Sanjay in an accomplished leader across three different stages of his business career. Currently, he is a venture investor with a demonstrated track record of sourcing, selecting, and adding operational value to numerous early and mid-stage companies. Before that, he was CEO of GlobalFoundries, CEO of Motorola Mobility, Co-CEO of Motorola, and President and COO of Qualcomm. Prior to that, he was a successful product and engineering leader, developing four generations of wireless computing platforms with 25 patents and over $15B of products shipped. In parallel to the three stages, his venture experience started in 2001, when he founded the Qualcomm Technology and Venture Group, the predecessor to the current Qualcomm Ventures. At that time, PayPal with a 30x return, was the most notable investment in the portfolio. He led the investment committee at Motorola Ventures and founded GlobalFoundries Ventures. Over the years, he has been responsible for numerous investments, spanning hardware, software, and integrated systems for mobile, cloud and AI. As a hands-on current investor or board member/chair at more than 28 companies through a joint Family Office and he is tracking to a ~3x cash-on-cash return across the portfolio.
In his CEO roles across three iconic companies over 15 years, Sanjay had a consistent track record of delivering value for shareholders, employees and communities. He has demonstrated a combination of business acumen and broad technology leadership. He has made industry and company shaping strategic bets at each of the three companies to create and scale platform-based ecosystems (e.g., mobile/AI systems) to deliver value. For example, in his roles as Co-CEO of Motorola, and as CEO and Chairman of Motorola Mobility Inc., he increased the value of Motorola Mobility Inc. from a net value of approximately negative $6.7B to a sale of $13.4B to Google (over $20B in value gain). Faced with a weak and unfocused portfolio, he made a pioneering bet to adopt a single hardware and software platform (Android) to instigate an ecosystem to unlock value, turning Android into a viable competitor to Apple’s iOS. Similarly, at GlobalFoundries, in light of a massive scale disadvantage with respect to TSMC, Sanjay set a technical and business direction for differentiation rather than head-to-head confrontations at large customers. He made bold technology (FDSOI) and global partnership bets that became the backbone for GlobalFoundries growth and value creation in the past 5 years. Sanjay joined Qualcomm as a senior engineer, 22nd employee and moved up to head the Qualcomm Technology and Ventures group (QT&V). He was able to attract $8 from VCs for every $1 invested by QT&V into its portfolio companies. Subsequently, he became President and led the first integrated application processor solution and built hardware and software platform-based ecosystems.
Sanjay was awarded Best Turnaround CEO of All Time by Fierce Wireless in 2011. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for leadership in the design and development of technology. He has a DSc (Hon) and a PhD in Digital Signal Processing (EEE) from the University of Strathclyde, and a BS in Engineering (EEE) from the University of Liverpool.
He has been on several boards of startups and a public company (Cerence Inc., where he was the chair of the audit committee). Sanjay is also a Board of Trustee at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, which is one of the world’s preeminent basic research institutions founded in 1960 by polio vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk, M.D., where internationally renowned faculty have been recognized with numerous honors, including Nobel Prizes and memberships in the National Academy of Sciences.