Soon we started getting invited to big investor conferences again. The bankers and analysts started to visit again. Everyone was willing to do business. There was just one problem. Nobody wanted our stock anymore.

Wall Street, you see, is like a romance. Full of mystery, hope, anticipation. New stocks are like meeting a new and pretty girl. You think maybe this is the one. Oh, for sure this is the one. You just know it. She may not love you or be earning money just yet, but look at those prospects. Other fellows can tell too. They’re all swarming around taking positions. Better not get left on the floor. Better buy some and ask her for a dance now.

On the other hand, what about the girl who has been around the block, after she’s tired and worn out, when none of the guys even want to ask her to dance anymore—when her stock has lost most of its value and the only place it seems to be going is further downhill? Well, who wants to get involved with her then? Not Wall Street, that’s for sure.

This was where we were now. The blush was off the rose. Our once-rising stock price had sagged below the IPO level and was still falling. All Internet-related stocks had collapsed. Some small telephone companies like us were still doing okay in the market but with our banker out of the picture for so long, the market decided to take the worst view of things and see us as another failed Internet company. We were losing money, running out of cash, had no backing. What a mistake our original buyers had made to buy into us. The stock would probably fall further, but they had no one to sell it to.

We’d won the battle but lost the war. Now that the bankers had finally ended the blacklisting, nobody wanted anything to do with us again. Again came the hated suggestion: Sell the company, if you can still find anyone to buy it. Sell the company. Take whatever you can get. In another month you’ll be broke anyway.

I’d sooner have cut off my arm. I didn’t spend twenty years working up from delivering brochures to running a public company to give up now. Because a bunch of jerks on Wall Street were running scared? Why the hell had I ever gotten involved with Wall Street to begin with?

I had never run a business that consciously and willingly lost money before I met the Wall Street crowd. That was their stupid idea, grow and lose money and you’ll be worth even more. Just come back to us for a money fix every now and then, and if we still find you attractive, we’ll give it to you. This wasn’t business, it was dependence. The same kind of dependence that a drug peddler or pimp feeds on.

Why didn’t I just listen to my grandmother and stay away from these guys? They’d turned the whole world upside down. Being a public company was walking the high ground, being respectable. Earning a profit and growing rationally was like being in the gutter. But now where were we? We’d walked the high ground and we were about to go broke because we couldn’t fund the losses the Wall Street business plans called for. Now it looked like we were going to wind up in the gutter anyway.