Don Rosenberg is Qualcomm's head attorney, the company's general counsel. He used to be GC at IBM and for an important year, at Apple.
In this INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL, he talks about the importance of intellectual property not only to Qualcomm but in his view to America, as well.
And he speaks of his close friend Duane Roth, who died last year. Roth was the energizer behind Connect, the oft-imitated connector of startups, investors and innovators, and, not coincidentally, a co-founder of Innovation Night at the La Jolla Playhouse. Rosenberg is a director today. And the Playhouse has itself had a remarkable run of innovation this year. INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL has been fortunate enough to take in most of the shows, all quite stunning--
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All Best for the New Year,
Steve
Steve Chapple
INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL (TM)
San Diego Union-Tribune
QUALCOMM COUNSEL TALKS INNOVATION
Executive remembers friend who led Connect, reflects on wireless world
By U-T San Diego 12:01 a.m.Dec. 22, 2013
"Innovation Night" at the La Jolla Playhouse was both a sad and a raucous affair this year.
Sad, because it was dedicated to Duane Roth, the late director of Connect, an organization that brings inventors and investors together. Roth, who died after a bicycle accident in July, had coined the term Innovation Night as a way to link San Diego's innovative wireless, biotech and high-tech industries to the innovative theater productions the Playhouse is known for.
But raucous, too, because the gala opening play was "Side Show," which is about two female circus performers, conjoined twins, not unlike innovative technologies and the future of San Diego, someone laughed at intermission.
A co-sponsor of November's Innovation Night, along with biotech venture capitalist Dr. Ivor Royston and Pharmatek's Tim Scott, was Don Rosenberg, executive vice president, corporate secretary and general counsel of Qualcomm, the San Diego wireless technology giant with some 14,000 local employees (31,000 worldwide), and a market cap of $123 billion. There are now more than 6 billion cellphones in the world, with 424 million smartphones sold in the first quarter of 2013, a good number powered by Qualcomm chips.
Exactly two years before Roth hit a rock embankment during a race sponsoring the Challenged Athletes Foundation and tragically suffered a fatal head injury, his friend and road-bike partner Rosenberg had been in a similar biking accident and been flown to the hospital by helicopter, unconscious, with Roth at his side.
They were the best of friends and in long rides up Torrey Pines and past the Playhouse, the two often discussed the future of San Diego.
Before the show, Intellectual Capital sat down with Rosenberg at Qualcomm headquarters to talk theater, licensing, the future of wireless communication, "how he did it," and just what makes a great chief lawyer for one of America's giant high-tech corporations.
Rosenberg, 62, wasgeneral counsel at Apple during the introduction of the iPhone and one tricky year during Apple's stock-option controversies, and before that general counsel of IBM, where he spent 31 years learning high-tech legal.
Rosenberg points to his own phone and smiles.
"When I'm in Washington, which is often, talking to senators or congressmen about intellectual property, taxes or immigration reform, they think this device is almost magical, how they can change and manipulate data with a touch of their fingers, but the real magic is that I can pick up that phone right here and call India, and you, Steve, can have a conversation with China, and my assistant can be on the phone to Tokyo, and all our words are clear and we are not interfering with each other, and we can send data, too."
That magic has flattened the world.
"We spend a lot of time pointing out to people that the kind of invented innovation — created initially by Irwin Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi — that comprises the guts of the smartphone costs a lot of money, and it takes a lot of people and a lot of time to perfect it — and our newer ongoing inventions. It didn't stop with CDMA. It takes a lot of my time, and my team's, to protect all this."
If you've ever been to Qualcomm headquarters in Sorrento Valley, what strikes you as a thing of beauty is the array of patents arranged like artwork around the central atrium. This is representative of what Qualcomm (short for "quality communication") is all about: a revenue model based on licensing intellectual property. That said, Qualcomm was aggressive in allowing countries in Asia to use its technology to build the world's phones some years ago when the cellular world was still dominated by — memory caps, please — Nokia and Ericsson in Europe.
What makes a good general counsel?
"Today," says Rosenberg, "the best GCs are those who have had a diverse set of experiences in the practice of law andcan draw upon those experiences as new issues arise. Of course, you have to be smart and quick on your feet, but good judgment and an intuitive feel for what's right and how a particular problem is likely to play out are just as important. Litigation experience can be very helpful especially if not confined to one type of litigation. It is invaluable to have a balanced sense of fighting for principle, willingness to compromise and knowing what is in the long term interests of your company."
Fairness is important to Rosenberg, whose assistant points out — later — that he is the new co-chair of the national Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
"From the moment I met Paul (Jacobs), I knew he was a person of great character who made it clear that we were always going to do the right thing, i.e. the ethical thing, no matter what the cost. That sealed the deal for me. It's been over six years, and I have no regrets.
"My path is not one we are likely to see anymore," says Rosenberg, who was hired by IBM right out of law school and put to work on antitrust cases, then moved to product development and labor law, then to copyright, then to drafting contracts in the marketing division, then to supporting the engineers and programmers responsible for the mainframe business. (He still holds an affection for supercomputers along with tiny smartphones.)
By being moved every two years, he was forced not to become a specialist or slotted as most lawyers are today. There was a bit of high drama when IBM caught two foreign companies stealing trade secrets, in fact, IBM's future system architectural documents and the code for its major operating system. Hacking is nothing new, just perhaps easier!
Rosenberg learned litigation from that experience, developing management skills along his circuitous path, he believes, and acquiring the kinds of hands-on experience rare among legal specialists today.
"That model no longer exists at IBM or any other company, to my knowledge," he says.
Rosenberg was brought to Qualcomm to aid in patent and licensing issues. In 2011, Forbes reported his salary as $641,925, with restricted stock awards of $7,639,369.
The diversity of his own career may help him to appreciate the range of shows mounted by the Playhouse, from the experimental (and literal) on-the-beach feel of the Without Walls Festival, to the hilarious (and poignant) "Sideways" to the bravura one-man of "The Tallest Tree in the Forest" to the now-just-ended "Side Show."
"I don't know what Duane's favorite show was at the La Jolla Playhouse," says Rosenberg, who sits on the Playhouse board of directors."Mine was 'Yoshimi (Battles the Pink Robots),' though I come from New York, where experimental theater was, like, no more than Shakespeare in the Park. I just remember being very affected by 'Yoshimi' — my daughter died of brain stem glioma."
The pink robots Yoshimi battles in the production are actually cancer cells. Innovation Night last year was as appropriate to La Jolla high tech as could sadly be imagined.
Rosenberg has another daughter and she is a dancer. He's taking her to "Side Show," for the choreography.
A raucous holiday affair, this time.
Researcher Subin Ryoo contributed to this column. Steve Chapple may be reached at intellectualcapitalchapple@ gmail.com stevechapple.com
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