Founder & Investor Conversation with Qualcomm Ventures @ UC San Diego Horizon
Stanford Angels and Entrepreneurs of Southern California is partnering with View From The Horizon — UC San Diego Horizon Accelerator's premier conversation series — to bring our growing San Diego community of investors, founders, and ecosystem leaders access to top speakers and cutting-edge insights.
Session Focus: Corporate Venture Capital and the Founder's Capital Journey
Hosted in partnership with Qualcomm Ventures and Stanford Angels and Entrepreneurs of Southern California, this installment brings together the Qualcomm Ventures team and a panel of portfolio founders — including representatives from Brain Corp — for a frank discussion on corporate venture capital strategy, what investors look for at each stage, and how founders have navigated key inflection points on the road to scale.
This series will be moderated by Pat Giblin of the Horizon Accelerator Advisory Board with guest speakers that include:
Rich Tapalaga, Director, Qualcomm Ventures
Albert Wang, Senior Investment Director, Qualcomm Ventures
David Pinn, CEO, Brain Corp.
More About Our Host: Patrick Giblin is a builder, operator and investor who has spent his career at the intersection of early-stage company formation and venture capital. As a founder, he scaled 451 Degrees Inc. with backing from Andreessen Horowitz, Social Capital, and 8VC, and holds multiple patents in AI/ML. He serves as an Advisory Board Member at the UC San Diego Entrepreneurship Center, where he advises within the Horizon Accelerator — a pre-seed program built on the belief that the best advisors are operators who have lived the hard parts of building a company. He is also a Founding Managing Partner of the Cooper Fund, a UC San Diego-focused venture vehicle designed to close the capital gap for UC San Diego staff, students and alumni while also anchoring economic value in San Diego. Patrick brings a practitioner's perspective to every conversation — one shaped as much by failure and recovery as by success.
Richard Tapalaga focuses his investments in XR, connected devices, robotics, gaming and logistics. He joined Qualcomm Ventures in 2008 and serves as a Board Member/Board Observer for investments including Airspace, Brain Corp, Netradyne, Nothing, Survios, ThatGameCompany and various strategic investments. Prior to joining Qualcomm, Richard had over seven years of investment banking experience at Merrill Lynch & Co and Société Générale. As a Vice President at Société Générale, Richard led the leveraged finance deal teams in the Gaming, Lodging, Leisure and Media & Telecom sectors.
Albert Wang is a Senior Investment Director at Qualcomm Ventures, which is Qualcomm's corporate venture fund with $3B AUM. Albert's current investment focuses are enterprise software and data & AI infrastructures. Some of Albert's portfolio companies are: Anthropic, Cerebras, Horizon3 AI, SiFive, Plume, Ring, and Mountain Digital, which went IPO last year.
David Pinn assumed the role of CEO at Brain Corp in 2022, where he has held various executive positions since joining in 2017, including Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Financial Officer. During his tenure, Pinn was instrumental in leading Brain Corp’s transformation from a robotics hardware company to a software as a service (SaaS) provider. He played a pivotal role in securing over $100 million in funding from prominent investors such as the SoftBank Vision Fund, Qualcomm Ventures, Hercules Capital, ClearBridge Investments, and Satwik Ventures.
Horizon Accelerator bridges discovery and deployment at UC San Diego, accelerating innovation toward measurable real-world impact. Operating from UC San Diego's Design and Innovation Building, they connect founders with the investors, mentors, and partners who help amplify teams alongside their promising technologies.
More About Us: Founded in 2018, Stanford Angels and Entrepreneurs of Southern California is building a trusted community where Stanford-affiliated founders, investors, and innovators come together to imagine, collaborate, and shape the future. Through events, pitch sessions, and mentorship programs, it aims to foster an environment that nurtures innovation, accelerates growth, and transforms the region's entrepreneurial landscape.
Location: UC San Diego's Design & Innovation Building, 1st Floor Landing
Getting here: https://dib.ucsd.edu/about/getting-here.html