Gurbaksh Chahal – The 300 Million Dollar Man

Gurbaksh Chahal – From School Dropout to Start Up Whiz

The only job he ever applied for was at McDonalds – and he was turned down! He is a high school dropout who at the age of 16 went on to create ClickAgent, an Internet business which sold for $ 40 million.

He sold his next start-up, BlueLithium, to Yahoo for a whopping $ 300 million. Now he’s on to his third start-up, RadiumOne, and is having the time of his life.

Meet Gurbaksh Chahal, the kid from Tarn Taran, near Amritsar, who has gone on to become a major serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He  has been on Oprah before millions of viewers and has written a best selling book. Worth over $100 million, he’s got the fabulous penthouse and the Lamborghini and all the perks. He was proclaimed as the most Eligible Bachelor in America in 2009.  Now, at 28, he’s still single!

And yes, this high school dropout even managed to get an honorary doctorate from Pace University. Interviewing him when he was just 26, Oprah called him ‘the youngest millionaire on the Planet Earth.’

Gurbaksh’s story began in the Punjab where his mother Arjinder was a director of nursing at Amritsar Hospital and his father Avtar was a retired police officer. They applied for the U.S. Green Card lottery – and in one of those fairy tale happenings, actually won the draw. Husband and wife journeyed to the US in 1985 and tried to make a fresh start. They scrimped and saved and a year later, four-year-old Gurbaksh along with his grandmother and three other siblings, was able to join them.

It was a tough life for a family fresh off the boat, trying to adjust to a new world in San Jose, California. Recalls Gurbaksh: “We were struggling financially, trying to make ends meet. My mother had to become an orderly in a hospital and start from scratch. My dad got a job as a security guard, making $3.75 an hour.”

The dream was to groom one son into an engineer and the other into a doctor. The life savings of the family, however, were wiped out in the stock market crash of 1997, and college became a distant dream for Gurbaksh and his siblings. His sister had to work while going to school, his brother took on a newspaper route to make extra money and Gurbaksh, 15, tried to get a job at McDonalds – and was turned down. It was probably due to his appearance, he says. America had not seen too many all-American boys with turbans.

Gurbaksh Chahal and the Dotcom Boom

What happened next shows the power of the cyber revolution at the time of the Dotcom Boom. Gurbaksh, working from a computer in his bedroom, launched ClickAgents, an Internet advertising company and within three months had accumulated $100,000 in the bank. He dropped out of school, nurturing the company and 18 months later, at the age of 18, sold it to the competing ValueClick  for $40 million.

Initially was it hard rising funding for that first company? Says Gurbaksh: “Yes, that’s probably because nobody would give me any money. At the start of my career as an entrepreneur there was that stigma of being an Indian CEO – nobody talked about it – but the stereotypical image required a certain look and feel which I didn’t have, and no education to boot. That’s why I just ended up bootstrapping the business and continued to invest in it.”

Gurbaksh points out that the scenario has changed dramatically in the last decade – now you don’t have to white or have an Ivy League degree to be a successful entrepreneur. Age and looks no longer matter.

So this whole digital revolution has really freed up people? “At the end of the day you can create million dollar businesses digitally in a matter of a few years,” he says. “The No. 1 way that stereotypes go away is when you don’t let stereotypes even be an issue, and that is through performance. The internet has allowed people to create these businesses which are just so jaw-dropping in their success that the stereotypes just fade away.”

BlueLithium & Internet Advertising

He launched a second company, BlueLithium which took Internet advertising to a different arena, emphasizing behavioral targeting, and focusing on data, optimization and analytics. It bagged the Innovator of the Year award, which had earlier been won by ground-breaking companies like Google and Skye. BlueLithium was bought by Yahoo for $300 million in cash.

Since he could not form a similar competing  company for two years, be busied himself in writing an inspiring memoir ‘The Dream’ which hit the book stores just as he appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, with his entire family watching in the audience. He clearly acknowledged their importance in keeping him sane and balanced, and one of the biggest thrills of making it big, he says,  has been the ability to pamper his parents with a big house and all the luxuries.

The book tour took him to several colleges on the lecture circuit and Pace University actually presented him with an Honorary Doctorate. “Technically I didn’t even have a high school degree,” says Gurbaksh. “That was probably the biggest moment for my parents. They always wanted me to be a doctor. Ph.D, doctor, same thing, right?”

He also starred in a Fox television reality series called ‘Secret Millionaire.’ In 2009 he was featured as American’s most eligible bachelor and as he wryly admits, “Unfortunately for my parents, I’m still single. I live a very private life with a small circle of family and friends. – Monday to Friday I have no social life but weekends I do all the things a single 28-year-old does!”

RadiumOne & Social Media

Hi s main passion is his third start-up, RadiumOne, which capitalizes on the huge social media trend. “All of this social activity has created a vast amount of data, but advertising hasn’t really cracked the code on how to apply this information to the targeting process,” he says. “With RadiumOne, our goal is to allow advertising to become smarter so it’s information – not clutter – for the consumer. I spend hundred percent of my time with it and hopefully I can make it even bigger than my previous companies.”

Asked for his secret of success, he says, “I live in the forward, never in the present or the past. I’m always thinking of what’s next and I think that ambitious DNA is critical for me.”

Starting young was almost a blessing for him as an entrepreneur: “It’s in the early stages that you tend to give up. At 16, I didn’t know the definition of failure; I didn’t know the definition of fear. It was all about picking the right battles, and knowing which ones to never give up on.”

© Lavina Melwani

(This article first appeared in Hi Blitz.)

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