The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions (11 page)

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.

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. Bush 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.

“You need to be careful out there,” she said, addressing us all. “People won’t understand that we are Sikhs. They will want to hurt you.” Taj and I had already cut our hair and gotten rid of the turbans, so this was directed mostly at my father. But she wanted all of us to exercise caution.

In the days ahead, with the press making constant references to the Islamic terrorists, things got even worse. The average person can’t be expected to tell the difference among Buddhism, Sikhism, and Islam, and our physical appearance worked against us. We had suddenly become the enemy.

One night, after a spate of violent attacks against innocent men—a gas station owner, a clerk at a 7-Eleven, etc.—the family watched a special on one of the networks. Several reporters went to great lengths to explain the differences between Arabs and Indians, between Sikhs and Muslims, and urged people not to let the situation get out of hand. This was not a religious war, they pointed out. Islam was not the enemy.

But nobody was listening. I remember running to the market with my father, to pick up a few things for dinner, and finding people turning to stare at him. They stared with undisguised hostility, teeming with hatred. I was so upset that by the time we reached the checkout line I was literally shaking, and my father could see I was on the verge of exploding.
“Say nothing,” he told me in Punjabi. “You will only make it worse.”