I was really on that day. I told the crowd how thrilled I was to actually have come in the front door of the Waldorf as an honored guest after so many years of coming in the rear door to deliver brochures. Then I launched into probably the best presentation of the IDT story I ever gave. People laughed at the jokes. They gasped at the charts. They sat riveted during the stories. I was really on. I mean, how couldn’t I be? My wife, my mother, my father—everybody I knew was there that day. This was our luncheon, and the room was packed with New York’s financial elite.

Partway through the speech the crowd started nodding and smiling, the way people do when they’re really with you. Soon they were starting to whisper to the Cowen brokers in the room, and the Cowen brokers were taking out their pads and writing. And then they were smiling too and giving the thumbs-up. They were getting orders and the presentation wasn’t even over yet. No one had ever seen anything like this! It was as if the financial presentation had turned into a revival meeting.

I was so happy. I was so grateful Cowen had really done it for me. My speech was just about finished, and suddenly I felt I had to say something else. I just had to.

I told people it wasn’t just us who had come so far. We couldn’t have done it without our underwriters. I told them about the coffee cup, about Maria, about Joe. I said, “A lot of guys get big, and they forget about who made them. They leave the H&Qs and Cowens of the world and go to the Morgans and Merrills—the M&M guys. Well, not us. We’re different. We’re gonna become as big as AT&T someday, but we won’t forget who brought us here. Someday we’ll be back making a presentation to thousands of you, I hope in the Grand Ballroom, just like AT&T. But unlike the other guys, we won’t be one of the M&M-size club. They can be part of the deal, of course. But only if Cowen is our lead.”

At that moment, I looked over at Joe, afraid he might be crying. He wasn’t. He was beaming from ear to ear. No one, people told me, had ever, ever said anything like this about an underwriter on a Road Show. “Well, I meant it,” I said later. “I’m glad I put it on record.”

I was also glad a few weeks later when Cowen sent us a check for the $40 million they’d raised in the IPO. With this money we’d really be able to grow. AT&T was gonna have a real competitor now, one with money.

By late 1996, six months after going public, our company was really on fire and the stock started to skyrocket. It was unbelievable enough to me that, after going public, I was personally worth over $100 million on paper. Soon I’d be Rockefeller. This was unbelievable!

We were, of course, still losing money, as we’d been doing for six months in order to achieve a growth rate that would satisfy the underwriters and investors, but what did it matter? We’d abandoned every rule my grandmother ever taught me. Wall Street had told us not to worry about the bottom line. We were a big-time corporation now, playing in the major leagues, not running a hot dog stand where you could calculate how much you made on every dog and soda sold at the end of the day. The trick was to keep growing at all costs. We were rapidly working our way through our $40 million nest egg, growing wildly, out of control. The nation’s largest stock underwriters were lining up to do a secondary and raise us “some real money.” (I’m talking nine figures.) Then, all of a sudden, it crashed. Every underwriter abandoned us, and it seemed we were finished.