Now, wait a minute, I thought. This guy is serious. He’s been in Congress for twelve years. He’s met with presidents and prime ministers. Now he’s telling me a little eight-by-ten closet I showed him with some modems we reprogrammed to circumvent foreign phone companies is changing the world? This guy really is some politician.

As we talked for hours that day, though, I became completely taken with Jim’s sincerity and idealism. He’d gone into politics because he believed in liberty and free enterprise. Much of political life, though, he found was just posturing and political gamesmanship. The real people who changed the world, he’d come to feel, were the free enterprise visionaries who made things happen. His only role was to protect them and the country from forces who wanted to limit freedom. Frankly, he said, he thought what I was doing was much more significant than being in politics. Wow, I thought. Up till that moment I’d gladly have traded all my businesses to be in Congress. Yet Jim had a point.

I wondered if he really was so enthusiastic or if it was just talk.

“Would you like to invest?” I asked.

“Boy, if you’d let me, I’d scrape up every penny I could.”

Jim bought 1 percent of the company. I really didn’t want to sell it to him. I didn’t know how long we’d last. Rich real estate guys with a hundred million or more, sure, I’d take their money. But Jim Courter, how could I do this to him? Jim wasn’t a rich guy. He drove a weather-beaten Oldsmobile. The next week three-quarters of the money arrived with a note that he’d send the rest when he got his tax refund. Poor Jim, I thought. This is like robbing an overidealistic orphan.

“Take the money back,” I suggested. “This is way too risky.”

“Don’t worry. I have complete faith in you,” he countered. “If this doesn’t work out, I have no problems taking the loss.”

“Fine,” I relented. “But at least don’t send the last twenty-five percent. Let me take it in legal services from you.”

So far he’s made better than 1,000 percent return on the money he gave up. I, however, earned far more on the 25 percent I didn’t take. Jim became not only an investor and our lawyer, but our protector, counselor, and advisor in every major deal or crisis we subsequently had to handle. Whatever the situation, once I’d call Jim, things would improve. Not only things, but my mood as well. Of all the people I’d talk to in business, it was soon clear to me that the one I enjoyed talking to and being with the most was Jim. In spite of the vast difference in our backgrounds, ages, and experience, we were kindred spirits.