Gurbaksh Chahal

RISK& REWARD FOR GURBAKSH CHAHAL ON STARTING UP AND TAKING OFF...

Everyone has dreams, but how often do we preface talk of these goals with "someday…"? As a high school student, Gurbaksh Chahal chose to strive for success instead of waiting. Now, at age 28, he has already had a hugely successful business career, if money is any measure. He's already sold two start-ups -- the first for $40 million when he was 18, and the second just last year for $300 million.

Gurbaksh isn't cagey about sharing his story and the steps he took toward entrepreneurial success. In fact, he wrote about it in The Dream, his new book, and hopes it will inspire others to pursue theirs too. "Nothing is handed to you," he says. Success can happen, but you have to reach for it.

Gurbaksh Chahal was born in the town of Tarn Taran, near Amritsar in Punjab, India to Avtar and Arjinder Chahal. In 1985, his parents received a visa for America through a lottery-based system in India, and the following year, when he was four, the family settled in San Jose, California. His parents later struggled at menial jobs in order to bring up their four children. For the Chahal family, as for many immigrants, education was paramount. However, when classmates were maneuvering the teenage social food chain, he was already making headway toward becoming a serial entrepreneur. At age 14, Gurbaksh was selling refurbished printers on eBay. The income helped his family and eventually supplied the few thousand dollars of capital needed to start his first business, Click Agents.

At that point, the dot-com boom was in full swing and Gurbaksh saw potential. "I wanted a piece of it," he says. And he didn't let his age daunt him. He surveyed the emerging digital landscape and decided Internet advertising would be the best entry point for him. Not having programming knowledge himself, he used some of the money he'd saved to pay a programmer a flat fee to write the software that would power Click Agents. It was one of the first Internet ad companies to charge advertisers per click, as opposed to traditional advertising that paid for ad space on websites.

 At the age of 16, Gurbaksh dropped out of high school to pursue a dream as an entrepreneur and started his first company, ClickAgents. It was one of the first ad networks focused around performance based advertising. In later years, the company was sold at 40 million dollars to valueclick.

In January 2004, Gurbaksh founded his second company, BlueLithium, this time with an insight into sophisticated new ways that data, optimization and analytics could help Web advertisers with behavioral targeting.

At 28, Gurbaksh is already leading his third start-up, RadiumOne. RadiumOne is the first Real Time Bidding (RTB) enabled display audience network with social and mobile capabilities.

For prospective young entrepreneurs, Gurbaksh offers some pointers.

"The first thing is research. Take baby steps and don't be afraid to change something." Start-ups are in a constant state of fluidity, he says. "If you're not prepared to change, you're so rigid and focused on that idea, you're probably going to fail."

He also says that companies don't necessarily need millions of dollars of start-up money to be successful. "The greatest ideas come with thousands of dollars and a whole lot of sweat equity," he says.

Aside from having the drive, the next step is to surround yourself with like-minded thinkers. This means that the first employees you hire are going to make it or break it for you. From there, any more hiring will likely be done by those first hires.

"From day one you understand you're not going to be able to do this all on your own," he says. "Hire the best first 20 employees that live, die and breathe the success of the company."

Gurbaksh has found that success comes from taking risks, and some of the best risk-takers are young. "The younger you are, the more guts you have," he says. With age come mounting responsibilities and obligations. It gets harder and more costly to take big risks. "A lot of people get dismantled by realizing they want to make money, so they get stuck in a situation where they're not happy… they end up living lives that are not rewarding to them day to day."

 “Find out early on what you're good at or what your passion is, figure out a plan for how to do it and don't worry about the economics right away. "Putting the money -- the agenda and economics -- at the end of the rainbow instead of the beginning is probably the best strategy," he says

In addition to writing The Dream, he also has several television projects in the works. Most are still under wraps, but the first is a FOX reality TV series called Secret Millionaire.

Because he thrives on the adrenaline rush of seeing things succeed, Gurbaksh says he doesn't see himself ever settling down and not pursuing new projects. Doing what he loves, and balancing material things with the immaterial is what it's all about.