The Reinventor

Matt Desch: Made a career of shattering the legacy at legacy companies. Bred as a Bell Labs engineer, built nascent wireless into a $4.5 billion business at Nortel. Now at the helm of Telcordia, awakening a closed culture and weaving into wireless.

I got started in telecom right out of college, on assignment at Bell Labs in software development. After a few years I got transferred to Chicago to do large-scale systems software development. In 1987, after I got my MBA from the University of Chicago, they told me I was hot stuff and I really wanted to make a big impact. But divestiture had just happened and things were still pretty slow. They said I had to go to New Jersey, but I couldn't find anyone who could tell me how to get to New Jersey.

So I looked around for an opportunity and found it at Northern Telecom in Raleigh. They created a wireless division in 1991, and I was asked to join that as the head of product management, trying to figure out what was next for the company after switching.

That was really the time that everything was taking off at once. It was a fun time to be there. I'm pretty proud of what Nortel did in the wireless area. I was running a big part of the company, but we decided to change the business model to integrate better. I also wanted a personal experience, so I moved off to Europe and Asia to run Nortel's business there.

I left in March of 2000 and became an entrepreneur like everyone else. I don't think I was ever very serious about wanting to lead a start-up — I only wanted to work with start-ups. I wanted to be part of an organization that had a really broad and deep impact on its customers. That's what led me to Telcordia. I felt it had an important relationship with its customers and the potential for impact on wireless carriers in terms of its ability to lower costs and generate new revenues.

Success will be defined when we're extremely relevant to wireless carriers. To do that, we need to develop more products and we need to partner with more companies to bring those products to market. And we need new people in the organization who understand what's important to wireless carriers.

There is a reputation about Telcordia — a culture people expect from us, and a wireline orientation. I really am confident I can tackle that. I can't control the marketplace or the competitive environment, but I can have a lot of impact on the culture of the organization. —As told to Jason Meyers