Who are Broadcom's decision-makers?

Hock E. Tan has been President and CEO of Broadcom since March 2006 — first at Avago Technologies, then at the combined entity after Avago's $37 billion acquisition of the original Broadcom Corporation in 2016. Tan earned a BS from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School, and worked in general management at General Motors and Pepsi before moving into private equity and semiconductors as CEO of Integrated Device Technology (IDT). He is widely regarded as one of the best capital allocators in technology: his playbook of acquiring companies with captive installed bases, cutting costs aggressively, raising prices on locked-in customers, and converting one-time sales to subscriptions has been executed with remarkable precision across Brocade, CA Technologies, Symantec, and VMware.

The co-founder of the original Broadcom, Henry Samueli (a UCLA electrical engineering professor), joined the board of today's Broadcom Inc. in February 2016 and served as Chairman from December 2018 through June 2026 — when he transitioned to a non-executive board director role, ending a direct leadership presence for the company's founding generation. Charlie Kawwas, Ph.D., President of the Semiconductor Solutions Group, is the most senior operational executive below Tan on the silicon side, running 15 semiconductor divisions, Brocade Storage Networking, Global Operations, and Intellectual Property.

The newest senior addition is CFO Amie Thuener, who joined from Alphabet (where she served as VP Corporate Controller and Chief Accounting Officer since 2018, and before that as Managing Director in PwC's Transaction and Accounting Advisory practice) and formally became CFO on June 12, 2026. Thuener replaces Kirsten Spears, who had served as CFO since 2020 and oversaw Broadcom's financial operations through the entire VMware integration and the company's entry into the trillion-dollar market-cap club. Spears remains as an advisor through early 2027 to support the transition.

Broadcom's procurement and buying decisions flow through a centralized, professionally managed function. For technology purchases, the Chief Information Officer oversees internal IT infrastructure decisions. For legal and compliance technology, Chief Legal Officer Mark Brazeal's team controls vendor selection. The semiconductor divisions, led by Charlie Kawwas, run their own EDA, silicon design tools, and engineering software budgets with significant technical autonomy. The VMware-derived Infrastructure Software business unit manages its own tooling stack for cloud management, observability, and developer experience.

Critically, Hock Tan himself is personally involved in all significant vendor relationships — Broadcom is known to negotiate hard at the executive level, and enterprise sales teams should expect CEO or CFO scrutiny on any material contract. The best entry point for most enterprise vendors is through division-level engineering or IT contacts, with escalation to CFO or CLO for significant contract values. Broadcom's post-VMware integration period (2024–2026) has also created new internal demand for cloud migration tooling, multi-cloud governance, and AI infrastructure management products as the company consolidates two large engineering organizations.

Broadcom operates with a deliberately lean corporate center and a divisional structure under two major segments: Semiconductor Solutions (led by Charlie Kawwas) and Infrastructure Software (which houses VMware by Broadcom, CA Technologies, and Symantec enterprise security). Each acquisition has been followed by significant workforce rationalization — Broadcom eliminated approximately 2,000 VMware roles shortly after closing, keeping headcount productivity metrics among the highest in the industry. The company's approach is to retain the revenue-generating and R&D functions while stripping out redundant corporate overhead.

Capital allocation and M&A strategy are highly centralized under Tan, while execution is delegated to division presidents. This structure means corporate directives around pricing, licensing, and customer strategy move quickly and uniformly across the organization. As of mid-2026, Broadcom has approximately 56,000 employees globally across semiconductor engineering, software development, sales, support, and operations — down from the combined pre-rationalization headcount of the merged entities. Headcount is distributed across more than 76 offices spanning North America, Europe, India, Israel, Asia-Pacific, and beyond.