The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions (10 page)

“Seventeen is not young,” she replied.

In late summer, shortly after I turned eighteen—and several months after ValueClick went public—I got the call I’d been expecting. “We want to take our discussions to the next level,” Jim Zarley said.

I called a meeting to discuss this with key people on my staff, many of whom were heavily vested in the company. I had received a merger call, I told them, and it sounded serious, so I needed to make sure that everything was running smoothly. “If we are going to do this, we need to make sure all our ducks are in order. Are we collecting on time? Are we exceeding our sales forecast? Are we getting the best rates from our publishers? I need you guys to make sure everything is running perfectly, because for the next few weeks I’m going to be focused on the deal, and I won’t be around to look over your shoulders. Nothing has changed, okay? I need you guys to keep doing your jobs, only I need you to do them better than ever.”

On November 1, 2000, ValueClick agreed to buy Click Agents in a $40 million all-stock merger. We would be getting 5.3 million shares based on a $7.50 per share price. As part of
the deal, we would all go to work for ValueClick, and I would sign a three-year noncompete agreement. This agreement meant I couldn’t do anything remotely connected to Web advertising for another three years, until I was twenty-one, but that didn’t bother me at all. I was about to become a very rich eighteen-year-old.

To the casual observer, it might have seemed that success came too easily and too quickly, but I don’t think that’s the case. The sale of Click Agents had nothing to do with mindless Internet euphoria. It was bought based on real metrics. I was profitable. I was making money. I was growing. So it wasn’t about luck or timing, it was about having real assets—assets somebody wanted. And that didn’t happen by accident. I did what I thought I had to do to succeed: I tried to build a great company that was in it for the long term, and I did it by making sure the foundations were solid. If you have an idea for a company, that’s just the beginning—that’s your entry point. What really matters is execution. Don’t think about the millions you’re going to make; think instead about creating a company that will be
worth
millions. It sounds like I’m splitting hairs, but I’m not: The difference is huge. Success is largely about
substance
. If your company is about real, tangible assets, and you’re looking at the long term (not the quick hit), you are going be handsomely rewarded for it.

The day after the deal closed, I celebrated with my family. We went to the local
gurdwara
and thanked God for this great blessing. A Sikh priest led the prayers, and he noted that my father’s dreams of a new life in America had indeed come true. “Perhaps not in the way he envisioned them, but they have come to pass nonetheless,” he said.

Then we went back to the house and had dinner, overwhelmed by our good fortune, but it wasn’t until I woke up the next morning that it actually hit me: I was a millionaire many times over.

Of course, I was only a millionaire on paper. It’s not as if the cash was sitting in the bank, waiting for me. In fact, I had to protect it. I had to report for work that morning and in mornings to come with one goal and one goal only: to increase the value of my stock—not only for myself, but for every shareholder in the company.

In December, a month after the deal closed, we moved into new offices in Fremont. A couple of months earlier, just before our one-year lease had come up for renewal, the landlord informed us that there were dozens of dot-com
companies looking for office space and that he intended to triple our rent. I thought this was outrageous, and I didn’t think I needed to be in the heart of San Jose, so my brother and I looked elsewhere and found that space in Fremont. The price was right, and there was a bonus. Parts of the city were predominantly Indian, so we knew we’d always eat well.

The Click Agents team at the company Christmas party in 2000 (Gurbaksh in front).

Every eight or nine days, however, I had to fly south to Los Angeles, for one meeting or another at the ValueClick offices. The first time I flew in, as you may recall, I had to take a cab to the office, because I was too young to rent a car. At that point, not wanting my new partners to freak out over my
youth, I did what I had to do: I went on craigslist.com and got a fake ID. It was cheap and simple, and nobody got hurt—not the car rental agencies, not the L.A. drivers, and not me. I know I broke the law, a
little,
and I’m not proud of it, but I believe the statute of limitations on this particular crime has long since expired.

The partnership with ValueClick didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped. In very short order, I found myself stifled by the corporate environment. There were endless meetings, but nothing ever seemed to get accomplished, and half the time I didn’t even know what we were meeting about. And neither did the corporate executives, apparently. The company was losing value every day. By the time my deal officially closed, the share price had dropped to $4, so my stake had plummeted by almost $20 million. It was crazy. I had been given 5.3 million shares at $7.50 a share, and my principal interest—my
job,
really—was to push the share price to stratospheric levels. But I was feeling as if I couldn’t get anyone to listen to my ideas, and they seemed unmotivated in the extreme.

I’ll give you one telling example: The company had $200 million in the bank, money it could have been investing in manpower, products, and technology—but everyone was so risk-averse that they refused to touch it. When you have $200 million in cash available, in my opinion, you should be doing
something with it, not simply enjoying the interest you’re collecting. The interest on that chunk of change paid for ValueClick’s operations, and then some, of course, but it wasn’t growing the company. Instead, the company was stagnating. Sitting on your money is not a strategy; it’s an
absence
of strategy.

I wasn’t the only one affected by the drop in price, of course. Every shareholder was affected, though some meant more to me than others: Two and a half million of those 5.3 million shares belonged to some of the people who worked with me at Click Agents, including my brother and sister. The company had been set up as a meritocracy, and the employees who had helped turn Click Agents into a success were rewarded for their contributions. At the end of the day, though, I was the one who had made the decision to sell the company, and I felt a huge responsibility. Even so, despite my continued efforts, ValueClick wasn’t giving me a chance to stop the downward slide. It seemed the people there weren’t listening to or interested in investing in my ideas. This was incredibly frustrating to me because we were at polar extremes on a very important issue: Their attitude was:
Don’t fix it if it’s not broken.
Mine has always been:
Fix it before it breaks.
And I can tell you from experience that my strategy works much better over the long term.

To be brutally honest, I got the impression that most of the people in the company were focusing their energies on
impressing the two head guys, Jim and Sam. There was a lot of ass-kissing going on, which is not something I have ever been able to relate to. Running a company isn’t about making each other feel good. It’s about business. Anything that doesn’t pertain directly to the business is counterproductive. There’s really no room for it in the office environment. As a boss, asskissing is not high on my list of needs. All I ask of my employees is that they do their jobs, that they do them well, and that once they are doing them well they make an effort to do them better. I’m a guy who cares about three things: results, results, and results. But some of the people at ValueClick seemed to be mostly concerned about brownie points.

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.”