Turning back the clock to Sonoma County’s Telecom Valley, a high-tech hotbed

Its leader, engineer Don Green, dubbed Father of Telecom Valley, died June 28. But his legacy lives on in entrepreneurs he recruited who are running a variety of tech ventures today.|

The recent death of Don Green, the noted philanthropist and telecommunications pioneer, refocused attention on a seminal period of inventive wizardry that put Sonoma County on the map as a high-tech hotbed.

Green’s co-founding of fiber-optics firm Optilink in 1987 gave birth to Telecom Valley, a hub of innovation in northeast Petaluma that sizzled until the technology bubble burst in 2001.

It earned engineer Green, who had an innate ability to recruit top talent, the moniker Father of Telecom Valley. Born in Liverpool, England, in 1931, he was the son of a coal miner who arrived in California in 1960.

Since plenty of local residents are too young to remember this collection of telecom ingenuity or weren’t here to witness it, I talked to a few of Green’s close friends and colleagues who worked with him to shed light on what led to its formation and made the phenomenon a famous chapter in local business history.

Its origin can be traced to the federal government’s move in 1982 to break up monopolistic AT&T telephone company, known as Ma Bell. That deregulated telecommunications.

A few years later, this unleashed a torrent of entrepreneurs, risk-taking investors and engineers in Dallas, Raleigh, North Carolina, Atlanta and Sonoma County to start companies to develop equipment and technology to upgrade phone lines to carry high-speed data and voice communication over a single copper and fiber-optic wire.

John Webley of Santa Rosa, also an engineer and one of Green’s early Optilink hires and later his business partner at Advanced Fibre Communications, said Telecom Valley was born in a former cheesecake factory in the North McDowell Boulevard area of Petaluma near the current home of Lagunitas Brewing Co. Green bought the space in the summer of 1987 and started assembling a formidable team.

Optilink went to work aiming to improve what Webley called “the last mile” of cable from homes to the nearest telecom network switching center. At the time, rotary landline phones were dominant. Phone service was in great need of upgrades and aging lines weren’t capable of supporting digital communication.

The Petaluma startup designed and built a new network switch and tried, unsuccessfully, to sell it to one of the nation’s seven regional Baby Bell phone companies.

After that, Webley knew it was time to jump ship in search of another telecom venture, and in 1990 Green sold Optilink to Texas-based DSC Communications for $54 million.

In 1992, Webley, Green and another partner started Advanced Fibre Communications out of Webley’s garage. The goal was marrying fiber-optic and copper cable lines. This startup caught fire, giving the growing local tech hub and community a big financial lift and fueled more innovation.

Advanced Fibre went public in 1996 and instantly created 80 millionaires from an initial stock offering. It was considered the most successful Telecom Valley company at the time and became a magnet for other startups.

AFC also owned 500,000 shares of networking startup Cerent Corp., which Cisco Systems acquired in 1999 for $7 billion — an “obscene amount,” Webley recalled. At the time, the area’s telecom sector employed 12,000, many of them engineers commanding salaries of $80,000-plus a year, twice the county’s average wage.

Green owned stock and options in AFC worth $137 million by 1997. That windfall made possible the $10 million donation Green and his wife, Maureen, made toward construction of Green Music Center at Sonoma State University.

In its heyday of the late 1990s, Petaluma’s Telecom Valley was home to an estimated 60 or 70 little tech companies. These entrepreneurial ventures were laying the groundwork for modern broadband internet.

Many of the people who joined Green in his early ventures went on to form companies of their own, including Cerent, Next Level Communications, Diamond Lane Communications, Turin Networks, Westwave Communications, Calix and Cyan.

Many of those early startups grew up in south county, then sold their stock to investors, or were acquired by larger players across the vast telecom and computer hardware and software field.

Rich Stanfield, who Green hired in 1994 as vice president of sales at Advanced Fibre, said Telecom Valley firms prospered by combining clever innovators, insightful operators with telecom expertise and, of course, plenty of venture capital money.

“People like Don would listen more than he talked,” Stanfield said, a different kind of executive at the time who valued the opinions of key people he hired.

When the overheated U.S. tech market imploded in 2001, local companies shed 6,000 jobs in two years. Then in June 2015, what remained of Alcatel-Lucent in Petaluma, a successor of the first startup in Telecom Valley, closed its doors. That ended a storied chapter of a high-flying telecommunications sector that in the 1990s employed thousands and generated billions for Sonoma County’s economy.

Forward-thinking Green told The Press Democrat then he still saw expansion opportunities in different types of technology.

Indeed, a group of at least 20 telecom entrepreneurs recruited by him at some point, including Webley, Stanfield and Michael Hatfield, continue his legacy in a variety of cutting-edge enterprises.

“We haven’t gone away,” said Webley, a South Africa native who ended his telecom tech foray in 2007 when he sold Turin Networks to computer maker Dell.

Three years later, he was back launching Trevi Systems in Rohnert Park, focused on reducing the energy it takes to convert ocean water to fresh drinking water. Stanfield and Ed Boyd, another AFC alumnus, cofounded Tibit Communications in Petaluma, maker of a small plug-in device for high-speed digital connections to homes, businesses and cellular towers.

In 2018, Hatfield, who had helped spearhead Cerent, Calix and Cyan, started Carium and embarked on a mobile app and web-based platform to manage personal health data.

“We’ve all tried to retire, but we all have a bee in our bonnet to do something,” Webley said.

In that regard, they also seem to take after the Father of Telecom Valley who, at 55, retired for three weeks before charging ahead with plans to launch Optilink.

Send your tips and ideas as this column chronicles the local economic recovery to paul.bomberger@pressdemocrat.com. Call or text 215-237-4448. Or you can messagfe @BiznewsPaulB on Twitter.

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