The one day a strange thing happened. Someone took us into the club. A friend of mine, who had formerly worked at Skadden Arps, one of the world’s most prestigious law firms, suggested that if we were going public, I should consider engaging Ira Greenstein, a senior securities lawyer with the firm, as my attorney. I called Ira on the phone. Something clicked, and he agreed to come out and visit us in New Jersey.

He came out to visit, and it was love at first sight. Here was the lawyer I’d been looking for all my life. In one of his previous assignments, Skadden had lent him out to Tower Airlines to serve as their general counsel. The year of actually working in a hangar at Kennedy Airport had apparently removed any of the uppitiness you’d expect to find in a big corporate attorney. He was prepared for our stripped-down blue jeans style of doing business. When I told him we couldn’t possibly afford to pay Skadden Arps’ bills, he told me not to worry, he’d see that we could manage it, and we could pay when we had the money. Like I said, Ira was the miracle we were waiting for.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what clicked between us. My late father-in-law, Irv Yatzkan, used to say, “When the rocks in his head fit the holes in hers, it’s a perfect match.” Perhaps that is as good an explanation as any. All I know is that as a business we owe everything to Ira. We simply couldn’t have gone on without going public, and we couldn’t have gone public without him.

It wasn’t so much that Skadden did our legal work. It was that they became our ambassadors. They went back to every firm on Wall Street and told them they wanted them to meet with us about taking IDT public. Skadden told these underwriters that IDT was a great firm and Skadden wanted them taken public. Skadden Arps does the securities work for many of the nation’s largest firms. As such, they are in a position to direct billions of dollars worth of business to those securities firms whom they favor. The firms know this. Skadden is definitely a member of the club. Anyone who Skadden wants in will get more than a fair hearing.

All of a sudden, prestigious underwriters started to show interest and send out teams to see us. They started bringing custom-printed booklets explaining why IDT should consider using them.

In the investment banking business, at least as far as high tech is concerned, there are basically three tiers of firms. The first tier consists of the dozen or so giants led by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch, who specialize in handling the investments and banking needs of Fortune 500 firms and government.

The second tier are the five large high-tech “boutique” firms—Cowen, Alex Brown, Robertson Stevens, Hambrecht & Quist, and Montgomery—who specialize in taking promising smaller firms public and helping them grow. Then there is the third tier—the hundreds of smaller, less specialized or regional firms who would also like to get a piece of the action.