On March 15, 1996, I made over a hundred million dollars. That was the day my company, IDT, one of the world’s largest Internet and alternative telecommunications providers, went public. As IDT’s founder, president, and majority shareholder, I was instantly rich beyond my wildest dreams. People ask me if this was the greatest moment in my business life. It wasn’t.
Four months later, on July 18, 1996, we released a new technology, a breakthrough that would eventually cut the cost of international calls by a remarkable 95 percent. That day Sara Grosvenor, the great-granddaughter of Alexander Graham Bell, joined us in New York to use our new technology in order to place the first phone call ever over the network to Susan Cheever, the great-granddaughter of Thomas Watson, in London.
Within twenty-four hours of Ms. Grosvenor saying “Come here, Ms. Watson, I need to see you” over our system, CNN, CNBC, and newspapers had spread word of the development to investors and potential users and partners around the world. Combined with a more than fivefold increase in our quarterly revenues for the second year in a row, IDT’s stock price started to move upward again. Many people who saw me glowing that morning asked if this was the greatest moment of my business life. It wasn’t.
The greatest moment actually occurred approximately twenty-seven years earlier on the morning of July 23, 1970. That was the morning I pushed my newly built hot dog stand past Joe and Vinny’s butcher shop on Eastchester Road in the Bronx. Only two months before, Joe had driven me from my after-school job in the butcher shop by forcing me to eat five pounds of rice pudding (a task that took me close to two hours) after catching me sampling the pudding while I waited on a customer at the deli counter.
I couldn’t resist stopping in front of the butcher shop on my way to the spot I’d picked out three-quarters of a mile away to set up my stand. As Joe, Vinny, and Joe’s nephew, Patsy, came out to see the new stand, I was gloating over the fact that I was now just as independent in business as they were. Nobody could make me clean out the rotten chicken tank anymore. Nobody could send me five miles away on the delivery bike in the snow to deliver ribs to a rich finicky lady who would just send them back to be trimmed, and never tipped more than a quarter. Nobody could make me lay in the sawdust and dig ground-up bones, blood, and fat out of the meat band saw. And, most importantly, nobody could do all this while poking fun at what a jerk I was to get all the dirty jobs. I was only fourteen years old, and the wheels would fall off my homemade hot dog stand many times before that summer ended, but that day, in my mind, I was as rich as a Rockefeller.
