That was it. You could grow up four kids to a room and still turn out like Geoff. As my wife’s friend Sandy says, geese grow fat in a small barn. But how would it be to grow up in a big house with a dad who’d lost everything because he didn’t have the courage to stand behind his own life’s great undertaking? What kind of father would set an example like that?

I told my wife to forget about moving, just as she found a house she was in love with. It had more bedrooms for the kids and a large dining room for company. It had a perfect yard for playing ball with the kids and a little terrace just off the master bedroom where we could sit and have coffee in the mornings. Frankly, I was in love with it too. But now wasn’t the time for a dream house. Now was the time to prepare for the worst.

“I don’t think we can afford it,” I told Debbie.

Can’t afford it? Was I kidding? She must have thought so. This was, after all, no mansion, just a nice house for a large family.

“Look,” she said, “I’d gladly live in a one-bedroom apartment if we had to. But are you sure we can’t afford it, or is your paranoid, worrying side just getting the better of you?”

“Debs,” I told her, “if I don’t put my own money into IDT, it’s going under. I don’t know what to do. Deep down inside, I’m not a hundred percent sure if I can turn this thing around or not.”

“Of course you can,” she told me. “Thank G-d we have money to put in. This old house has so many good memories, and the best neighbors in the world.” So for the time being we stayed put.

So here we were, a multimillion-dollar company, trading on the NASDAQ big board, with agents in over a hundred countries, developers of the most advanced Internet telephony software in the world, with well over $100 million in annual sales. And we were being kept alive with money I’d earned delivering brochures to hotels in the middle of the night with an old Chevy station wagon. If I had a deep-seated psychological need to reject everything about Harvard, some deep craving to be independent and make it on my own, without any help from the normal institutional interests that companies depend on, that need was more than satisfied.

We were swimming across the ocean with the flimsiest of life preservers and the sharks were circling. Getting on some financial institution’s boat seemed mighty attractive now that we were on our own. There was no boat in sight, though, and so our only option was to hope that our plan had pointed us in the right direction, and to stroke like mad.

Surprisingly, the plan worked, and land came into sight much sooner than I’d expected. In fact, we seemed to swim right into some sort of tropical paradise with gold in the streets, way ahead of schedule. The luck that the twins brought could finally be seen.