Tellabs

Tellabs, Inc. is a telecommunications company that designs, develops and supports telecommunications networking products.

History

Tellabs traces its roots to a meeting in 1975 over a kitchen table in suburban Chicago. In a booklet on Tellabs' first quarter century, Twenty-Five Years of Clear Ideas: Tellabs 1975-2000, founder Michael Birck, the first chief executive officer and still chairman, described the formation of the company.

Startup

Birck said that six men with backgrounds in electrical engineering and sales drank coffee and brainstormed ideas for a new telecom company. He said they wanted to build a company that offered customers products and services that met their specific needs. The partners raised $110,000 in capital. They incorporated as Tellabs in the spring of 1975. The name combined the idea of telephones and laboratories. The start-up only had a one-man research department, a second-hand soldering iron picked up for $25 and an outdated oscilloscope.

In a matter of months, Tellabs began making echo suppressors, which suppress annoying echoes on phone calls. During this time, the founding partners drew no salaries. Family members supported the new company by mortgaging their homes, cleaning Tellabs' offices and even posing as assembly line workers when potential customers were taken through the “plant.” Birck said, “None of the six of us gave any thought whatsoever to where we'd be 25 years hence--we were far more concerned with surviving the first year or two….We ended that first year with 20 employees, US$312,000 in sales and a modest loss.”