Michael Tessler had a reasonable question during BroadSoft’s initial public offering roadshow: could he keep the jet? He asked repeatedly. The answer remained no. The episode gives a welcome glimpse of a founder whose public career is usually compressed into a transaction price. Cisco bought BroadSoft for approximately $1.9 billion in 2018. Behind that number were two decades of software, sales meetings, travel and relationships. Even an engineer could be forgiven for developing an interest in the transport.
Tessler’s business was built around a more restrained ambition for the company name. BroadSoft would supply the software that telecom carriers used to deliver business communications. The carriers would put their own brands in front of customers. Fame could wait; the service had to work. It was an arrangement that eventually took the company into more than 80 countries, while leaving many of the people using its technology quite unaware of its existence.
A partnership in search of a postcode
Before the cloud came a friendship. Tessler met Scott Hoffpauir at Celcore, the wireless equipment company where Tessler arrived to run engineering. Coming from Montreal to Memphis was, in his recollection, a cultural adjustment. Hoffpauir was running GSM engineering. They became friends, then prospective business partners when Celcore’s corporate journey gave them an opportunity to start something together.
His preparation included engineering studies at McGill and work at Nortel on advanced services for carrier networks. He knew the industry from inside its machinery. In the late 1990s, as voice began moving from traditional telephone networks to internet protocol, much attention went to hardware and cheaper transport. Tessler and Hoffpauir were interested in the applications that could sit above it. A different way to carry a call might permit a different way to provide the whole service.
They settled around Washington in 1998, a compromise between their hometowns. Their first company name was iKnow. BroadSoft came later, after a domain-name search in Bessemer’s Boston office. The new name brought broadband and software into the same word. A corporate identity had caught up with a product direction.
Let the carrier take the bow
The commercial idea was as consequential as the software. BroadSoft enabled telecom operators to offer hosted communications to businesses. Operators could use their own branding, set their offers and maintain the customer relationship. A business could buy communications as a service, paying by the seat each month, instead of assembling its own collection of servers, software and integration work.
Tessler called the arrangement “BroadSoft Inside.” The phrase neatly captured a company willing to be the ingredient. A carrier already had customers, a market presence and a name people recognised. BroadSoft supplied capabilities that made that relationship more useful. For a founder, this required a particular kind of confidence: the ability to build value without insisting that every customer applaud its author.
By 2013, BroadSoft was powering services for more than 500 providers across 65 countries. Its customers included AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. BroadWorks supplied a core platform; BroadCloud offered hosted services that providers could rebrand. The reach helps explain why a company could matter deeply within telecommunications without acquiring the public familiarity of the companies using it.
For Tessler, the technical opportunity was broader than reducing the price of a call. Software could change how applications were introduced and delivered. His engineering background helped him see the possibilities; building a company required persuading operators to turn those possibilities into services people would buy.
A moustache in the meeting room
Those relationships occasionally acquired a surreal quality. In one meeting arranged by AT&T Business executive Andy Geisse, another executive had Tessler’s biography in front of him. As they talked, he began drawing on the photograph: a moustache, darker glasses, more hair. Tessler recalled exchanging puzzled looks with Geisse. The meeting had become an unsolicited consultation on personal presentation.
He tells the story without naming the artist. The relationship continued, and Geisse later joined BroadSoft’s board after leaving his AT&T role. The anecdote makes an otherwise abstract phrase, “strategic customer relationship,” feel human. Large companies make decisions through people. Some of those people doodle.
BroadSoft also brought its network together at Connections. The first gathering, in 2003, attracted about 175 people, including visitors from Australia and New Zealand. The setting was modest; the social life was less restrained. Tessler recalled guests and staff ending up in the swimming pool fully dressed. The next year, the company supplied bags to protect their phones. Apparently the event planning department had become interested in waterproofing.
There was commercial substance beneath the fun. Customers, partners and employees were meeting one another, making the network around the product tangible. BroadSoft’s software depended on other businesses taking it into their markets. A gathering could turn that arrangement into acquaintances, conversations and memories that lasted beyond the presentations.
The market needed a picture
BroadSoft went public in June 2010. The opening reception was subdued. Finance chief Jim Tholen later recalled a $9 offering price and roughly five months of trading between $7.50 and $9. Investors found the business small and complicated. An unfamiliar company selling through other unfamiliar layers of infrastructure does not explain itself merely by arriving on an exchange.
Tessler has described the effort required to produce a diagram that explained BroadWorks to investors. They needed to understand what an application server did and where it belonged in a service provider’s network. Creating a clear picture proved surprisingly difficult. The people closest to a system possess precisely the knowledge their audience lacks, which can make explanation a demanding piece of work.
His preference was for diagrams that showed inputs becoming outputs, alongside the components that made a product possible. There is an engineer’s practicality in that approach. Give the audience something it can follow. A successful technical company still has to tell a comprehensible story about why anyone should care.
“Our team cared.”
Michael Tessler, reflecting on BroadSoft in March 2020
The sale, and the two years after
Cisco completed its acquisition on February 2, 2018. The purchase price was approximately $1.9 billion. By then, BroadSoft’s reach extended to more than 600 service providers in over 80 countries. The company Tessler had helped start had become part of a much larger communications portfolio. By then, BroadSoft had grown to almost 2,000 employees.
Approximate price paid by Cisco for BroadSoft
Tessler stayed, serving as general manager of Cisco’s Cloud Calling Business Unit. His departure came in March 2020, bringing his BroadSoft journey to roughly 21 years. His farewell dwelt on colleagues: their responsiveness, their professionalism, the bonds that continued when people moved to customers or partners. He also remembered entrepreneurs whose companies had joined BroadSoft through acquisitions. The business had gathered people as well as products.
Austin, with a side order of hold music
Later that year, Tessler moved to Austin after 22 years around Washington. In announcing the move, he looked back to the nearby apartments he and Hoffpauir had rented at the beginning, and to the days, nights and weekends spent building. The founding group included Alex Doyle, Maria Hemmer Doyle and Steve Liao. A change of city supplied an occasion to remember the people who had made the old one matter.
The move also supplied fresh evidence that communications technology and customer experience can be awkward companions. Cancelling services for his old home meant waits, repeated sales attempts and processes that made departure laborious. One company tried selling him a service it did not provide in Texas. A business can know a great deal about retention and remarkably little about where its customer is going.
His prescription was plain: make cancellation easy. A former customer who leaves with goodwill is worth having. The criticism came from someone who had spent decades helping companies communicate, now encountering the ordinary indignities of trying to get a company to listen. It gives his interest in customer experience a pleasingly practical edge.
Learning to leave the driving to someone else
In April 2020, Tessler began his next chapter as a managing partner at True North Advisory. Hoffpauir and former BroadSoft finance chief Tholen were part of the venture. The accumulated experience would now be put to work helping other businesses scale.
Advising required an adjustment. In a 2021 conversation, Tessler acknowledged the difficulty of giving up command while describing the satisfaction of coaching executives and seeing their companies advance. There were still hard conversations to have. The decisions, however, belonged to someone else. Years of being responsible for execution do not automatically prepare a founder to watch another person execute.
His interests have continued into AI adoption and autonomous mobility. Ahead of Cloud Connections 2024, he discussed helping service providers turn AI capabilities into useful services. Guident announced his board appointment in August 2025; in a February 2026 interview, he discussed autonomous vehicle safety and his role as an independent director. The technologies have changed, while questions about reliability, adoption and reaching customers remain close at hand.
There is a thread running from the software hidden behind a carrier’s brand to the adviser working beside another chief executive. Tessler has spent a career making room for partners to succeed. At BroadSoft, that helped a small company travel across the world. At True North, it gives the next founder somewhere to begin the conversation. The jet, regrettably, remains outside the arrangement.