“Yes, it’s terrible,” we told them. “Yes, management is cutting their own salaries and sharing the pain. Yes, if Wall Street hadn’t abandoned us we would surely have been able, over time, to grow our way to profitability.”

But we had to face facts. The only way to save the company and everyone’s jobs was to become profitable now. The cuts guaranteed this would happen. The next few months would be rough, but in the end we’d all be better and more secure for it. We weren’t a dying company. We were a growing one—one of the fastest-growing in the world, in one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. The pains we were experiencing weren’t the pain of death, they were growing pains. Achieving profitability would be like growing up. It would set us apart from everyone else and really open up every possibility for us.

Then watch out! The sky would be the limit and everyone would go further than they ever dreamed. If we met this challenge, we could do anything!

To my surprise, most people were ecstatic. They’d come here to share a dream, and our fiscal crisis had made everyone wary that the dream was going down the drain. No one really wanted to leave for an ordinary company and just give up, but no one saw how we were going to get out of this either. It turned out everyone had been depressed for months following our stock’s seemingly moment-by-moment continual fall on their computers. Now suddenly there was hope. People were gung-ho like never before. They were going to show the market. Matters were in our hands now. We’d prove the market wrong.

Not before the market gave us one more good kick in the head, though. When, as required, we released the news of the layoffs and the cessation of Internet advertising, the stock collapsed entirely, settling at 4. At this price, all but the most contrarian were obviously just waiting for the bankruptcy. My paper wealth, once close to $200 million, had dropped below $50 million. I’d lost over $100 million in less than a year. I couldn’t even protect my family by selling some stock to make a larger nest egg. If I’d sold, the stock would have collapsed entirely. Wow! Even more significant, new potential lenders who’d been attracted to us by the lure of undervalued warrants that might appreciate, thus giving them a windfall, now lost interest. This stock, they reasoned, was headed for the toilet bowl. Our last source of financing had dried up. Every financial maneuver I was able to pull off still wouldn’t leave us enough cash for the turnaround. Investors who used to want to give me money now ran like I had the plague. It was as if someone had hung a big sign with the stock price and the word loser around my neck. Those who bought because they’d previously thought highly of me now had only losses to show for it. My staff also complained that whereas once friends treated them with awe as an IDT employee, they were now almost laughed at.

What a world! If Wall Street, the banks, investors, and even friends wanted nothing to do with us, where would the money come from? I had no place left to look but the mirror. It was time to put up or shut up. I put up.

When I was at Harvard, I did an extensive research project on the Mitsui Company, one of the seven giant firms that control the Japanese economy. What impressed me was not the billions in sales or their banks, shipping firms, or manufacturing operations, not their millions of dependents or hundreds of subsidiaries. What impressed me was their origins. Centuries ago, the original Mitsuis opened a small bar near Edo, now Tokyo. Travelers would stop there and not only drink sake but sometimes take a loan or change currency. Thanks to the profits from these transactions, the owners of the bar were able to put some money aside as savings, burying their silver coinage deep beneath the bar’s earthen floor. In time, they expanded to banking, then other businesses. But still they ran the bar and still each generation continued to make some just-in-case deposits beneath the floor of the original bar.