Henry Samueli is best known as the billionaire brains behind chipmaker Broadcom Inc. and the owner of the Anaheim Ducks.
Nowadays, the 64 year old with an engineering doctorate, while still committed to his strategic role as chief technical officer at Broadcom, is a healthcare advocate.
That promulgation, along with his budding real estate portfolio around the Honda Center in Anaheim, could line the next chapter in Samueli’s remarkable career, which has stretched from a professorship at the University of California-Los Angeles to reluctant entrepreneurship to tech vanguard.
“The entire country is recognizing the fact that healthcare needs to change—the way we deliver healthcare needs to change,” Samueli said during a rare public appearance at OCTANe’s Medical Technology Innovation Forum on Oct. 29 at the Newport Beach Marriott Hotel & Spa.
The remarks, during a 40-minute Q&A session with Greg Washington, dean at the University of California-Irvine’s Samueli School of Engineering, provided a rare glimpse into the mindset of the brilliant engineer, who has largely shunned interview requests over the past decade.
Health Kick
“It’s all about starting early and being healthy, eating healthy, exercising, being proactive,” Samueli told the OCTANe crowd, which included several hundred executives, investors, entrepreneurs and others.
That mantra and lifestyle led Samueli and his wife, Susan, a fellow Ph.D. holder, to donate $200 million to UCI last year—one of the largest gifts bestowed to a U.S. public university.
About $55 million of that will build a home for the Susan and Henry Samueli College of Health Sciences, a first-of-its-kind school that will focus on interdisciplinary integrative health.
The rest of the gift will fund a permanent endowment for 15 faculty chairs, student scholarships and other initiatives, including “investigations of new healthcare approaches,” according to UCI.
Susan, whom he met in the 1970s at a dance at a Jewish temple, has been passionate about integrative, or complementary, healthcare for more than 30 years.
The couple established the Susan Samueli Center for Integrative Medicine at UCI in 2001.
“It finally came to the point where we felt we could take it to the next level and really try to impact the entire College of Health Sciences,” Samueli said of the $200 million donation.
“That was certainly a disruptive gift and intentionally so,” he said.
Whether Samueli plans other disruptive gifts—to fund education or other healthcare-focused tech companies—is unknown.
He has not been reported to have invested in any additional tech or medical-focused companies in Orange County or elsewhere outside of Broadcom.
He still has an outsize influence in the business community, other top executives say.
Samueli “is one of the true disrupters’ in the industry,” said Jim Mazzo, global president for Germany-based Carl Zeiss Meditec’s ophthalmic devices division.
“His leadership and impact in Orange County has been instrumental to advancements in our industry.”
Henry and Henry
Samueli co-founded the chipmaker in 1991 with Henry “Nick” Nicholas in a spare bedroom at the latter’s home in Redondo Beach. The longtime friends became millionaires overnight after the digital and analog semiconductor company’s 1998 IPO, as the stock jumped more than 120% in its first trading session. A few years of additional stock gains made them billionaires.
The then Irvine-based company made a name for itself developing the first broadband chips that powered connections to the internet.
“We started the company because of the literal demand to create this broadband technology from research projects we were publishing papers on to real commercial products,” he said.
“It was very opportunistic that we had companies willing to throw money at us. We had a two- or three-year market advantage to develop our products.”
Moreover, Broadcom never took venture capital funding, a remarkable development in a capital-intensive industry.
It later moved into communications chips in smartphones and other devices that power Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and other applications, as well those used in data centers and set-top boxes.
Broadcom has long counted the largest and most influential consumer electronic makers in the world as customers.
The Golden Egg
Samueli has the golden touch with more than just chips.
After purchasing the Anaheim hockey club in 2005 for $70 million, it’s now valued at $460 million by Forbes.
The value of the Ducks franchise could rise even further. Samueli is reportedly in the early stages of negotiating the right to head new development around Angel Stadium as part of a new lease with the city for the Honda Center.
While the city owns the Honda Center, Samueli has quietly amassed a sizeable collection of land and other properties of his own in the vicinity of the stadium, sources tell the Business Journal.
Culture Focus
Samueli is big on culture—even when the company’s grown to some 15,000 employees across the globe.
It’s a far cry from the chipmaker’s more humble, bootstrapped days before it went public.
“Culture evolves as a company grows. Certainly when you’re a startup, you know everybody,” said Samueli, who interviewed and hired Broadcom’s first 350 workers.
“The company that has a strong leadership team can promote that culture down through the organization. You can see it today at Broadcom.”
Samueli, however, is no longer the public face of Broadcom. He ceded the mantle to Chief Executive Hock Tan in early 2016 when Tan’s Avago Technologies acquired Broadcom for $37 billion—the largest deal in tech history at the time.
Tan, who kept the Broadcom name, has built it into an even larger global powerhouse through an aggressive roll-up strategy that included a $606 million takeover of Costa Mesa-based networking equipment maker Emulex Corp. in 2015.
The stock of Broadcom (Nasdaq: AVGO) has climbed 57% since the 2016 deal to $211.50 per share and an $87.4 billion market cap as of press time.
Samueli still owns shares worth about $2 billion, according to the company’s latest proxy. The Business Journal estimates his wealth at a little more than $4 billion.
“Hock Tan is the master of financial analysis and valuing companies that way,” Samueli said. “He has exponentially expanded the company.”
