The meteoric rise of an Indian American entrepreneur, Gurbaksh Chahal who dropped out of school as a teenager and went on to sell his company to Yahoo for $300 million is amazing, finds Steve Fox
Does this sound like a formula for enormous success? Come to the United States from India at the age of four, speaking almost no English. Grow up in one of the poorer sections of San Jose, California. Experience bullying and discrimination because of the turban you wear as part of your family’s Sikh religion. Drop out of school at 16.
That’s the early life of Gurbaksh Chahal, a multimillionaire entrepreneur who started, built and sold two Internet advertising businesses by the time he was 25. Now 31, Chahal is again on the cutting edge with a company called RadiumOne he founded in 2009 that has some 250 employees and customers such as Hyundai, Del Monte and Popchips. RadiumOne helps companies use social media technology to target consumers precisely for advertising delivered on digital, mobile and video channels, as well as on Facebook.
Chahal, who described his meteoric business career in an autobiography called The Dream—How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions, says the love and support of his tight-knit family helped him overcome many childhood obstacles. Eager to help his family financially but unable to persuade the manager of a fast-food restaurant to hire him, Chahal began buying refurbished printers and reselling them profitably on eBay.
A budding entrepreneur, he watched his father trade stocks on a home computer in the late 1990s and noticed that Internet advertising companies—some of them located in San Jose—were wildly popular with investors.
Enlisting his older brother Taj, then 19, to help him, Chahal started his own Internet company, ClickAgents, promoting it as a “performance-based advertising” firm that could measure how many viewers clicked on a customer’s ad.
He scoured the Internet for a firm with software that actually could do that, offered the young founder $30,000 he didn’t yet have for the program, and then started cold-calling ad agencies until he found one willing to pay $30,000 for 30,000 “clicks.”
“Suddenly I was in business,” Chahal wrote in his autobiography, “That’s how fast things moved.” He then called Web sites that carried ads and offered to split the money with them if they would carry ads the agency had created for its customer. Many accepted. In a short time, the agency’s customer was happy, the agency was happy, and Chahal had learned an invaluable lesson he recounted in his book: “They had no idea they were dealing with a 16-year-old kid because I presented myself as a serious professional…perception is reality.”
Chahal sold ClickAgents for $40 million, promptly bought his parents new cars and paid off their home mortgage. In 2004, Chahal founded a company called BlueLithium, which was sold to Yahoo! for $300 million.
His success has brought him fame and fortune—the high school dropout received an honorary doctorate in commercial science from Pace University in New York and the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur Of The Year 2013 in the platform technology category.
He has met President Barack Obama, and also has been interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, who asked him about the discrimination he faced as a child.
“The way I looked at it was, ‘OK, I’m different and I’m willing to accept that.’ ” Chahal told Winfrey. “It really matured me in a way where I used that negative noise as energy in a way to go ahead and find out what my true passion was, what my strengths were…. My dream was I wanted to go ahead and control my own destiny and not be at the whim of someone trying to put me down because of my appearance or who I was…. I wanted to be successful and run my own company.” (TWF)