Building for the world

WHAT BEGAN AS A COLLABORATION BETWEEN TWO TECHNOLOGISTS AT QUALCOMM HAS EVOLVED INTO A UNICORN THAT DEMONSTRATES HOW INNOVATION CAN THRIVE WHEN IT CONNECTS DIFFERENT TECHNOLOGIES, PROBLEMS, AND PARTS OF THE WORLD

- ANEES HUSSAIN

IT WAS 2003. The dot-com bubble had burst, leaving the tech industry bruised but not beaten. At Qualcomm's San Diego headquarters, David Julian, fresh from completing his PhD in information theory at Stanford, joined a team led by Avneesh Agrawal, a fellow Stanford alumnus. Their mission: explore whether OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access) technology could be applied to cellular networks—a move that would challenge the company's own dominant technology.

Until then, Qualcomm's business heavily relied on royalties paid for patents on CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access)—the technology that allowed multiple cell phones to share the same frequency channel by assigning each a unique code. OFDMA represented a fundamentally different approach that divided radio spectrum into subchannels, offering greater spectral efficiency and data speeds.

"At that point, Qualcomm was deeply invested in CDMA, which they held most of the patents for," Julian recalls. "Outwardly, everyone believed CDMA was the only way, but OFDMA was this emerging tech with a lot of potential." The team developed a system that eventually became LTE, the foundation of 4G networks worldwide, with OFDMA as its downlink access method. The experience left both with a crucial insight: technological inflection points create enormous opportunities for those willing to challenge orthodoxy. It was a lesson they would apply more than a decade later when founding Netradyne.

Their paths later diverged after this project. Julian went on to explore brain-inspired computing and neural networks, chasing yet another technology before it went mainstream.