Though we got many nibbles from the giants, it soon became clear that our deal was too small for them and the talks they were having with us were more to facilitate future business dealings than to help us now when we needed it. On the other hand, we were already too large for the third-tier players and going with one of them would just discredit us in the eyes of the financial community. I did think, however, that it might be prudent to take one of these smaller firms on to our team. We were running out of money and couldn’t afford to have our offering delayed. From what I was hearing, it was not uncommon for the larger player to pull out of the deal at the first sign of trouble or even at the last minute. The firms who got pulled out on went from riches to rags overnight. Often, all their activities were so geared toward a successful Initial Public Offering (IPO) that when it didn’t go off on schedule, they actually went bankrupt. A smaller firm, I reasoned, to whom the fees from such an IPO would be a fortune and whose industry position would be much enhanced by pulling it off, would be almost sure to take the IPO all the way. They might not raise as much money, but they’d raise some. Taking on one of them would be like applying to a safe school (one you know you’ll get into) when submitting college applications.

The small firm I selected as our “safe firm” was First Albany. They’d done some slightly smaller deals on their own. They’d been “on the covers” with the larger guys before. Their research was top-notch. And most importantly, their lead banker, Charley Manuel, was dying to do the deal. I really liked Charley. He was the kind of guy I just knew I could trust.

Traditionally three underwriters take a small promising company public. Since I’d already selected First Albany as our “insurance policy,” this left room to select only two of the five boutique firms. We met an analyst at Alex Brown and knew right away that we wouldn’t work well together. We agreed on nothing from a business perspective, and I, who have always felt the analyst is more important than the bankers, wanted nothing more to do with him.

We all fell in love (in a professional sense) with Maria Lewis, the senior analyst at Cowen. Thousands of analysts across America are ranked every year by their colleagues and the twenty or so best are featured as the All-American analysts by Institutional Investor magazine. These are the people whose opinions move markets, the ones whose say-so is enough to make investment managers invest. Maria has been an All-American several years running. She could work at whatever giant firm she wanted and be paid almost any amount. But she liked being a partner at Cowen. Not only that, she loved us, our style, our business plan, and she loved how we were executing it.

Wow! If we could have her, we thought, our problems would be over. Everyone would buy our stock with her as the analyst.

We were therefore thrilled when Maria invited me to speak about IDT at Cowen’s technology conference in Boston. My speech at the conference went well and that night we were invited to a small private reception to be held at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum.