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

Free The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions by Gurbaksh Chahal Page B

Book: The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions by Gurbaksh Chahal Read Free Book Online
Authors: Gurbaksh Chahal
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Business & Economics, Business, Entrepreneurship
turban.
    Still, it was a very tough decision. In the Sikh religion, males are required to wear turbans, and they are not permitted to cut their hair—
ever
. The turban didn’t mean that much to me—with or without it, I was still a Sikh—but over the years I had been ridiculed for wearing it, and this had causedme more than my fair share of anguish. I wanted to talk to my father about the possibility of removing it and of cutting my hair, but I knew he would never agree to it, and I was deeply conflicted.
    For a time, I tried not to think about this. I put it out of my mind and focused on growing my business. Click Agents was becoming a force in the advertising world. We were noticed for all the right reasons: We were reliable, we produced results, and we were beginning to separate from the pack.
    Whenever I walked into the office, I would think,
Here I am, where I belong
. I loved work. I loved success. I would reach my desk, take a seat, and it was almost like a hit of adrenaline.
How do I make today an even better day than yesterday?
I would ask myself.
What do I have to do to leave the competition in the dust?
    Seriously, now—who could ask for anything more?

3 The First $40 Million
    A s 1999 got under way, Silicon Valley was still caught up in the dot-com euphoria. Wall Street was as strong as ever, and the Nasdaq was going through the roof. Venture capitalists were still spending obscene amounts of money on start-ups whose entire value was their tenuous connection to the Internet; college kids withvague ideas became instant millionaires; and companies with unproven business models were still executing IPOs, their crazy stock prices based on little more than the relative novelty of the dot-com concept. Everyone wanted to
get big fast
, and there was so much venture capital around that just about all of them were given a chance to do so. Lots of these new companies
did
get rich, but the vast majority went bust. Most of them you never heard of; some might ring a faint bell: Pets.com. Flooz.com. Kozmo.com. Etoys.com. Webvan.com. Boo.com (one of the biggest disasters in dot-com history). The list of casualties was endless.
    There was one thing that set Click Agents apart from the many failures, however, and it was pretty simple: We were actually making money. We were a viable business. We had nothing to prove.
    In January 2000, less than a year after my official launch, I got a call from an investment banker in New York. “I hear Click Agents is doing very well,” he said. “Have you thought about selling your company?”
    He flew out from New York to meet me, and I was actually a little nervous. I was seventeen years old, and I had a beard, which made me look a little older, but I also had a turban, and I was frankly worried about the kind of impression I was going to make. He didn’t seem at all put out—or, if he was, he didn’t show it. “I’m going to put together a list ofcompanies that might be interested in buying you, and we’ll go through the list together, and then we’ll pitch Click Agents to them for a hundred million dollars.”
    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

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