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

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The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions Page 8

by Gurbaksh Chahal


  Every time the share price dropped a little, it hurt me more than it hurt Jim and Sam. I had more shares than both those guys combined. In short order, it became pretty obvious to me that Jim and Sam resented me for my stake in the company, and I didn’t understand why. If I’d been given 5.3 million shares, it was obviously because Click Agents had been worth it. But they didn’t see it that way. I wasn’t even half their age. I had more money. They couldn’t get their heads around that. They appeared to be jealous. And you know, there was a lesson in this, too. (I’m a firm believer that you can learn from other people’s mistakes.) Learn to deal with jealousy. As you make your way up the ladder, people are going to wonder Why him? Why not me? Don’t sweat it. There’s no getting away from that. And of course there’s a flip side to the lesson: Don’t be jealous. Jealousy is one of the most useless emotions on the planet.

  My salary had also jumped, from $60,000 to $150,000, but this didn’t mean much to me. When you have a stake in a company, the paycheck is the least of it. It’s really about growing the company. I would have gladly taken a cut if I felt I was working with a strong, dynamic team that was focused on our collective future.

  During those first few months, ValueClick made several other acquisitions, including the purchase of ZMedia, a company at the forefront of e-mail marketing. ZMedia’s offices were in the San Jose area, so they ended up moving into our space in Fremont. One of the people who came over was Troy Baloca, a loud, colorful character who also happened to be a smart businessman. We hit it off right away, and we began to hang out together. From time to time we’d go out for a drink and whine about the guys at the head office. (We did this outside the office, never in the office. In the office it was always 100 percent business.) They seemed locked in an us-versus-them mentality, I noted. They were ValueClick, we were Click Agents, and we had next to nothing in common. At best, we were the stepchildren, and we were to be accepted as part of the “package,” but we would never be part of the family. I continued to share ideas and make suggestions, but everything I said fell on deaf ears. At one point, I found out that we were going after the same accounts. I had just closed a huge deal with a major advertiser, and two days later I was undercut by one of the people at the head office.

  “It’s insane,” I told Troy. “We’re supposed to be on the same team.”

  Troy didn’t disagree with me, but he tried to take my mind off the unpleasantness by forcing me to live a little. We went to dinner from time to time and to some of the local clubs, and I started getting very interested in girls, but I was still too terrified to approach them.

  “I don’t know what you’re afraid of,” Troy kept telling me. “I’ve got a great woman at home, and I love her, and any day now I’m going to pop the question. That’s what it’s all about.”

  I was happy for Troy, but he was about ten years older than me, and I figured I had time to catch up. Oddly enough, despite the friendship, I hadn’t told him that I was eighteen. I guess I still thought it would affect my credibility. Meanwhile, I tried to focus on getting a little credibility with the ladies. “As soon as I see a woman I like, I’ll make my move,” I said. That was just talk, of course. I didn’t even know what a move was.

  Still, Troy was showing me that there was life outside business. I tried foods I’d never tried before, and I even had a drink from time to time. And on more than one occasion, fortified by Grey Goose vodka, I even ventured onto a dance floor. I also started paying a little more attention to the clothes I wore, though clearly I was still a victim of McFrugal’s: My very favorite store was Ross Dress for Less.

  Meanwhile, I went into the office every day, Monday to Friday, and tried to do my job. I was working for a multibillion-dollar, Nasdaq-listed company, and I was the youngest executive ever to hold such a position. I suppose I should have been proud and happy. But no; I was miserable.

  To compound matters, my original programmer—the guy from London, the guy who shut me down for that whole, hellacious week—decided to sue me. He had read about the deal with ValueClick—big news at the time, hard to miss—and came after me with guns blazing. I was subjected to an endless round of depositions, in front of a video camera, and subjected to questions that were impossible to answer. If you said yes, you were wrong; if you said no, you were equally wrong. This is standard operating procedure. Attorneys will tell you that depositions are designed to hurt you. The common tactic is to use argumentative questions, and the classic question—after a couple of easy ones (“Is your name Gurbaksh Chahal?” “Do you live in San Jose?”)—is: “Have you stopped beating your wife?” There’s no way to answer that without losing. No matter what you say, you’re guilty. And anything that pushed my buttons strengthened their case. They had so-called body language experts standing by, ready to review the videotapes, and if I expressed any discomfort whatsoever, it would be easy for them to report that I was lying. It was all I could do to keep myself from falling apart, and every hour or so I would excuse myself to go to the men’s room, where I would splash cold water on my face and try to talk myself down. “You will not get angry! You will not lose it! You will answer their questions honestly and calmly, and you will get through this.”

  It was psychological warfare, and I survived, but only because I knew I had done nothing wrong. We had a contract. It was written by a sixteen-year-old, admittedly, but it was still a contract, and we had both walked into the deal with our eyes open.

  Still, at the end of the day, my lawyer urged me to settle. “This isn’t about right and wrong,” he said. “Litigation seldom is. It’s about greed. He saw that big number—forty million bucks—and he wants a piece of it.”

  “He got everything I promised him and more,” I said. “And that big number isn’t so big anymore.”

  “Gurbaksh, you’re not listening to me. That’s not the point. It will cost you too much to litigate this thing. I’m urging you to settle.”

  At the end of the day, I realized he was right. I wrote a big check and made the guy go away.

  The experience taught me another lesson: Pick your battles.

  I learned something else, too. We live in the most litigious society on the planet, so I have three little words of advice: Watch your back.

  Some weeks later, perhaps feeling that I’d been catapulted into adulthood by that harrowing ordeal, I decided it was time to leave home. I wanted to show my parents that I was independent. As long as I lived at home, my father’s word was law, and I wanted to get away from that—I wanted to control my own life, my own future.

  I remember the night I told my parents. I had just returned from work, resigned to getting it over with, and walked into the house to find them arguing. The issue seemed minor, and I was eager to get my problem off my chest, so I simply interrupted them. “Mom, Dad, I’ve decided to move out,” I said. They ignored me and kept arguing, their voices growing louder and more strident. So I repeated it: “Did you hear me? I’m moving out! I’m leaving home!”

  They both turned to face me, still angry, and they both said the same thing at the exact same moment: “Good!”

  It was kind of funny, actually.

  Later, when they’d resolved their differences, we talked about my imminent departure like adults, and they had a hard time wrapping their minds around it. “Why would you want to leave this house, where everything is provided for you?” my father said. And my mother concurred: “How will you manage? You are a still a boy. You don’t even know how to boil water.”

  I understood their concerns. I had led a pretty sheltered life, and it wasn’t going to be easy, but it’s what I wanted. And when I wanted something, I always made it happen. Not even their tears could keep me from leaving home.

  When it became increasingly apparent that I wasn’t about to change my mind, my parents began to panic a little. They continued to try to talk me out of it. “Why would you leave your family? Indian families do not do this. It is tradition to live together.” They were right, in fact. In a
typical Indian household, sons never leave their parents; they stay with them even after they marry. But I was leaving at eighteen, as a single man, and they found it incomprehensible. “What are you not getting from us? Don’t you like it here?”

  “No. I like it here fine. I just want to try something new.”

  For an American family, this is no big deal. But my family had come to this country with a very specific vision of the future, and in those dreams we would always be a big, happy family, living together under the one roof.

  “This is what we worked for?” my father asked. “For our son to leave the house? For our youngest son to abandon us?”

  And from my mother: “Look how old we’ve become! Who’s going to take care of us now?”

  The guilt gnawed away at me, but I still went out and began looking around for apartments—sometimes with my brother, sometimes with my friend Troy.

  Eventually I found a very nice place in Fremont, a few blocks from the Indian section of the city and only about ten minutes from our offices. It was a new building with mostly white, all-American tenants, and everything looked crisp and clean. I like new, and I like clean, so I went in to speak to the manager, who turned out be rude and dismissive. Almost reluctantly, she asked me to fill out an application, When I was done, she took it without so much as glancing at it and assured me that she’d be in touch. “We have to do a credit check and all that,” she explained.

  Despite her hostility, I drove home in a good mood. I knew my credit was fine, and my mind was made up: That nice new building was where I wanted to live.

  The next day, I called the manager to check on things, and she was more hostile than ever: “Sorry. Your credit report didn’t look so hot. You’ve been rejected.”

  “How is that possible?” I asked. “I have excellent credit.”

  “I don’t know the details,” she said. “I just know what they tell me.”

  “Well, who ran the credit check?” I asked. “There must be some mistake.” I wanted to say, Do you know who I am? I just sold my company for $40 million, and I could buy that whole building if I wanted to, but I bit my tongue.

  “I don’t know who ran the credit check,” she said, sounding increasingly irked. “The head office farms that stuff out.” Then she hung up on me.

  I tried calling her back but she wasn’t picking up and she didn’t respond to my numerous messages, so I tracked down the owner of the building and told him what had happened. “I’m a very nice guy,” I said. “And I don’t like causing trouble. But I know that I’m not being rejected for financial reasons, and if I’m being rejected for other reasons—my appearance, say—I just want to remind you that there are laws in the State of California designed to protect people like me from discrimination.”

  I thought it was important to get straight to the point. There were a lot of Indians in Fremont, but that building was in a predominantly white section of town, and I got the distinct impression that the manager wanted to keep it that way.

  The owner of the building asked if he could put me on hold for a moment, and within a few minutes he was back on the line. “Everything is in order,” he said. “Go back and talk to her. If you want the apartment, it’s yours.”

  The next day I went back, and she was expecting me. She was trying hard to smile, but it wasn’t a particularly convincing smile. “I guess there was some mistake,” she said. “You can move in on the first of the month.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  That night I went home and told my parents about my new apartment. My mother looked numb with shock. My father betrayed no emotion whatsoever.

  “Did you hear me?” I said. “I found an apartment I really like, and I’m taking it.”

  “We didn’t think you were really going to go through with this,” my mother said.

  “Well, I am,” I said. “I think I need to start becoming more independent.”

  “Your brother is three years older than you and he doesn’t seem to have an issue with this,” my father said.

  “I’m not my brother.”

  By the end of the meal they were still struggling to come to terms with my decision, as if this was some kind of tragedy.

  They managed to rise to the occasion. “Remember, we are always here for you,” my father said, his voice void of feeling. My mother was much more emotional, but she stopped short of crying. “If it doesn’t work out,” she said, “this will always be your home.”

  I moved into the Fremont apartment a couple of weeks later, with little more than two duffel bags full of clothes, and then I went to Ikea and bought everything I thought I would need. A dresser. A bed. A desk. Lamps. A sofa. I went back three days in a row, stocking up, and I actually found it sort of enjoyable. I remember thinking So this is real life? Interesting.

  I had everything delivered, and then I sat down and tried to put some of my purchases together. I started with the nightstand, and failed miserably. I couldn’t even follow the directions, and I wasn’t exactly nimble with a screwdriver. So I called the store and asked them to send someone out to help. A few days later two guys showed up and put everything together in a couple of hours. I ended up paying through the nose for their labor, so at the end of the day I hadn’t really saved that much by being Mr. McFrugal.

  I had to buy pots and pans and plates and put sheets on the bed and figure out how to do laundry. And I had to go shopping for food and learn how to cook some basics, which was quite a challenge for a guy who had always been served by the women in his life: grandmother, mother, sisters.

  My evening meals had the feel of a science experiment. I would look at the directions and think I could double the temperature and be ready to eat twice as fast. It didn’t quite work out that way, though, so I learned to follow directions. Then I bought a microwave and my life changed. Suddenly, I could cook. And I was a good cook. (Me and Sara Lee.) I also discovered microwavable pizza, which became a staple in my new home.

  There were times, admittedly, when I was lonely, but it was a small price to pay for my freedom. I wanted to be independent, and I wanted to take responsibility for my own life, and I thought this was the way to do it. Every time I went home to visit, however, my parents and my grandmother always asked me the same thing: “When are you moving back?”

  “Not today,” I would reply. “I’ll let you know.”

  Long after I was gone, they still couldn’t accept it.

  Even as I was trying to become a socially independent adult, however, my professional life was turning into a virtual prison. I could not get used to the corporate world. The bureaucracy. The politics. The infighting. It was nothing but noise, and it was making me very unhappy. Still, I began to realize that this was par for the course for any entrepreneur who makes the transition from his own business to working for another company, where he doesn’t control things. When I was in charge, anything I wanted to do I did myself, or I asked my employees to do, and it was done precisely how I wanted it done. But in this new environment, I couldn’t move forward without official approval. I had to sell an idea to one guy, then to a second guy, and then to two or three more guys after that, and they all seemed incapable of making a decision. I guess that’s what people mean when they talk about the bureaucracy. It’s a place where absolutely nothing gets done. And the larger the organization, the less one is able to accomplish—or so it seemed to me. It was really mind-boggling. I couldn’t understand how corporations actually accomplished anything, since the bureaucracy seemed to be designed solely to steer you into one brick wall after another.

  Still, I’m not a quitter. I have a stubborn streak that I inherited from my father, and it kept me focused. I kept telling myself that things would get better, that the people at ValueClick would eventually start listening to me and begin to turn the ship around. So I waited. And I argued. And I waited some more. And the ship held steady—on precisely the wrong course.

  It was tough not being the decision maker anymore. Or, as George W. Bu
sh has called it, the decider. It seemed to me that the company was being run by the accountants, which left little room for creativity. It was always about the bottom line, about the numbers; never about a vision for the future. The numbers guys couldn’t think beyond profitability—which is fine, but not if it’s all you think about. As I’ve already said, it’s wise to keep an eye on the bottom line, but not at the expense of growing the business. When I was at the helm at Click Agents, I was always looking ahead, thinking about where I wanted to be in a year, three years, five years—and doing everything I could to get there.

  Before long, the frustration began to overwhelm me. Whenever I went home to visit—which was anytime I was in the mood for a good meal—I would bore my poor family by ranting and raving about the problems at work. “This is an Internet company. The competition is ferocious. If we don’t grow, we can’t compete.” My parents would look at me as if I were speaking a foreign language, but they listened respectfully, and I continued to vent. “I work much better in a benevolent dictatorship.” I knew my involvement with ValueClick would have to end soon. As much as it bothered me to leave the company, which I had created from scratch, I realized I would have to move on to keep my sanity.

  That September, the unimaginable happened. My father called very early on the morning of the eleventh and told me to turn on the news. One tower of the World Trade Center was on fire, and I watched in horror as a plane crashed into the second. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I sat there, open-mouthed, and watched both towers collapse. Immediately after, still in shock, I got dressed and drove over to my parents’ house. We sat huddled in front of the TV, trying to make sense of what had just happened. My grandmother didn’t understand what was going on—Alzheimer’s was taking a heavy toll—but my mother was terrified.

 

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