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

by Gurbaksh Chahal

  At the end of the day, I realized I had to get through this class assignment without help, and I plunged in. I researched the subject in the library and on the Internet, and before long I had put together a coherent speech. I practiced at home, in front of the mirror, with the door locked: “Among the various causes . . . redirecting the flow of blood to the penis . . . the psychological implications . . .” and so on and so forth. On the big day, I got to my feet, made my way to the front of the class, and managed to get the nervous tremors under control. When my five-minute speech ended, right on time, the class applauded. I had been expecting a standing ovation, but I wasn’t totally crushed. And the professor really liked it: She gave me an A.

  I also took Philosophy 101. I was just a kid, but I was curious. What does life mean? What do the Great Thinkers say it means? What could I learn from them? I did a paper on Socrates, comparing his thinking to other philosophers of the time, and there are two quotes from him that I remember to this day. The first is: “Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, and undue depression in adversity.” And the other one, on a lighter note: “By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”

  Gurbaksh at age sixteen, outside a classroom at Accel Middle College.

  I plugged along at Accel, though not with any great joy. Even here, most of my classes began to feel like a monumental waste of time, and I was eager to get on with my life. I wanted to do something in the world of Internet advertising, like that monolith DoubleClick, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about it.

  Meanwhile, I looked around for other business opportunities. I noticed, for example, that a lot of blue-chip companies had been slow about adapting to the Web, so I went out and bought a dozen domain names for twenty bucks apiece. The process was simplicity itself: I went online and registered names like Dell.net, HP.net, and so forth, then parked myself in front of the family computer and wrote emails to each of the companies, offering to sell them their own domain names for $10,000. This did not go over very well. Forty-eight hours later, I received a package from Federal Express, which my mother found more than a little disturbing. “You are just a boy,” she said. “Who is sending you things by Federal Express?”

  It was one of the companies I had contacted, and they weren’t exactly thrilled by my so-called offer. The letter was basically a cease-and-desist order, and it included a request that I immediately surrender the domain name. The next day there were two more FedEx letters, from two other companies, and the language was almost identical. One of them talked about “trademark violations” and gave me only hours to make things right. I honestly hadn’t known I’d been infringing on a trademark, and I immediately wrote the companies to let them know that they could have their names back, for free. “I am just a high school kid,” I explained. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  I had gone into that misguided little venture thinking I was going to be rich, but I hadn’t done my homework. There is a big difference between trying to scoop up domain names for profit and infringing on a trademark—and I had done the latter. Somebody else, somebody smarter than I, had acquired the name “business.com,” and he subsequently sold it for $7.5 million. But he had done his research. Nobody owned that name. I promised myself that there would be no shortcuts next time. If I had a job to do, no matter how small, I would always do it right.

  One day I found myself at a local flea market, talking to a guy who was selling refurbished printers for $50. I had seen identical printers on eBay for $300, so I bought his entire inventory, put them on eBay for an unbeatable $200, and made $150 on each one. Every week I would go back to the flea market and take the printers off the guy’s hands, and every week I was making money. Not much, mind you, but more than I would have been making at McDonald’s.

  Still, I am not a patient man. I knew nothing happened overnight, but I also knew I had to have a concrete plan. I told myself that I would give myself five years to make my dreams come true and that everything I did from that day forth would be a step in that direction, even if that step seemed a little oblique. I wasn’t exactly sure what I hoped to accomplish, but Internet advertising remained at the top of my list. This was a world well worth exploring. Money was flowing from the more traditional venues, such as newspapers and television, to the Internet, and lots of young start-ups were looking for ways to cash in.

  DoubleClick was still the Big Kahuna. The company was a leader in brand advertising, luring advertising dollars to the Internet in much the same way newspapers and magazines attracted advertising to their pages. But some of the newer outfits were introducing performance-based advertising. These companies—ValueClick, Advertising.com, Flycast, and others—had software that could track when someone clicked on an ad, and the advertiser was charged only if and when a buyer dragged a mouse across the screen and clicked through. I saw this as a tremendous opportunity. There weren’t that many guys in performance-based advertising yet, and I thought I could be one of them. What’s more, it looked to me as if performance-based advertising was the wave of the future. That model gave advertisers a concrete way of gauging performance, and the company that delivered the most clicks, most consistently, was clearly going to get the most business. DoubleClick might have been the 800-pound gorilla in the world of brand advertising, but its creators could see that the business was changing, and they began to change with it.

  In an effort to make sure I understood the intricacies of the business, I started calling around to see what I could learn from anyone who was even remotely connected to Internet advertising. As I mentioned, I was something of an introvert, and I was a little nervous, so I kept practicing my pitch in front of the mirror. I lowered my voice a notch and tried to sound older than my sixteen years. “Hello,” I said. “My name is Gary Singh”—Singh is my middle name—“and I do performance-based advertising.” That’s a fancy word for pay-per-click. “I have a Web site, and I want to know a little about your operation.”

  I did have a Web site, but it was a bit on the cheesy side. Some weeks earlier, thinking ahead, I had used a rudimentary program called Microsoft Frontpage to design it. I’d done a decent job, but it didn’t look too professional, and I had promised myself to hire someone to redesign it as soon as I generated a little income. Still, the Web site wasn’t critical. I didn’t think anyone would actually look at it, and if they did, all they’d learn was that I was an advertising network—like every other fledgling network.

  Meanwhile, as a result of these many calls, I was learning something new every day. I discovered, for example, that the vast majority of the Web sites got their ads directly from advertising agencies. A successful ad agency might have ten or twenty clients, but you only needed one to get started. If an ad agency took a chance on me, and I delivered, I imagined the doors would swing wide open. And how hard could that be? It was basically a numbers game. He who delivers the big numbers wins.

  I kept doing my homework, pumping various companies for information. I needed to know who their customers were; which Web site owners they were working with; how they got paid; and, even more important, how fast they got paid. And of course I was very curious about the kind of revenue-sharing agreements that existed among the ad network, the advertiser, and the Web site owners. In other words, who got what piece of the pie?

  The Web was virtually limitless, I realized. I just had to convince one agency to give me one client and I’d be competing with the big boys.

  In order to get started, however, I needed to find the right tracking software. I spent a couple of weeks looking around the Internet for a viable program.

  Finally, I found a company in London that had a decent tracking system. It was less sophisticated than some of the other stuff I’d seen but looked like it might fit the bill, and I suspected I could get it for a fair price. I picked up the phone and made that first, fateful call. The company turned out to
be a one-man operation, and the one man was eager to talk business. A week later, he flew to San Jose to meet me. I hadn’t told him I was sixteen, that I was Indian, or that I wore a turban, because I didn’t think any of that was germane. I was a businessman, interested in doing business. Period.

  We met for dinner at a local Wyndham Hotel. My brother had a driver’s license, so he drove me over in Dad’s car, and I introduced him as my business partner. I was a little nervous, understandably, because I was eager to strike a deal, but the guy seemed even more nervous than me. He was twenty-one, very pale, and had a pronounced English accent. In the middle of dinner he confessed that he didn’t have much money. He said he saw this potential deal as an opportunity to keep his little company from bankruptcy. That certainly helped my cause: He was negotiating from a position of weakness, which immediately put me in the driver’s seat. I no longer had reason to be nervous. I had reason to rejoice.

  By the end of the evening, realizing he had no money for the hotel, I invited him to stay at my parents’ house. My brother and I moved into the living room and let him have our room, and in the morning he got up and had breakfast with my family. It was pretty strange. “Who is this white boy?” my mother asked in Punjabi.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I’m going to make a deal with him. I am trying to do something on the Internet that’s even better than those printers I was selling on eBay. Don’t worry about it. He won’t stay long.”

  After breakfast, everyone left the house, to go to his or her respective job, but I was on my winter break and I stayed behind with the visitor to talk business. Back in London, he had created a few Web sites, and he was trying to sell ads, though not too successfully. The software was serviceable, but it needed changes, and we talked about how he might rewrite the program. I didn’t know anything about programming, mind you; all I knew is what I wanted the program to do. So, again, I was thinking like a businessman—thinking about my needs. Still, I knew enough to know that it would never be a great program. In talking to him, it was clear it had its limitations, especially regarding the amount of traffic it could handle—but with some modifications I also knew it would be good enough for my needs. And while I couldn’t program it myself, I was certainly able to describe what I needed. At the end of the day, I didn’t mind the fact that the program was a long way from state of the art, because that meant I could get it for a reasonable price.

  He had dinner with my family the two nights he was there, listening to them speak Punjabi, saying nothing, and on the third day my brother and I took him to the airport. I said I would wait for the changes to the program and sent him on his way.

  After he returned to London, we talked on the phone almost every day, and he got busy tinkering with the software. After I took a look at the finished version, I agreed to take the tracking system off his hands for $30,000. I sat down and wrote a simple agreement in which I outlined the general terms and conditions. I am not a lawyer, of course, but I thought I’d done a pretty good job of writing my first contract. And the way I did it was simplicity itself. I went online and did my homework. I looked at dozens of sample contracts, to try to get a handle on the way these things were written, and found everything I needed on the Web. (It’s even easier today; you can get a variety of contracts from various sites, at no charge.) The agreement stipulated that I would pay him in ninety days, once I had tested the program, but I already knew that it was working fine. The fact is, I needed those ninety days to generate enough income to pay him—though he didn’t need to know that.

  I also told him that if things worked out, I might want to hire him to run the software for me, on a month-to-month basis, when the company was up and running, and I mentioned the possibility of paying him $10,000 a month. I know that sounds like a huge number, and it was certainly a huge number to me, but I had been looking closely at my competition and at the staggering amounts of money that were being generated, and I knew that all I needed was one little deal to get my business off the ground.

  “Great,” he said.

  “I’ll be in touch,” I said.

  Suddenly I was in business. I didn’t know anything about computers—not about programming, not about security, nothing—but I didn’t have to. I was a salesman, remember? A broker. I had the software; all I had to do now was make it work for me; all I needed were the advertisers and the publishers. If I could get an advertiser to commit to one ad, and if I could get a Web site owner to put up that ad, there’d be no stopping me.

  The week the deal was signed, I figured out how to incorporate online, and I spent $99 to do it. I called my company Click Agents, and I made myself the marketing director, but I put the company in my brother’s name. I was a minor, and I didn’t want to be breaking the law, and my brother was willing to take the financial risk—which I appreciated. (I certainly didn’t want my parents taking any risks!) Then I began calling advertising agencies, as I had done during the research-and-information phase, but this time I was dead serious. I needed someone to take a chance on me—anyone. And it was hard. Getting people on the phone was a piece of cake, but finding the person who made the decisions was almost impossible. I would leave one voice-mail, no more—because I didn’t want to sound desperate—then follow it up with an e-mail. If I didn’t have an e-mail address, I’d guess, which really isn’t that complicated. First initial, last name, @whatevercompany.com. And whenever someone actually responded, I was ready. “I have a company called Click Agents,” I would say. “We have a consortium of Web sites. I can get your ads on those sites, and I will price them on a per-click basis.”

  I didn’t have a consortium of Web sites—I had no real connection to any legitimate Web sites—but they didn’t need to know that, and that wasn’t the point, anyway. I was a simple salesman. I just had to convince the guy on the other end of the line that I was an effective one. It was the basic theory of supply and demand.

  Two days into it, I struck gold. I found myself on the phone with a gentleman at the LeftField Advertising Agency, in San Francisco. LeftField had a client, Infoseek, a search engine, like Google, that was looking to increase traffic to its Web site. “If you put up a $30,000 order, I can deliver traffic at a dollar a click,” I told the agency. In plain English, I was telling him that I could deliver at least 30,000 clicks.

  “We’ll get back to you,” I was told.

  The following morning, they contacted me with an “insertion order.” Suddenly I was in business. That’s how fast things moved. In a matter of days, I had a contract for $30,000, which called for me to deliver 30,000 clicks within six weeks. I immediately began to contact every Web site that carried advertising, and I gave them the other part of my pitch: “If you make room for my ads for Infoseek, I will share my revenues with you, fifty-fifty.” Most of them accepted—it was a good deal—but there were some that remained unconvinced, and I had to offer them a larger piece of the pie to make it happen. Still, in a matter of days the ads went up, people started clicking, and InfoSeek was getting exactly what it wanted: more traffic. A lot more traffic.

  Later, as things rolled along, I was able to scale things back to a fifty-fifty split. The Web site owners were making money. I had done my job. Everyone was happy.

  “Great delivery, Gary,” the guy at LeftField told me. “What do you think you might be able to do for us next month?”

  “I can double it.”

  “Okay. Good. I’ll talk to Infoseek and get back to you in a couple of days.”

  The door was open, and it was up to me to keep it open. I had made a good first impression—which was critical—but I had to keep them impressed.

  Did I have a certain skill that made this happen? No, I don’t think so. At the end of the day, I was polite, professional, and confident, and that certainly helped. But LeftField had orders to fill—it was in the business of spending money—and I was in the right place at the right time. With the right pitch.

  A few days later, that first check arrived. Thirty tho
usand dollars. I couldn’t believe it. I ran to get my brother. “I need you to help me open a bank account,” I said.

  “Why do you need a bank account?”

  “This,” I said, showing him the check.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Wow.”

  We went to the nearest Bank of America branch and Taj signed for the account, my very first bank account. It was my company, yes, but I was too young to write checks, so I would be relying on Taj to handle the unimaginable sums that were about to begin pouring in.

  “Don’t tell Dad,” I said.

  “This isn’t illegal, is it?”

  “No, of course not. But that’s exactly what he’d think.”

  My brother had total control of the bank account. But who could I trust if not my own brother?

  The next day, I hired someone to overhaul my company Web site. I wanted it to look like the portal to a very serious corporation. I needed to impress people. Perception was key. And the guy did a great job. Anyone looking at the flashy graphics and the 3-D logos must have thought they were dealing with a major player. Most of them probably never even looked at my Web site, of course, which was fine with me. All they knew was that Gary Singh delivered, and that’s all they cared about. They had no idea they were dealing with a sixteen-year-old kid because I presented myself as a serious professional. Once again, perception is reality. That’s not a kid on the other end of the line. It’s a guy who delivers on his promises.

  Before long, business was booming, and I learned another valuable lesson: People tend to think that in order to start a new business they have to come up with something new and dazzling, but that’s a myth—and it’s often propagated by venture capitalists. Usually the first question those guys ask you is “What makes you different? Tell me why your company is unlike anything that’s out there. If you want our money, you’re going to have to show us what makes you so special.” What they fail to understand, however—and what most people fail to understand—is that a company can be similar to the competition as long as it has the right people and the right leadership, and as long as it is committed to being better than all the other players. In starting Click Agents, I knew I was a small fish in a big pond. After all, I didn’t invent performance-based advertising. But as I evolved, I was able to transform my company so that it stood out from the pack—in terms of performance, delivery, professionalism—and that’s what got me noticed. My attitude was simple: I knew I could do it, and I knew I could do it better, but I also knew that I wasn’t going to be the best coming out of the gate. I would begin by catching up with the other guys, the guys who got there first, and then I’d leave them in the dust. And that’s what I did: I overexecuted the competition.