BroadSoft Secrets Revealed: The Beginning
By Michael Tessler, Managing Partner
Many people are curious how we started BroadSoft but let me start with how Scott and I first met.
How We Met
We met when I joined Celcore, a company building low density wireless systems for underserved markets. One day I can share lots of Celcore stories, but imagine my arrival to Memphis to take over engineering. This was quite a culture shock coming from Montreal. Scott had been running Global System for Mobile (GSM) engineering and we quickly became friends. When Celcore was eventually sold, Scott and I decided to take a bite from the entrepreneurial apple, so packed up, and moved to Washington DC to start our entrepreneur journey.
Choosing a Home
Some folks ask, “How did you guys land up in Gaithersburg, Maryland?" Well we knew that we could not build a high tech company in Memphis. We debated locations - on how Boston was too cold for Scott and he complained that he couldn’t understand anyone. Atlanta was too hot and I complained that I couldn’t understand anyone. The West Coast was too far for both of us. After a while we settled on the DC area which was really the midpoint between our two hometowns; Lafayette and Montreal.
Understanding the Market
After agreeing on where to settle and start our venture in Maryland, we got to work. Lots of people ask if building a voice application server was the original idea. When we looked at the industry in the early days of VoIP, there was a lot of focus on hardware. We saw that the industry would eventually move from the transport layer to the application layer. So, we focused on the app and end user and what would work well for them.
Securing Investment
In our founding year (1998), there was already lots of money flowing and investments in the venture community. Scott and I secured our investment before we knew what we were going to build. We received Series A round funding of $5 million dollars with enough capital to build our first concepts. The investors in Celcore decided to bet on Scott and me as a team. We developed about 10 different product vignettes, all around the move of networks to IP and the application layer being software. We debated these 10 ideas between ourselves and the investors, then decided on what became BroadWorks.
Our Brand
With a location and investment secured, we also had to come up with our company name. Well, funny enough BroadSoft was not our first name. We needed a name before we knew what we were going to do, so we picked a dotcom name, iKnow. Once we decided what we were going to do, we decided that we wanted a more descriptive name and we thought - broadband, software and systems. After a few hours in the basement of the Bessemer venture office in Boston - and looking at hundreds of URLs, we found and registered BroadSoft.com.
The Mysterious Founder
While most folks know Scott and me as the original founders of BroadSoft, we had a third founder, Jeffrey. I met Jeffery in Memphis and he was counsel at Celcore. In many ways, Jeffrey was my education to all things southern. He grew up in Memphis and came from a well established family. Most of the time, Jeffrey would say things and I would have to ask him to repeat or interpret. Jeffrey was our in house partner. He joined us in Maryland and handled all things legal, operations, HR and office. This was great as it left Scott and me to focus on the company vision, product and the customers. Jeffrey himself was quite the inventor and genius licensing guy. He always had some crazy projects going on; like licensing the Elvis brand for cigars. There are enough Jeffrey stories to fill a book. Unfortunately, Jeffrey missed home and decided to leave us and Scott and I continued to build BroadSoft with our founding engineers Alex Doyle, Maria Hemmer Doyle and Steve Liao.
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