going to put a server in the trunk of a car, but you need as much computational capability. As the car becomes a connected computer on wheels, we provide the computation and all the sensors for assisted driving, the new digital cockpit experience, connecting the car to the cloud. All of that is happening at the edge. Does Qualcomm want to be the brain of a lot of autonomous vehicles in the future? You said brands like Mercedes, BMW, whatever. Cars have the sexy thing that defines their brand, and then there's the brain that doesn't need to have branding. So does Qualcomm see that, or will I be able to buy a Qualcomm car?

No, you're not going to be able to buy a Qualcomm car. But we are already on our way to become the brains of the car. The way you should think about Qualcomm's automotive strategy is

Which one is that? I heard of is

One of them lives in Austin.

Oh, that one too. Yes.

You know, the car companies are not going away. It's actually a mistake not to bet on the car companies. The core companies need a technology partner that will provide the digital chassis for them, and that's what we're doing. So if you look at Qualcomm, we talk about a Snapdragon Digital Chassis. We want to be the preferred technology partner of the car companies, and I think it's working. The strategy is working right now. So basically helping the car companies accelerate into becoming technology companies.

We have in our IoT business, which has been one of the fastest growing businesses for us, a number of robotics engagements. So I'll give you some example. If you look at the Amazon Astro, you familiar with that? There's two Snapdragons in there.

Yeah, we are working with robotics in industrial, of course drones. We're getting more and more traction for robotics.

Industrial, especially when you think about what's going to happen with the factory of the future, the industrial side of the future, the warehouse of the future, when you bring 5G to it, you have a number of different use cases, and then you see a lot of robotics applications, and of course drones. The most famous robot in the world right now is powered by Snapdragon, which is the Mars Ingenuity helicopter.

The same Snapdragon that goes to a phone, it can go to a Galaxy phone, for example Samsung, the same, not a special one, went all the way to Mars.

I want to use the example to go back to the conversation we had about quality. As an engineer, you need to make sure it works. Can you imagine if it gets over there on Mars and it doesn't work?

Okay, that's a big topic of conversation, and we only have 5 minutes. So I'll try to be as objective as I can. First, let's talk about what caused it. I will try to put it within the right context. The first thing that caused it really is the acceleration of digital transformation of pretty much everything in every industry. Every industry has been digitally transformed, and as such the amount of semiconductors required is much larger. Just to give you a practical example, if you think about the automotive industry, the cars that are launching a new model today most likely have 10x the amount of chips of the prior model, and the model people are working on coming in next probably 10x that one. So you see the amount of silicon, and then billions of things become smart. More and more data goes to the cloud, the data center grows. So the floor for semiconductor consumption went up by a lot. Then you have things that aggravated this. The pandemic aggravated this. There are a couple of trends from the pandemic. The enterprise transformation of the home. The home became an enterprise. Massive amounts of upgrades on broadband and IoT. The office has changed the way we work now, including the ability to support collaboration tools and video. Then you have the higher demand for products during the pandemic because people wanted to be connected. People bought new phones, new tablets, new computers, new gaming. So all of those things came on top of that and aggravated the issue, but they're not the main issue. The main issue is actually a long-term growth of digital.

It is an aggravation. So is there a way we can support as a human civilization in terms of manufacture, in terms of supply, the kind of growth that you're talking about in devices and so on? Are there high-level ideas you can say of what's required there?

Yes, and I think that's the second part of the answer. So what's happening now, how are we going to get out of this? We see a lot of capacity investments put into place by the industry. We have invested a lot with our suppliers. A lot of the suppliers have made plans about increasing capacity. The industry is planning to double its total semiconductor manufacturing capacity within the next 5 years, for example. So that's already happening. And then you see things which are actually good, such as the United States CHIPS Act and now the European Chips Act. The United States CHIPS Act is about $52 billion, the Europeans about $43 billion. Their goal combined is to get at least 50% of the consumption with manufacturing installed within the US and European geographies. That's also very good. That's yet another incentive for more manufacturing capacity to be built and to be built in a geographically distributed way, which is how you play in supply chain. So those are good things. If anything we learn through the crisis is that semiconductor is important. Semiconductor companies are important and we need to invest in semiconductors. Returning to the grilling of the CEO, the hard questions. This is almost for my own education of the space. You mentioned regulators. Qualcomm paid out and received payment of billions of dollars in settlement and fines. There seems to be a lot of huge lawsuits in the space. How do you explain that? Does this get in the way of innovation or does it promote it?

I will rephrase it by saying there used to be a lot of lawsuits in the space. In addition to what we do in semiconductors, our processors and our modems at the Snapdragon platform, we also have a licensing business which has been part of the company since the beginning as the largest inventors of the essential technology in 2G, CDMA, 3G, 4G, and 5G. Qualcomm contributes that to the standards. So we always had this model that rather than invent the technology and be the only one producing the products, we license so everyone can produce it, and as such we receive intellectual property for these standard essential patents. As part of our past dispute with Apple, that's behind us now.

They're my customers. And as part of that, I think the licensing model got tested in every geography, and we succeeded in every single geography to validate the pro-competitiveness of this model. I think the fair, reasonable, non-discriminatory aspect of this model, besides being the most successful licensing business to date in the industry, is probably the one that's been battle-tested and is most stable because there's not a single jurisdiction that we have not had to validate that model. So it's part of our past, and what it creates is a lot of stability in our licensing business. But having said that, the growth of the company is in the semiconductor space. So licensing is you come up with a pretty good idea, you have a bunch of smart people coming up with cool ideas, and then once you come up with that idea, you sell that idea to others that get to use it. That's essentially what the license revenue we have is for the standard essential patents that are part of the 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G standards. So if you want to build anything with 5G, you need to get a license from Qualcomm because it uses Qualcomm essential technology as part of this standard. A slightly different model with the semiconductor is you design, you inject a bunch of fascinating ideas how to build the Snapdragon, and then because it's a fabulous company, you have somebody build the chip and it goes into a phone with the branding and all that kind of stuff. That has less kind of players involved. It's not a licensing model. We sell the product in the semiconductor technology. We build products and we sell products.

No, not one year yet.

That's a loaded question. Let me answer in reverse order. First thing that I learned, and I think it's probably common across CEOs especially in our industry, is it would be great if I had more time. I think especially because we're growing in so many areas and there's so many things to learn, so many relationships to build, time to spend with a number of different technologies. But it kind of reflects the size of the opportunity that exists for Qualcomm. Qualcomm is really growing in a number of different directions all at the same time, so it got busier. Part of this is because I'm spending a lot of time understanding the new industries we're going into and building relationships. Second thing, which has a lot to do with how I think about things and a little bit of my personality, is that at the end of the day, business partnership is really done by people. I think the importance of having trusted relationships for the long term is extremely important, and I've been dedicated to do that as CEO. We're not a company that plays for the short term. When we build new partnerships, we expect that to be for decades. So I spend time doing that, and I think that's important for Qualcomm. The other part of your question is we do have a lot of opportunities in all different areas. I've been fortunate enough to become CEO at a time that a lot of the trends are pointing toward technology. We talk about some of them: merger of physical and digital spaces, transformation of the automobile, merge of computing and mobile, enterprise transformation of the home. There are many of those trends, and those trends create opportunities for Qualcomm to be providing technology first. As such, we're in a hurry. I'm in a little bit of a hurry because I think the opportunity is incredible for technology, but having fun and enjoying the job.

It is exhausting, but it's something I do like to do. And it's not only with partners, it's also internally to your employees, to get alignment on the vision and faith in the vision and execute. At the end of the day, we're very fortunate. We have a lot of smart people. So if they're aligned with the vision, they know what to do. And then of course as CEO, you have to convince your investors that that's the right idea as well.

I think the first thing, and of course all those answers are going to relate to my own experience, is it always worked for me to have a plan. Even if the plan is just what I'm going to do within the next two years, but what do I want to do? Where do I want to go? I think it's important for people, especially young people, to really have a dream and go pursue it. Have dreams, not go back to bed to sleep. It's really what do you want to accomplish, and then what it's going to take to do that, and then believe in yourself. I joined Qualcomm as an engineer, and I didn't have any plans when I joined to be CEO, but I did want as an engineer what I wanted to contribute, what I wanted to work on, and then keep evolving from that point in time. The other thing is advice that I got early in my career that was extremely helpful: spend time understanding what are the things you're good at and what are things you're not. What is that real border between your area of competence and your area of incompetence? Once you see that, you know exactly what you have to work on. You can say, if that's where I want to go next, this is the gap I need to fill. It's faster when you can identify yourself before other people can tell you. Then it leads automatically to the next step: surround yourself with people that are very good at the things that you're not. So you have to be radically honest about the things that you're not good at, but given what you're passionate about, you need to get good at or you would like to get good at, and surround yourself by those people.

More than 50% success rate.

Try to keep it above 50.

I've been fortunate enough to work in cellular and wireless my entire career. I always liked communications. When I went to engineering school, my dad was an electrical engineer, but he worked with the utility company. He wanted me to graduate in traditional electrical engineering like energy generation distribution. But I liked electronics communication, so I ended up doing both. I always liked communication. I was fascinated by wireless communication. So my first job out of college I started working for a Japanese company down in Brazil, NEC, and within about a year they transferred me to Tokyo, asked me to go to their headquarters. It was the first time I left Brazil.

Different, it's on the other side of the planet.

I think he's very proud. Especially, he tells me that I'm still the same person, never changed.

My mom and dad still give me advice today. I'm very fortunate for that. But he's proud. So proud because there are very few Brazilians that have achieved a position as CEO of a company the size of Qualcomm. I do know that I also carry a burden, especially for the Latino community, to be an inspiration for them and make sure I set a good example.

I'm a devout Christian, so I'm a big believer that this is just a transition. But I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that. I try as much as possible to live in the present. And that's what I do.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

There's more good than bad.

Easy questions. I think that's a question at least for me you have to answer individually. But I do believe we're all here for a purpose. In my prayers I always ask that I stay on track to whatever my purpose is. But I do believe we're here for a purpose and we need to do the best we can during the time we have on this earth.

Love is very important and it's an essential part of being human. It comes in the package. I think if you look at the situation what's happening right now, you look at the situation with some of the underprivileged communities, you look at the homeless situation, I think we all need more love.

Oh, thank you so much. Thanks for the kind words. Really a pleasure having this conversation. I really had a lot of fun doing it. And thank you for having me on the podcast.