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

by Gurbaksh Chahal

  As soon as the driver left, I got into my Lamborghini and began cruising around the neighborhood. Every time I shifted, the car made a crazy grinding noise, and I could smell something burning, but I figured it was all part of the sports car experience. Also, because it was low to the ground, I kept whacking the front end, but I couldn’t figure out how to avoid that.

  Everywhere I went, people turned to stare, and I didn’t mind it so much. I also got a lot of big, seductive smiles from pretty girls, but something told me that these weren’t the types of girls I should be pursuing.

  A week later I was out on the freeway, in midshift, when the Lambo died on me.

  I found a mechanic in Gilroy who specialized in high-end sports cars, and he arrived half an hour later in a shiny tow truck. “I can’t believe this,” I whined. “I spent a ton of money on this car, and it just stopped dead.”

  “What have you been doing?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Just driving around.”

  We went back to his shop in Gilroy and he took a closer look, then sauntered over to break the bad news. “Well, the front end is pretty banged up, but that’s the least of it,” he said. “You burned out the clutch.”

  At that point, it became clear to me that the grinding noise and the burning smell were not supposed to be part of the Lamborghini experience. “I’ll be honest with you,” I said. “I don’t know how to drive this car.”

  The guy couldn’t have been nicer. He took another Lamborghini out of the shop and we went for a drive, and before long I found out that I was supposed to take my foot off the accelerator when I was shifting gears. The experience cost me $30,000, plus a modest sum for the driving lesson.

  The car continued to get a lot of attention. From time to time I’d find a handwritten note tucked under the windshield wiper from one woman or another, urging me to call. I guess they thought I was a wonderfully charismatic guy and a brilliant conversationalist, based on the car I drove, but I never phoned.

  My favorite experience happened one Saturday morning as I pulled into the gym. There was a little Honda behind me, and I noticed that it had been following me for several blocks. As soon I parked and cut the engine, the Honda pulled up next to me and a kid of about sixteen got out. He looked at me with great admiration, and seemed on the verge of tears. “Oh, man,” he said. “I really, really hate to bother you, but I need to know what you do for a living, because I want to get me one of those.”

  “I’m in Internet advertising,” I said. “But that might not be for you. Just find something you love and do it better than everyone else.”

  Eventually I got tired of the Lamborghini and sold it on eBay, losing a few bucks in the process. I bought a Mercedes-Benz SL55. It was an automatic, and it was fast, and I loved it. Some months later, however, I began to miss my Lamborghini, so I bought another one, a red one this time, also on eBay. The following year I sold that, too, and went out to buy a Ferrari, since I’d heard so many good things about them. I went to a dealership in Los Gatos. I half expected the guys to treat me like a kid, but they were very respectful because they were selling Ferraris every day, mostly to young, dot-com millionaires. I drove off the lot in a 360 Spider, which was much easier to drive than the Lamborghini, and in fact it felt like a more solid car (but I still think the Lamborghini is way cooler). Even so, I sold the Ferrari after six months—I had only put 425 miles on it—and bought myself a white, two-door Bentley, which is what I drive to this day. It’s perfect for me. It’s luxurious, it’s sporty, and it’s easy to drive because it’s an automatic.

  But it’s a funny thing: At one point, I thought I was getting a little carried away, and I wondered whether I was losing control of my money. But every single time I bought a car, I almost instantly had buyer’s remorse. It was as if I had this built-in barometer that would go off the charts when I did anything too extravagant, and then I’d wallow in it, wondering why the hell I had done it. I was breaking one of my own business rules: need versus necessity. Did I really need that kind of luxury? No. Then again, maybe I’d earned it. So I lived with it. After all, as they say, All work and no play makes G a dull boy. But I still freak out a little when I spend big money, and at the end of the day I consider that a good thing. For example, when I fly, I fly economy. On the rare occasion when I treat myself to first class, I don’t enjoy it because I can’t believe I spent that much money on a ticket.

  When I wasn’t buying and selling cars, or dating, or polishing my game, I found something else to occupy my time: the stock market. I still had that year left on my three-year, noncompete agreement with ValueClick, so I decided to play the market with $250,000 and see what I could do with it. I got off to a great start. On my first day of trading, I made thirty grand. On the second, ten. On the third day, I was up another fifteen. I had made 20 percent on my money in three days. I was impressed with myself. I was good.

  The next day, I started losing money. And I kept losing money. And in no time at all my original quarter million was down to $125,000. I spent months trying to get my money back. Eventually I made some trades on margin and got close to breaking even, at which point I quit. I realized I didn’t have the heart for gambling. I didn’t have the stomach for it. I didn’t like not being in control. So I gave it up. Another lesson learned: Leave the stock market to the professionals.

  Don’t get me wrong: I had studied the market pretty extensively, especially during those early years, sitting in front of the TV with my father. But it isn’t who I was. I was an entrepreneur at heart. The market wasn’t in my blood. And I will tell you this: You need to know what you’re all about if you want to succeed. You need to play to your strengths, otherwise you’re going to settle for mediocrity—and mediocrity doesn’t cut it. I’m not interested in second or third place. When I play, I play to win. And anyone who can’t do that doesn’t belong in the game. They’re not going to win with that attitude. Anybody can be good; few people can be great.

  Still bored, and still looking for something to fill the hours before my noncompete expired, I decided that it would be very cool to open an Indian restaurant. I talked to Taj about it, suggesting it would be a nice way to give back to the community. “It’ll be a cool place with a great vibe, a place of their own,” I said. “And we can call it Planet Bollywood. Bollywood with a B.”

  Just about every Indian you’ll ever meet is infatuated with Bollywood films, and in fact the Indian film industry is one of the largest in the world. The most popular Bollywood films are musicals, and they are full of rousing song-and-dance numbers. These were the films I used to watch with my family as a child, and I still remember many of them. Love stories and comedies and thrillers, all of them propelled along by entertaining musical numbers, which always came along at exactly the right moment. I remember my father once telling me that people referred to the best of these films as paisa vasool, which means, literally, “money’s worth.” I told my brother that we would create a restaurant that gave the Indian population its paisa vasool and then some. We wouldn’t be making movies, of course, but we would serve food and drink and create a place where people could mingle and relax and have fun.

  We began looking around for a viable location and found a space in nearby Milpitas. It was a French restaurant, but the owners had put it up for sale. We bought it and got ready to convert it, and I suggested that we serve French cuisine along with Indian cuisine. “A lot of Indians get Indian food at home,” I said. “Maybe they’re sick of Indian food.”

  “Sounds good to me,” my brother said.

  We hired contractors and designers and had to apply for permits, and six months later, with the hiring of two outstanding chefs, we had a big launch party. It was a huge success, and I felt like a real restaurateur. In fact, I felt like Rick in Casablanca. I went around greeting people and making sure they were enjoying themselves, and I liked the fact that everyone knew who I was. I was the Click Agents kid, the $40-million man (though it was closer to $20 million at this point). A
ll night long, Taj and I greeted well-wishers. We were happy. We thought we were doing something wonderful for the community.

  And it turned out pretty good for me, too. One night I met a gorgeous Indian girl at the restaurant, and we started dating. Many of the women who left notes on my windshield, or smiled at me at traffic lights, or approached me at the restaurant were attracted to my wealth, so I tended to be very cautious—sometimes to the point of paranoia. But this woman seemed to like me for all the right reasons.

  I also made new friends at the restaurant, people from the community, people from families like my own. One of these was Krishna Subramanian, who was on the fast track to medical school. It wasn’t what he wanted to do—he was an accomplished Web designer, and he loved anything to do with computers—but he was forging ahead to make his parents happy. He was definitely waffling, though. “If you ever start another company,” he told me, “think of me.”

  “Your family would kill me,” I said.

  “Think of me anyway,” he said.

  There was one aspect of the restaurant business that I definitely didn’t like: Strangers wanted things from me. Credit. Comped meals. Loans. Some of them tended to approach me as if I somehow owed them these things. One Saturday night, in the lounge, one of the more obnoxious patrons, a regular, became abusive, insulting me and demanding free drinks. When he got out of control, I had to have him booted out, and as the bouncer dragged him away he threatened to kill me. I wondered if it had been a good idea to be such a visible, high-profile owner, but I didn’t let the threat bother me. The man was drunk. It was just liquor talking. (That’s what I told myself, anyway.)

  When my parents found out about the incident, however, they were less sanguine. They wanted me to report the man to the police, but I didn’t see the point. A drunk had made an empty threat. What could the police do for me?

  Amazing as it seems, Planet Bollywood had been profitable from the very start, which is almost unheard of in the restaurant business, so it was painful to watch things deteriorate. A number of the patrons came in only to get drunk, and it seemed as if fights broke out every weekend. These people drained the joy from the place, and they ruined it for everyone. Taj and I had opened the restaurant with the best intentions, almost as a service to the Indian community, and a handful of unpleasant people seemed determined to make us fail.

  When I spoke to my father about it, he repeated what he had told me years earlier: “Some people are like crabs. If they can’t get over the wall, they will pull you down to keep you from climbing over.”

  I was also reminded of something I’d once heard said by Simon Cowell, one of the judges on American Idol. He claimed that he found it depressing whenever any of his friends succeeded; the interviewer laughed, thinking he was kidding. But Simon wasn’t kidding at all. He hated to see his fellow crabs making it over the wall.

  I also heard a famous quote on the subject, attributed to author Gore Vidal: “It’s not enough to succeed; others must fail.”

  I don’t understand that kind of thinking. I’m not like that. When I see someone succeed, I find it inspiring. I’m not jealous. I’m not resentful. On the contrary, I figure if they can do it, I can do it too. But some people seem to resent success in others, and it was clear that I wasn’t about to change their thinking.

  Unhappy with the way things continued to deteriorate at Planet Bollywood, I looked for other ways to occupy my time, and at one point I flew to San Jose, Costa Rica, to meet with the owners of a Korean-based software firm. They had expressed an interest in working with me, and for the next few months I flew back and forth between the two San Joses, trying to help them get their company off the ground.

  While this was going on, I got a call from Sam, back at ValueClick, who was eager to talk business. “You are the second largest shareholder in the company,” he said. “The only person who has more shares than you is the founder. You have more shares than I do. We were wondering if you might want to sell your stock to us. We’d be willing to buy you out for cash.”

  This sounded a little suspect. When the shares were at $7.50, they had been worth $40 million. At $2.50, they had lost two-thirds of their value. Sam offered me $3 a share, which didn’t seem particularly generous, but I told him I’d think about it. Before I did anything, however, I wanted more information on what the company had been up to lately. I’d been out of the loop for a year, so I was in the dark about recent developments. Sam said he didn’t have a problem with that; he’d put something in the mail to me and send me the relevant information as soon as I signed. In a matter of days, I received a document stating that ValueClick intended to buy all of my stock at $3 a share but that nothing would move forward until I’d received the requested information on the company’s near-term goals. It was a nonbinding agreement, and the document talked only about the proposed sale, so I went ahead and signed it.

  One Sunday night, I returned home from yet another trip to Costa Rica and fell to bed exhausted. Just before eight the following morning, my phone rang. It was my brother, and he was in a panic. “Get over to the restaurant right now!” he said.

  “Dude,” I said, still only half awake. “I got in late last night after a long-ass flight from Costa Rica. I’m beat.”

  “The restaurant is on fire,” he said.

  I jumped out of bed, dressed in a hurry, and raced over, and I arrived to find the place engulfed in flames. Fire engines were everywhere, but the firemen were fighting a losing battle. The restaurant looked as if it had been bombed, and it appeared deliberate.

  In the days ahead, we talked to the fire department and to the police, and from everything we saw and heard it looked like a case of arson. But they had nothing to go on, so they did nothing. That’s when we started hearing the rumors. People in the Indian community—my own people—were saying that the restaurant had turned out to be a bad investment and that we had burned it down for the insurance money. They were wrong on both counts. The restaurant had been a very good investment, but it had attracted the wrong crowd, and after only four months it was all over. And we didn’t have enough insurance to cover a fraction of what we had put into it. In fact, we lost a small fortune on the venture. Still, the rumors persisted, and there was absolutely nothing we could do to dispel them.

  The idea that people in our own community, fellow Indians, would think we could be so dishonest was very upsetting to us both. Our intentions had never been anything less than honorable.

  My brother and I went to talk to the arson unit again, begging them to investigate, but they said they had already tried. “We couldn’t find anything,” they said. “It certainly looks like arson, but maybe it’s not arson. Maybe it was just a freak accident.”

  For weeks afterward, in my own neighborhood, at the coffee shop, at the grocery store, I would find people smiling at me conspiratorially, as if I’d gotten away with burning down my restaurant. Again, these were my own people. What part of this didn’t they understand? Even if the place had been fully insured, which it wasn’t, the restaurant was not and never had been about the money. I had been trying to do something for the community, and clearly that had been a big mistake. It taught me yet another lesson: Forget noble motivations. Pursue your own interests and focus on making yourself happy. That’s what I’d done with Click Agents, and I had made myself very happy indeed. I had also made a lot of other people happy, people who had worked hard to make the company a success. Many of them would never have to work another day in their lives, and that had nothing to do with noble intentions. I had pursued my dreams and others had shared in my success.

  After the fire, I went into a funk. For a while, I felt completely lost. I was an entrepreneur, and I missed exercising that talent. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I was restless and unfocused and probably more than a little irritable, and my parents became deeply concerned. “Why don’t you go back to school?” my father said. “It’s been three years since you dropped out, and you’re very close to getting
your high school diploma.”

  “What’s the point?” I said. “It feels like a giant backward step.”

  “The point? The point is this: One day you will have kids of your own, and they will give you trouble. ‘My dad doesn’t have a high school degree and look at him! Why should I pay attention in school? I want to be a dropout, like him.’”

  Okay. Point taken. A few weeks later, I found myself scrambling to complete my high school requirements while taking a slew of new courses at San Jose State. I tried to be optimistic. I told myself that experience might lead to something new and exciting.

  One day an Indian girl approached me after class. “You’re Gurbaksh Chahal, aren’t you? The restaurant owner.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I hear you burned the place down for the insurance money.”

  Man, it was all I could do not to explode. I tried to count to ten, but I only got as far as five. “Listen to me,” I said. “I don’t know who told you that story, but it’s bullshit. If you want to know the truth, I’m a cheap bastard, and I was grossly underinsured. I got $100,000 from the insurance company. That’s it. And after paying off my debts and the lawyers, I was left with nothing. Zip. Zero. I put a million dollars of my own money into that place, and I lost every penny of it.”

  I guess my outburst startled her a little. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “You should be,” I said, and I stormed off.

  Two weeks later, I dropped out of school for a second time. It was boring. Nothing about it was remotely interesting to me. And you know, I’m probably going to be taken to task for this, but I have no regrets about dropping out—not the first time and not that second time. I am sure I would have learned plenty in school; I might have even learned a few things that would have helped me make smarter, more informed decisions; but I’m just not a textbook kind of guy. And sure, there are things I don’t know—I don’t know much about art or literature—but if and when the time comes, I can pursue those interests on my own. So no: absolutely no regrets. Maybe in the early part of my adventures other people would have been more comfortable if I’d had a degree—the stereotypes, remember?—but a degree wouldn’t have made real difference in my life.