It wasn’t the public, but the big players in the communications industry that really wound up driving our sales, though. Tightening credit on the bad risks along with more international deals and network build-out allowed us to really cut our prices. Suddenly no one could offer reliable international phone service with rates anywhere close to ours. We figured the big guys would never buy from us anyway and would keep directing their business to more established, “respectable” members of the club, not to street fighters like us. When we said good-bye to Wall Street and all the fancy trimmings, we figured we were saying good-bye to this end of the industry as well.

Boy, were we wrong. The big guys came running for our rate like bees to honey (or flies to you know what). Turns out they didn’t give a damn about respectability. They could get all the respectability they wanted dealing with each other. What they wanted in a little company wasn’t fancy offices. What they wanted was lean, mean, and competitive—some way to increase the bottom lines—new technology, different types of distribution, lower rates, especially lower rates.

Our giant former nemesis started buying time from us, the way a team of cowboys in from months on the cattle drive order beer. All the capacity in the world didn’t seem like enough for them. Suddenly, we were ordering the million-dollar switches, not to ward off middle age but because we needed every ounce of horsepower. By the summer of ’97, we, who had once only dreamed of handling a million minutes of international traffic a month, were handling far more than a million a day and scrambling to keep up with demand as more of the giants jumped on board. And best of all, we didn’t have to deal with bags of cash anymore. These guys were all worth billions and they all paid their bills. That was a welcome change from the gutter.

Once we’d tasted doing business with the big guys, we couldn’t get enough of it. I flew to Denver to meet with John Malone. Malone, I figured, was my kind of guy. He was nuts about his wife and kids, going away for at least a solid month with them, just like I did. He was a fanatic about running his company his way, single-handedly. He was determined to hold voting control of TCI, the nation’s largest cable operator with over twenty million households, in his own hands, much as I did with IDT. Like me, he was a vocal libertarian. And he was also known as a visionary. I thought he’d probably click with me and I could sell him some small service and start a relationship.

Boy, was I wrong! He wound up wanting to buy everything IDT had to offer, including some services I hadn’t even thought of myself. The guy was brilliant. He spent the whole day with me, called in all his top lieutenants, and told them he wanted to move on this now. I couldn’t believe it. Here I was with the most powerful communications magnate in the world, the legendary John Malone, second as a businessman only to Bill Gates in power, and he was rushing to do business with me before he lost the opportunity. This had to be some kind of dream.

When I returned to work and told everybody what had happened, they thought I was kidding, hallucinating, or just exaggerating. Like the poor classmates of a character named Yankee Irving in a bedtime story for my kid, they thought I was nuts. In the story, Yankee Irving made a spectacular catch of a foul ball hit into the stands. Hours later, in the twentieth inning of an extra-inning game, one of the last nine Yankee players eligible to play is hit by a pitch. Unfairly, the umpire tells the Yanks with only eight guys left they have to forfeit.