When Silicon Valley rock star Paul Jacobs in 2023 became CEO of Globalstar — a publicly traded satellite company that powers communication for mobile devices — it was something of a full-circle moment.
Jacobs spent nearly a decade in the mid-2000s at the helm of Qualcomm, the San Diego maker of semiconductors, software and services for wireless technology that created Globalstar in the early 1990s, so taking the helm of the Covington-based company was a return to his roots.
It was also a pivotal time for Globalstar. Jacobs arrived at the company a year after it landed a deal with Apple to power the Emergency SOS services on iPhones — a game changing partnership, now reaching $2 billion, that has reoriented the company’s trajectory and kept Jacobs busy.
Earlier this month, Jacobs joined his local team to celebrate the opening of Globalstar’s new $5 million control center. The 10,000-square-foot space, located within the company’s larger headquarters, will monitor and manage its growing communications network of satellites and ground stations around the globe.
Jacobs sat down for an interview after the recent ribbon cutting to talk about Globalstar’s three-decade history and his plans for the future.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Globalstar was created as a satellite phone service by Qualcomm and a partner in the early 1990s. In the following years, it had ups and downs.
Mostly downs.
Why was that the case?
First, any satellite company has to be able to pay for the satellites, and that's really expensive. So if you don't have a good business model, you're in trouble.
The original idea for Globalstar and its competitor, which was called Iridium, was to provide cellular services outside of cellular coverage area, which sounds a little familiar now. Well, that didn't work decades ago. It was a niche for people who really needed it, backpackers or first responders. The market wasn't enormous.
So Globalstar pivoted, finding other users of its tech.
The company figured out how to do "internet of things," monitoring cattle and horses, equipment for the oil and gas industry, or shipping containers. That's all over the landscape, and nobody wants to lose some expensive piece of equipment just because somebody parked it somewhere and they forgot about it.
Then came this idea of working with our partner (Apple) to be able to build something that actually worked on an existing phone. And the reason why that was possible is because the way that Globalstar satellites work, when you send data out of here, it essentially bounces off the satellite back down to a huge antenna.
The enormous market that we're addressing now is peace of mind. Everybody depends on their cellphones now, and when you get outside of coverage, it's a little nerve-racking. If I'm a backpacker and I twist my ankle out in the mountains, I would like to know that I can let somebody know and come rescue me.
Globalstar has a license to use certain radio frequencies to transmit and receive signals, called spectrum. Can you explain what that means in layman’s terms?
When you think about radio, although some people are too young for that, each station is using a chunk of spectrum to transmit radio waves. They are divided up into different chunks, like somebody singing lower or higher frequency. You can divide those up and only listen to a certain frequency. … It’s a finite resource of nature, and so people try to find better and more efficient ways of using it.
How long is the company’s spectrum license?
We just got a 15-year renewal, which goes with the 15-year life of the satellite.
Looking back at the company’s slow build, did anyone think this was going to be a 30-year play?
It's interesting you ask that, because one of the early things at Qualcomm was messaging to long-haul trucks, which was also satellite based, and that was a 30-year kind of business. ... And then we sold it for a billion dollars at the end.
What happens next, if everything goes swimmingly?
We're building new ground stations around the world. We're in the process of two different tranches of satellites. We will launch some by the end of the year to replenish this constellation. And we’re going to go from 24 satellites that are operational to 32 satellites that are running the system. Beyond that, we’ve got another 50 that are underway that are next generation. So we have a long road map now of having the ability to have the satellites up, and this facility in Covington will control all those. Globalstar’s got a good solid base now.
Last month, Globalstar moved from the New York Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq and completed a reverse stock split. Can you explain what that is and why you did it?
The company was a multibillion-dollar market cap company, but because they had issued so many shares, the shares were in the dollar range, and most institutional investors can't invest in a stock that's below five bucks. We were missing a huge portion of the investing community, and because of that, we didn't have a lot of analysts following us either. So, there was sort of this negative spiral of not having people investing and not having people covering us, so people weren't investing and the stock price stayed low. By doing the reverse split, we just moved the stock, didn't change the market capital of the company, didn't change the value of the company, just changed what the per-share price was.
Why move to NASDAQ from the NYSE?
NYSE is a great exchange, and they were very supportive of the company. For me, I'd been involved with NASDAQ through most of the companies I'd been part of, so it just seemed like a natural move for us.
Now that you have to come to Louisiana from time to time, what’s your routine?
There's a Southwest flight to MSY, and sometimes I stay in the Southern Hotel in Covington and sometimes I'll stay in New Orleans. We're pretty virtual, actually. The senior team is together a lot, but it's like at a customer, convention or investor event. We don't necessarily all have to work in the same place to run the company.
