The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions

by Gurbaksh Chahal

  I don’t mean to be immodest here, but that didn’t seem like an unreasonable number. Other companies that had no business being in business, and were in fact slated for the slag heap of dot-com history, had been evaluated at much higher prices, so this was actually a reasonable number. I was being valued on performance, results, and revenue, unlike some of those other companies, which were still talking about their potential. My fundamentals were real. I was running an actual business.

  A few weeks later, the investment banker arranged for me to fly to New York to meet with the brass at DoubleClick, the company that had initially sparked my interest in this whole crazy business. I was a little nervous, understandably, but on my way to the meeting I kept telling myself to be fearless. That’s key in any business situation. If you show fear, they sense weakness, and that can be deadly. You must always negotiate from a position of strength. They want me, I kept telling myself. They need me.

  When I arrived, I was in total awe of their offices. They had sleek, high-end furnishings, magnificent views of the Hudson River, and a basketball court on the roof. It was an incredibly posh environment, the exact opposite of our offices in San Jose, and this only added to my tension. Still, the meeting went very well. None of them seemed fazed by either my youth or my appearance, and they listened attentively when it was my turn to speak. I described my performance-based model, talked about the speed at which the company was growing and about our profitability, and when I left their swank offices I felt as if I had definitely piqued their interest.

  By the time I got back to San Jose, though, it was clear that DoubleClick was not going to be buying Click Agents, but they did arrange for us to meet with Value Click, another big player. I flew down to Los Angeles and took a cab to the ValueClick offices in West Lake Village—I was too young to rent a car—where I met with Jim Zarley, the CEO, and a couple of other executives, including Sam Paisley. The conversation was a little awkward, mostly because I needed to protect my company’s ideas, and I was careful not to reveal too much about our business model. Still, I knew what they wanted to hear, and I wasn’t shy about discussing the bottom line: Click Agents was a hugely profitable company, and it was continuing to grow at a robust pace.

  But I didn’t have to say much beyond that. In the middle of our guarded conversation, I got the distinct impression that they had already made up their minds. They needed us—we were taking away market share—and they were eventually going to buy us. Maybe not that day, or the day after that, or even in the next month or two, but I was confident it would happen before long.

  The experience taught me another lesson: Don’t tell people what they ask you, tell them what they need to hear to fall in love with you.

  On my way out of the office, I overheard a few whispered comments about the turban, and I found it more than a little disturbing. These people were either bigoted or plain stupid. The turban is a religious symbol, no different from a gold crucifix or a yarmulke, and I thought the behavior of those few employees was both childish and disrespectful.

  On the flight home, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I was still thinking about it long after I’d landed. Up until that point, I had been a disembodied voice, communicating on the phone or via e-mail, hidden away in my office. But my company was evolving, and it was time to show my face to the world. I needed to be comfortable with my appearance.

  Two weeks later, I found out that DoubleClick had decided to invest in ValueClick, not in Click Agents, which was not totally unexpected. In March, with the Nasdaq at over 5000 and close to peaking, ValueClick came out with an initial public offering (IPO). It sold for $18 a share, becoming one of the last companies to go public before the dot-com bust. The price quickly shot up to $24, but it began to sink almost immediately, and it dropped all the way to $7. At that point, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I heard from ValueClick again. The company would be looking for an investment to boost its value, and we were just the ticket. Click Agents was still going strong and still making serious money.

  As I waited for that to happen, I remembered that first meeting with ValueClick, and I went to see my sister, Kamal. She was in her office, working away.

  “I need you to do me a favor,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Go with me to get my hair cut.”

  “What? Are you crazy? Dad is going to kill you!”

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  We got into my Lexus and drove to Supercuts. When we walked inside, everyone turned to stare. A guy with a turban getting a haircut. How weird is that? Suddenly I was afraid to my very core. Maybe my father would never forgive me.

  I could feel my heart beating like crazy.

  “You all right?” my sister asked.

  “No,” I said. “But my mind’s made up.”

  When it was my turn, I sat in the chair, removed my turban, and let seventeen years’ worth of hair fall to my shoulders. “Cut it,” I said.

  “All of it?”

  “Well, no. Just, you know—I want a regular haircut, like a regular person.”

  In less than an hour, it was gone. I looked in the mirror and hardly recognized myself, but I liked what I saw.

  Kamal and I got back into the Lexus and made our way back to the office. “You look so different,” Kamal said.

  I took my eyes off the road and found her staring at me. “Different good or different bad?” I asked.

  “Neither. Just different. It’s going to take me a while to get used to it.”

  “I like it,” I said. “Maybe people will actually stop staring when I walk into a room.”

  “Maybe,” she said, “but you better brace yourself for Mom and Dad.”

  “I don’t know why they’re going to be upset,” I said. “I’m still me. I love my family, I love my culture, and I love my religion. The only thing that has changed is my physical appearance, and I don’t need to be defined through the way I look.”

  “Well, if I were you, I’d still brace myself,” she said.

  When I walked into the office, I got a lot of strange looks from the employees, but they said nothing, and they got used to it pretty quickly. What choice did they have? I was the boss.

  Out in the street, the change was instant. Without the turban, people no longer noticed me, and I loved it. I could walk into Starbucks, stop for a magazine, pump gas, and I was just like everybody else. It felt great.

  Deep down inside, though, I was still the same guy. I was still a proud Sikh through and through. In removing the turban, I wasn’t less of a Sikh and I wasn’t disavowing my religion. And in fact I didn’t believe that in cutting my hair I would be somehow offending God. With or without the turban, I was a man of faith. I knew that without faith nothing was possible and that with faith nothing was impossible.

  At the end of the day, issues of faith notwithstanding, I still had to face my parents, and when I walked through the front door of the house my heart started again beating like crazy. My mother was the first to see me, and her mouth dropped open in shock. She was so horrified that she couldn’t speak. She turned away and walked out of the room, supporting herself against the walls. “Just wait until your father gets home,” she said weakly.

  I waited, growing increasingly nervous. Months earlier, when the idea of getting rid of the turban first began to percolate, I had thought about asking for his blessing, but I knew that it was never going to happen. And if I had gone ahead and done it at that point, against his stated wishes, it would have been much worse. Still, this was bad enough, and I was bracing myself for a real firestorm when he came home.

  The moment he walked through the front door, he delivered on my expectations. “I cannot believe you did this!” he said, shouting. “You disrespect your family, and, worse, you disrespect your religion.”

  “It has nothing to do with respect or with religion,” I said.

  “I came to this country to make a new life, but I never lost my faith!” he continued, drowning me out. �
��You are a coward! You are a huge disappointment to me! I will remember this day as one of the most disappointing days of my life!”

  It was all I could do not to burst into tears, but the Chahal men seldom express emotion. It hurt, though, to have disappointed my father. As every child knows, letting your parents down can be painful. At the end of the day, though, even in that tough, emotional state, I knew I had made the right decision. Life is about choices, and you can’t make everyone happy, so at some point you have to learn to live for yourself. This applies in business situations too, by the way. When you make decisions, it’s fine to listen to the people around you, but the final decisions need to be yours. If you can’t trust yourself to make decisions, you’ll never succeed. And if you make the wrong decision from time to time, don’t sweat it—you won’t make the same mistake again.

  For weeks and months afterward, I would look up to find my parents staring at me as if I were a stranger. And in some ways I was a stranger. My father had come to America to live out his dream, only to find that his son had dreams of his own.

  For a period, I avoided my parents and they avoided me. I found myself spending more time with my grandmother, who was in declining health. She was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and there were days when it was impossible for her to connect the dots. Sometimes she didn’t know who I was. I would sit with her, holding her hands in mine, and patiently answer her questions.

  “What are you doing for work?” she would ask again.

  “I have a company that makes a lot of money, and I think I’m going to be selling it for millions of dollars,” I said. “We’re going to be rich. Good things are in store for the whole family. What do you think of that? Your grandson is a big success.”

  “Success? Success is to be married with three children. That is success.”

  I’m sure she believed that, but it would have been nice if she’d been clear-headed enough to be happy for me. Half the time she confused me with my brother, who was not married either. And she was fixated on this marriage business. Two or three times a week she’d ask me why I wasn’t married, and wondered what I was waiting for. “You are not a young man anymore,” she would say.

  “I’m seventeen,” I protested, laughing.

  “Seventeen is not young,” she replied.

  In late summer, shortly after I turned eighteen—and several months after ValueClick went public—I got the call I’d been expecting. “We want to take our discussions to the next level,” Jim Zarley said.

  I called a meeting to discuss this with key people on my staff, many of whom were heavily vested in the company. I had received a merger call, I told them, and it sounded serious, so I needed to make sure that everything was running smoothly. “If we are going to do this, we need to make sure all our ducks are in order. Are we collecting on time? Are we exceeding our sales forecast? Are we getting the best rates from our publishers? I need you guys to make sure everything is running perfectly, because for the next few weeks I’m going to be focused on the deal, and I won’t be around to look over your shoulders. Nothing has changed, okay? I need you guys to keep doing your jobs, only I need you to do them better than ever.”

  On November 1, 2000, ValueClick agreed to buy Click Agents in a $40 million all-stock merger. We would be getting 5.3 million shares based on a $7.50 per share price. As part of the deal, we would all go to work for ValueClick, and I would sign a three-year noncompete agreement. This agreement meant I couldn’t do anything remotely connected to Web advertising for another three years, until I was twenty-one, but that didn’t bother me at all. I was about to become a very rich eighteen-year-old.

  To the casual observer, it might have seemed that success came too easily and too quickly, but I don’t think that’s the case. The sale of Click Agents had nothing to do with mindless Internet euphoria. It was bought based on real metrics. I was profitable. I was making money. I was growing. So it wasn’t about luck or timing, it was about having real assets—assets somebody wanted. And that didn’t happen by accident. I did what I thought I had to do to succeed: I tried to build a great company that was in it for the long term, and I did it by making sure the foundations were solid. If you have an idea for a company, that’s just the beginning—that’s your entry point. What really matters is execution. Don’t think about the millions you’re going to make; think instead about creating a company that will be worth millions. It sounds like I’m splitting hairs, but I’m not: The difference is huge. Success is largely about substance. If your company is about real, tangible assets, and you’re looking at the long term (not the quick hit), you are going be handsomely rewarded for it.

  Don’t chase the money. Chase substance. If you have substance, the money will follow.

  The day after the deal closed, I celebrated with my family. We went to the local gurdwara and thanked God for this great blessing. A Sikh priest led the prayers, and he noted that my father’s dreams of a new life in America had indeed come true. “Perhaps not in the way he envisioned them, but they have come to pass nonetheless,” he said.

  Then we went back to the house and had dinner, overwhelmed by our good fortune, but it wasn’t until I woke up the next morning that it actually hit me: I was a millionaire many times over.

  Of course, I was only a millionaire on paper. It’s not as if the cash was sitting in the bank, waiting for me. In fact, I had to protect it. I had to report for work that morning and in mornings to come with one goal and one goal only: to increase the value of my stock—not only for myself, but for every shareholder in the company.

  In December, a month after the deal closed, we moved into new offices in Fremont. A couple of months earlier, just before our one-year lease had come up for renewal, the landlord informed us that there were dozens of dot-com companies looking for office space and that he intended to triple our rent. I thought this was outrageous, and I didn’t think I needed to be in the heart of San Jose, so my brother and I looked elsewhere and found that space in Fremont. The price was right, and there was a bonus. Parts of the city were predominantly Indian, so we knew we’d always eat well.

  The Click Agents team at the company Christmas party in 2000 (Gurbaksh in front).

  Every eight or nine days, however, I had to fly south to Los Angeles, for one meeting or another at the ValueClick offices. The first time I flew in, as you may recall, I had to take a cab to the office, because I was too young to rent a car. At that point, not wanting my new partners to freak out over my youth, I did what I had to do: I went on craigslist.com and got a fake ID. It was cheap and simple, and nobody got hurt—not the car rental agencies, not the L.A. drivers, and not me. I know I broke the law, a little, and I’m not proud of it, but I believe the statute of limitations on this particular crime has long since expired.

  The partnership with ValueClick didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped. In very short order, I found myself stifled by the corporate environment. There were endless meetings, but nothing ever seemed to get accomplished, and half the time I didn’t even know what we were meeting about. And neither did the corporate executives, apparently. The company was losing value every day. By the time my deal officially closed, the share price had dropped to $4, so my stake had plummeted by almost $20 million. It was crazy. I had been given 5.3 million shares at $7.50 a share, and my principal interest—my job, really—was to push the share price to stratospheric levels. But I was feeling as if I couldn’t get anyone to listen to my ideas, and they seemed unmotivated in the extreme.

  I’ll give you one telling example: The company had $200 million in the bank, money it could have been investing in manpower, products, and technology—but everyone was so risk-averse that they refused to touch it. When you have $200 million in cash available, in my opinion, you should be doing something with it, not simply enjoying the interest you’re collecting. The interest on that chunk of change paid for ValueClick’s operations, and then some, of course, but it wasn’t growing the company. Instead, the company was stagnat
ing. Sitting on your money is not a strategy; it’s an absence of strategy.

  I wasn’t the only one affected by the drop in price, of course. Every shareholder was affected, though some meant more to me than others: Two and a half million of those 5.3 million shares belonged to some of the people who worked with me at Click Agents, including my brother and sister. The company had been set up as a meritocracy, and the employees who had helped turn Click Agents into a success were rewarded for their contributions. At the end of the day, though, I was the one who had made the decision to sell the company, and I felt a huge responsibility. Even so, despite my continued efforts, ValueClick wasn’t giving me a chance to stop the downward slide. It seemed the people there weren’t listening to or interested in investing in my ideas. This was incredibly frustrating to me because we were at polar extremes on a very important issue: Their attitude was: Don’t fix it if it’s not broken. Mine has always been: Fix it before it breaks. And I can tell you from experience that my strategy works much better over the long term.

  To be brutally honest, I got the impression that most of the people in the company were focusing their energies on impressing the two head guys, Jim and Sam. There was a lot of ass-kissing going on, which is not something I have ever been able to relate to. Running a company isn’t about making each other feel good. It’s about business. Anything that doesn’t pertain directly to the business is counterproductive. There’s really no room for it in the office environment. As a boss, asskissing is not high on my list of needs. All I ask of my employees is that they do their jobs, that they do them well, and that once they are doing them well they make an effort to do them better. I’m a guy who cares about three things: results, results, and results. But some of the people at ValueClick seemed to be mostly concerned about brownie points.