The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions (12 page)

On the drive home, I was still seething. “I don’t know why you put up with it,” I told him.

“Because only the ignorant ones look at me like that and call me names,” he replied. “And I am not going to waste my time trying to educate ignorant people. I am different and I am not afraid to be different.”

Those words were a revelation to me. My father was right. I was different and I had to learn to embrace my difference. My looks, my culture, my faith—these differences had made me who I was and were shaping the man I hoped to become. Others might not know who I was, but I did—and that was enough for me.

T
oward the end of 2001, I was having dinner with my friend Troy at Dave & Buster’s, a popular restaurant/arcade, when I noticed a pretty blonde at the bar. I kept looking over at her, and Troy kept urging me to get up and say hello. She had a friend with her, but her friend was
busy talking to a guy, and the blonde seemed a little lonely. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to approach her.

“What’s the worst that could happen?” Troy said.

“She tells me to get lost.”

“So what? There isn’t a guy in the world who hasn’t been told to get lost a dozen times in his life.”

“I can’t do it.”

“G, you’ve told me yourself that ‘Every success has its failures.’ You’re not going to get anywhere without trying.”

He had a point. I took a sip of vodka, took a deep breath, and marched over, and in the course of the next few minutes I managed to stumble my way through every platitude in the book. “Hey, how you doing? What’s your name? You alone? You come here often?” Somehow, probably because she was a little hammered, we managed to have a three-minute conversation,
at the end of which she actually gave me her phone number. I returned to the table, walking on air. I couldn’t believe it had worked.

With Troy Baloca at the Click Agents offices
.

“Wait two days, then call and ask her out,” Troy suggested.

Two days later, I called, and we agreed to meet for dinner the next night, at Dave & Buster’s, familiar ground. On the way over to her house I went into a panic. I called Troy and told him I had no idea what we were going to talk about. “What are the top ten questions for making conversation with a girl?” I asked.

“Are you kidding me?”

“No, man! I’m serious. I need help.”

“Ask her what she does for a living. What she does for fun. If she likes traveling. If she has hobbies. What her family’s like.”

“You’re going too fast!” I said.

“What? You’re writing this down?”

“I was trying.”

“Jesus. Then what? You’re going to palm your little crib sheet and steal looks at it at the dinner table?”

He had a point. “Okay. I get it. I’ll try to remember. What else?”

“Just be interested in her. People love it when you’re interested in them.”

It wasn’t a great night. I was
too
interested. When she said she liked going to the beach, I said, “That’s great! I like beaches too.” And when she said she enjoyed yoga, I said I’d been interested in yoga my whole life—that, as an Indian, yoga was in my blood.

Whenever I asked her a question, she was kind enough to answer it, but I was so focused on preparing the next question that I wasn’t listening, and sometimes I asked the same question twice. And when I ran out of things to ask, the silence felt interminable.

“How’s that burger tasting?”

As things continued to deteriorate, I got so nervous that my hands shook when I reached for my glass. She was kind enough to
pretend
not to notice.

After dinner, I walked her to her car and said good-bye. “Call me,” she said, but it was clear she didn’t mean it.

I phoned Troy on my way home and gave him a blow by blow. “I’m a total loser,” I said.

“I’m sure it wasn’t that bad,” he said.

“It was. Trust me.”

“Maybe you’re wrong, G. Give her a call in a couple of days and see what happens.”

I called her two days later, in the middle of the day, knowing she’d be at work—I didn’t have the guts to actually talk to her—and left a message. “Hey. It’s Gurbaksh. Give me a call some time. If you want.”

She never called, and I remember thinking that dating was a lot tougher than it looked. It had been easier to start a company than to take a woman to dinner. Then again, I was new to this. I’d never had a relationship with a woman. I didn’t even know what a relationship was supposed to be. I hadn’t gone to the senior prom; I left high school years two short of graduation. But even if I had stayed in school, I’m not sure I would have found a girl who was willing to go with me.

Several weeks later, still recovering, I was at an Indian restaurant with my brother, in Fremont, when I noticed two Indian girls at a nearby table, nearing the end of dinner. One got a call on her cell phone and a moment later she left in a hurry, but the friend stayed behind to finish her meal. “I think I’m going to go talk to that girl,” I told my brother. He glanced over at her and said nothing. He didn’t have much experience with women either. I took a deep breath, got to my feet, and went over and introduced myself.

Three days later, I was sitting across from her at a small, corner table at an Italian restaurant. We had a very nice time at dinner and started seeing each other regularly, and before long I understood what all the fuss was about. Women were great! Everything I had heard, and more! Now I knew what happened off-screen, after the Bollywood directors cut from those near-kisses to the wild, musical numbers. Suddenly the musical numbers actually made sense.

Unfortunately, the relationship didn’t last. It was mostly me. I worked five and six days a week, and I was constantly flying to and from Los Angeles. Despite my problems with the brass at ValueClick, I was still determined to make good things happen. I tried to explain this to her, but she didn’t seem to understand, and eventually we went our separate ways.

This business of living was certainly confusing.

That February, 2002, I finally decided to leave ValueClick. I told Sam that I was tired of trying to make myself heard and that the last couple of years had been a real disappointment for me. “I’m heavily invested in this company, and I’ve been trying desperately to make things happen, but nobody is really interested in what I have to say and nobody seems to give a damn about making this a more successful place.”

Sam argued with me. He said I was impatient—that things didn’t always move as quickly as one liked—and he asked me to stick around for another six months.

“What for?” I said. “You don’t need me. I’m absolutely useless to you. I walk into the office every morning and wonder why I’m there.”

“We need you, G,” he said. “You are critical to the success of this operation.” Really? That was news to me. “This company
doesn’t seem particularly interested in success,” I told Sam. “And it’s not from lack of trying on my part.”

“Give us two months,” he said. “Things will change.”

Two months later, with no changes having been made, I was gone. The following week, I cashed out a portion of my shares, drove over to the Lexus dealership, and bought an SUV RX400 and a GS400 sedan. “I need these delivered tonight,” I said. “Is that doable?”

“Yes sir,” came the reply. “Absolutely.”

I stopped by the dealership that evening and the two cars followed me to my parents’ home. Both vehicles had been decked out with red ribbons, just like in the television commercials. We pulled up and I rang the bell and asked my parents to step outside. “These are for you,” I said, gesturing like a game-show host.

They looked at the vehicles. Back at me. At the vehicles again. It wasn’t computing.

“For us?” my father said.

“Yes. For you. For being such great parents.”

My mother couldn’t believe it. She shook her head from side to side, visibly disturbed. “But, Gurbaksh, we can’t accept this. You need to save your money for a rainy day.”

“I think I can cover a few rainy days,” I replied.

“But you don’t even have a job,” my father protested.

“Dad, please. Take the cars for a spin.”

Almost reluctantly, they got into their respective vehicles and drove to the end of the block and back. Both of them were grinning when they got out. “It is the best car I have ever driven,” my father said. And I’m sure it was. In our family, whenever we saw a Lexus, we would point it out. Lexus, to us, was the epitome of perfection.

“How much will this be costing you each month?” my mother asked.

“Mom,” I said, “I paid cash.”

“Gurbaksh,” she said. “How is this possible?”

A few months later, I contacted the title company that held the mortgage on their house. It was a thirty-year mortgage, and they had twenty-eight years to go, but their anniversary was coming up, and I wanted to surprise them. Within forty-eight hours, I had wired the money to the bank, and my parents suddenly owned their home.

“This we definitely cannot accept!” my father said.

“Too late!” I said.

“But you are going to spend all your money on us,” my mother protested. “You need to be more careful. We are doing fine. Really.”

And the fact is, they
were
doing fine—my father was well satisfied at the post office, and my mother enjoyed working as a nurse—but I wanted more for them. I wanted them to have
the life they had dreamed of having when they left India for America.

Certainly, it was a little awkward for them, having me shower them with presents. But it gave me pleasure. It made me feel
great,
actually. And one of the lessons I took from the experience is that giving—genuine giving, giving from the heart—is way more satisfying than receiving. I would look into their eyes and I could see that they felt it was too much, but I could also see how much it meant to them. And beyond the emotional component, of course, was the simple fact that it made their lives easier. In addition, they no longer had to worry about Taj and Kamal, both of whom had become wealthy as a result of the merger. As for Nirmal, she was off in Utah with her husband, awaiting the birth of her second child, and her life seemed in order too.

Still, when all is said and done, money
does
change things, and it was no different for us. My success had a huge effect on family dynamics. I had made good in America, was living the dream that had eluded my father, and in some ways I began to usurp his role as the Chahal patriarch. I was the youngest, but I had become the one everyone turned to for answers, and it was quite the transition. As the youngest child, no one had ever asked for my opinion. In fact, on many occasions I was told, specifically, that my opinion counted for nothing. Now
they wanted my opinion on almost everything. Should grandmother have surgery? What kind of carpeting will look best in the master bedroom? Are we going to get the family together for the summer this year? I was consulted on decisions large and small, and I quite enjoyed it. It gave me something to do. After all, I was unemployed, with a full year left on my noncompete agreement, and I had so much leisure time on my hands that it was driving me crazy.

It was during this extended period of unemployment that I woke up in my Fremont apartment one morning and realized, perhaps for the first time, that I was really rich. I decided to do something crazy and spectacular for myself, so I bought a Lamborghini. As a kid, I had been a big fan of those Hot Wheels cars, which my parents used to find, on sale, at Toys R Us, and my very favorite was the Lamborghini, with the scissor doors that opened upward. Now that I had money, I thought it would be cool to own the real thing.

There were no Lamborghini dealerships in San Jose, and I didn’t feel like driving to Palo Alto, so I went onto eBay Motors and found one online. It was a silky gray Diablo GT Roadster Millennium Edition, only ten of which had ever been made, and it cost me $240,000, plus a little more to have it shipped to Fremont in a truck. The night before it arrived, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about my new car. I was going to have my very own Lamborghini. A
real
Lamborghini,
not the Hot Wheels version! Whenever I managed to drift off for an hour or two, I would dream about my new car, and when I jumped out of bed in the morning I immediately called the truck driver. “Are you still on schedule?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll be there right around two o’clock.”

An hour later I called again. “No delays?” I asked.

“No delays.”

“Any bad weather ahead?”

“Not that I know of.”

“So you’ll be here at two o’clock?”

“That’s what I told you an hour ago, and nothing has changed.”

Sure enough, he showed up right at two, and I ran outside to greet him, as excited as a ten-year-old. He was a little surprised to see I was so young, but he went about his business, quietly and efficiently, and at long last the car was sitting on the street in front of the apartment complex, gleaming. I noticed several people on the far sidewalk standing and staring, and I must admit, somewhat shamefully, that I was filled with pride. A Lamborghini isn’t something you see every day, certainly not in this neighborhood, and mine was a real knockout.