Howard Jonas seemingly was born with the contrary spirit of a successful entrepreneur. At Harvard, when Oxfam organized a one-meal fast so that the university could donate $2.37 a student to combat hunger worldwide, Mr. Jonas noted that he was already giving thousands of dollars a year to charity and said that he'd gladly pay an extra $2.37 so he could eat dinner. He sat in the huge dining hall and, all alone, ate his meal.

But Mr. Jonas' On a Roll shows that opportunities are out there for everybody in a fast-changing world-technical and nontechnical alike-as long as people are willing to take a few stumbles along the way. The book also shows how an upstart, despite frequent problems and obvious weaknesses, can take a lot of the profit out of even an established, capital-intensive business like telecommunications.

I never intended to get into the international telephone business. I wound up in it by accident because I was cheap and I was desperate.

My desperation sprang from the fact that Marc Knoller, my right hand [in the directory business], informed me that he intended to move his family to Israel. I was in a panic. He was irreplaceable. Without him, I'd be back to running a marginal publishing business. I was on the horns of a dilemma, however. He didn't want to leave for a better opportunity. He wanted to move for reasons of religious principle. I didn't think it would be right to try to make him stay against his conscience. I also didn't think it would be productive.

On the other hand, without Marc there was no magic. So I proposed the only deal I could. Marc could open his own office in Israel or nearby Italy and continue his sales efforts from there. After all, about half of our advertising in the directories came from overseas anyway. So what did it really matter if the sales were done from Europe or America? Previously, we'd sold about half our ads to Europeans from America. Now we'd sell half our ads to Americans from Europe.

Marc thought it was a great idea. With the much lower living costs in Israel, he'd be almost rich on his American pay. The time zone problem didn't matter, because Marc normally worked till past midnight. When Marc took a vacation in 1989, we decided to test how doing sales from Israel would work. It worked great. In fact, with Marc not having to deal with administrative work back in the States, his sales actually went up.

Everything seemed great until I saw my telephone bill. It was five times higher than it would have been had he made all the calls from the States. There is competition for long-distance service in the U.S., but overseas there were only state-owned monopolies. The differential was staggering, and it was going to come from my pocket. The lessons learned at the hot dog stand, such as not overpaying for supplies, were not forgotten. Either I had to solve this problem or give up on Marc's overseas expansion.

Why not bypass the European phone lines altogether? We could adapt the system I had used with my parents when I was in college. I'd call collect, using a code name, and they would refuse the charges. Then they'd call me back. Essentially, callback worked on the same principle. The European user would call a number in the States, and an operator would recognize his signal. Then the user would hang up, and within a few seconds he'd be "called back" with an open, American line over which to make his calls. Instead of paying for a call from France to New York, as an example, he would be using an American line, and his bill would reflect the cost of a call from New York to Paris instead. At first, this whole process was done manually, with operators placing the return call. Eventually, we mechanized the process. My phone bills were now manageable, and the callback industry had been born.

The lesson I learned from this is that if you look hard enough, you'll find a way to circumvent obstacles. In fact, sometimes you can do this so effectively, and get such a big advantage over your competition by doing so that it actually pays to go out looking for obstacles to circumvent.

About six months after inventing the callback system, I was on vacation with my family in Israel. I used the callback system many times myself in the presence of others. Almost everyone who saw this was amazed and told me they wished they could use my system to cut their own bills. Although I was flattered, I couldn't accommodate them, because I only had enough callback equipment for my own purposes.

Late one night, as I was driving past the Dead Sea to the vacation resort of Eilat, I had a stunning revelation: There were no limits! I was so excited I couldn't drive anymore. I stopped the car, jumped out, and woke up my best friend, Simon, and my wife, Debbie. "I've got it!" I told them. "We'll start an international phone company! We'll change telecommunications forever!" What did they think? My wife said it sounded like a good idea. Simon nodded his approval. "We're going to be bigger than AT&T," I shouted. "We're going to be rich!"

"That's great," my wife said, but could I please get back in the car and keep driving before the kids woke up? I did, but I was still on fire. Within days I had, via telephone, redeployed Marc and half my office staff to start working on the details of setting up a phone company. It seemed like taking candy from a baby. I came back from Israel ready to take on the world.

Upon entering the highly capitalized telecommunications business, I continued my old policy. All our start-up product development sales and equipment acquisition expenses were paid for out of our publishing profits-although I'm a baby boomer, a large part of me has the values of someone who grew up in the Depression. Of course, the only equipment we needed in the beginning was one $500 callback device about the size of a pie box for each of our customers, and we didn't have too many customers.

To conserve money, our offices at that time were crowded into a small converted funeral parlor in the Bronx that we shared with my father's insurance brokerage. As there was absolutely no spare room in the office, when we finally got a couple of clients, we put their modems in the men's bathroom, sitting on top of the toilet bowl water tank. In those early days, whenever the callback rang, we would all race into the men's room to watch the little red lights that indicated the progress of the call. With each completed phone call we would all embrace, give each other high fives, and then leave the men's room.

By the time we had eight boxes and a half dozen phone business employees, however, three things became clear. First, we couldn't all fit into the men's room. Second, if we got any more clients, all the boxes would tip and fall in the toilet, destroying our business. (These days, my constant concern that everything could go down the toilet is more euphemistic in nature.) Finally, as the business grew, new boxes were going to cost a lot of money.

Sometimes, these far-fetched "visionary" ideas just don't work out in the real world. This began to look like one of those times.

[Despite succeeding in early attempts to raise financing, without giving up equity] I discovered tremendous resistance on the part of consumers to use a system that they perceived as cumbersome and time-consuming. Some Fortune 500 firms felt it was legally questionable to boot. People take telephones for granted. Of all the instant things in our society, the telephone is probably the most incredible, and the one we get most annoyed about when there's any glitch. To have to wait for a callback, or a dial tone, even if it only took nine seconds, was a tough thing to sell. Not only that, but since the people who could really benefit from this were all living and working in Europe, just reaching them to pitch the idea posed a problem. Setting up an international sales force proved to be virtually impossible. Whatever lessons about absentee management I hadn't fully absorbed from my years in Harvard were now driven home twice as hard, as sales managers in France and Spain ripped me off to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The idea of callback was brilliant; putting it into practice almost put us under.

A little more than one year after my "revelation" at the Dead Sea I was just about ready to quit the phone business. The year was 1991, and it had been a disaster. My staff was dispirited. This was pure folly.

We had miraculously secured a small exhibit space at Telecom '91, the grand international telecommunications show in Geneva. But I told my wife I wanted to quit and skip Geneva. She counseled me to go, because the fees we'd paid were nonrefundable and not going would have been throwing money away. "Go to Telecom for the fun of it," she said. Thus began six days that changed my life, and perhaps the international telecommunications business, forever.

Once every four years the international telecommunications industry-under the sponsorship of the UN-stages a grand industry conference and exhibition in Geneva called Telecom. Every one of the world's major telecommunications and computer companies sets up a huge exhibition at the convention center. Almost $1 billion is spent on this week-long extravaganza.

It was to this exhibition that Marc (the only person still working with me on the callback business) and I arrived with our homemade, four-foot folding exhibition booth in a suitcase, to push the product we no longer believed would transform the industry. On the Swissair flight, we discussed which publications he would be in charge of when we gave up the phone company upon our return.

Our exhibit area was placed in the Telecom equivalent of Siberia, miles from the main exhibit area, with other small American companies. While thousands thronged to the indoor fireworks and bands at the IBM, AT&T, and Alcatel booths, or lined up to receive free cameras from Canon, only a few lost or intrepid souls wandered to our area of the exhibit floor.

While big executives of the "important" companies were staying at luxury hotels and partying into the night, Marc and I had managed to secure an austere, empty, one-bedroom apartment that had been unexpectedly vacated. Unfortunately, the former tenant had flown the coop, stiffing not only the landlord but the telephone, gas, and electric companies, as well. While we were attending this futuristic telecom extravaganza, we were without basic phone service once we left our exhibit booth. Not only that, but we ate all our meals by candlelight, after we had heated them up on Sterno. After several nights of tuna fish and soup in a cup, Marc and I decided to go downtown to see how the other half lived.

If anything, what was going on at night was even more mind-boggling than the excesses we witnessed by day. Huge yachts, adorned with the names of their corporate sponsors, floated majestically on the lake, while tuxedoed men, and women in haute couture gowns, danced and laughed on the decks. Those guests of AT&T who decided to stroll along the lake in the moonlight before returning to the hotel were discreetly followed by an observer, who radioed to a waiting limo driver when he thought the opportune moment for taking the guests home had arrived.

At first, this all frightened me deeply. How could I ever hope to compete against people who could afford to spend money like this? Then I turned it around. How could companies that wasted money for their own self-aggrandizement ever hope to compete against me?

I had an idea. I put on my IDT baseball cap and told Marc I intended to join the lovely women giving out literature to visitors arriving at the exhibition hall. Marc was skeptical. "You're ugly," he said. "Well," I replied, "there's only two of us here, and you're not any better looking."

It wasn't my looks, however, that landed me in hot water. It was a gentleman at France Telecom, who pointed me out to the huge Swiss policeman who stood at attention by the entranceway. A moment later, I was surrounded by gendarmes, who informed me that it was illegal to distribute literature at the entrance to the exhibit hall. But, I pointed out, everybody here is doing the same thing. The others, I was informed, were handing out literature for approved companies, while I was from an outlaw, impudent organization and didn't belong in the exhibit hall. My exhibitor badge was confiscated, and two huge gendarmes grabbed my arms, carried me down the escalator, and deposited me outside the exhibit hall.

I was really stuck now. I couldn't even get back to my own booth. No matter what exhibit door I tried to come in, a polite but implacable huge policeman refused me entry. I was desperate. As I walked in circles outside the convention center, I suddenly had another idea-the press door! Using my American publishing credentials, I secured entry to the press room. Here, business journalists from around the world were drinking coffee and tapping out their stories on courtesy computer terminals.

This, I realized, was not such a bad place to be. I immediately started stuffing my literature into the pigeonholes that were set up so big companies could distribute press releases to the reporters. When I finished that, I attempted to reenter the exhibit floor through the press corridor. It is no wonder that no invader has penetrated Swiss territory for hundreds of years. The moment I left the press room, I was spotted, and a phalanx of gendarmes ran to apprehend me. I ran back into the press room with the guards in pursuit. Just as they were about to grab me, I began shouting to the assembled journalists: "They're trying to get me. They're trying to shut me up. They want to squelch international telephone competition. No matter what they do to me, you've got to get the story out." I threw all my remaining literature up in the air, confetti-like, to the reporters as I was ejected once again, this time much more roughly, from the exhibit hall.

Back in the press room, the reporters were apparently electrified. This sort of thing may be commonplace for reporters covering wars, freedom fighters, or international terrorism, but it doesn't happen too often at business conventions. Here was a chance for the reporters who had the boring bad luck to be there to be real reporters, not just to regurgitate press releases. The effect was immediate and seismic.

Reporters descended on Marc back in our booth demanding to know how we had broken the high international telephone rate monopoly. Others demanded to know the nature of the conspiracy against us. Some actually filed their stories from our booth using our callback system.

Two days later, we were the cover story in the Telecom show's daily paper. I was readmitted to the exhibition and returned as a sort of hero. Thousands of peopled flocked to our booth. Within days, we had sold more service than we ever dared imagine and had lined up distributors around the world.

Shortly after Geneva, the New York Times ran a front-page story in their business section describing how our little company was cutting international telephone rates by more than 50% worldwide. Time, Newsweek, Forbes, Business Week, Der Spiegel, the Economist, the London Times, and The Wall Street Journal soon jumped on the story. Suddenly, telecommunications directors from the Fortune 500 were calling us back saying they had reconsidered and wanted to use our service. Firms from around the world did the same.

Suddenly we were in the telecommunications business-big-time!

After establishing the callback business, Mr. Jonas made a mess of an attempt to provide access to the Internet, then ran short of cash. But he scaled back his expansion plans in time to stave off insolvency and, by now a public company, became solidly profitable again. By experimenting with the Internet early on, he also learned about its possibilities for carrying telephone calls. He now sells a device, called Net2Phone, that lets users transmit their voice calls over the Internet. Critics say the voice quality is nearly as good as that for regular voice traffic-removing a common complaint about Internet telephony. And the cost advantages are great enough that Mr. Jonas and similar companies are again pressuring more-established competitors.

From On a Roll: From Hot Dog Buns to High-Tech Billions by Howard Jonas. Copyright Howard Jonas, 1998. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.