The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions (13 page)

“Wow,” I said. I couldn’t believe it. I approached the car tentatively and opened the door. I studied the interior and
inhaled that new car smell. The car smelled expensive and powerful. Then I noticed an extra pedal next to the brake. “What’s that?” I asked the truck driver.

“What?”

“That pedal next to the brake?”

“That’s what they call a ‘clutch,’” he said.

“Clutch? Don’t tell me that. That’s not possible. I don’t know how to drive a car with a clutch. I can only drive an automatic.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, pal.”

By this time, I had signed for the car, and he was ready to leave, but I begged him to help me out, and I offered him $200 to spend an hour with me and teach me how to use the clutch.

“I can’t teach you in an hour,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m a fast learner.”

He agreed, somewhat reluctantly, and he got behind the wheel and we began tooling around the neighborhood. He showed me how it was done: You engage the clutch, shift into the next highest gear, release the clutch, and give it some gas.

As I watched, I found myself remembering my very first driving lesson, back when I was sixteen. My sister Kamal had a small, secondhand car, which got her to and from Kaiser Permanente, where she worked as a nurse, and one day I
asked her if she would teach me how to drive. She took me to a quiet, residential neighborhood and let me get behind the wheel. “That’s the gas. The pedal to the left is the brake. This is where you put the car into gear. Put it in D for drive.”

I started moving, but she immediately went into a panic and gave me an earful in a glass-shattering voice: “Watch out! Do this! Do that! Slow down!”

About a minute into it, I pulled over and told her to take the wheel. “I can’t drive with you screaming at me,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said, calming down. “This is my motherly side. And you’re my little brother. And I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“Forget it. I don’t want you to teach me anymore.”

We swapped places and rode home in silence.

The following week I approached my father and asked for his help, and the next day he took me out in his car. I got behind the wheel and took a few careful turns around the neighborhood, and in a matter of minutes he was directing me onto the freeway. It was an incredible rush. I was doing fifty, sixty miles an hour, and cars were whizzing past me. “Oh my God,” I said. “I’m driving!”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he joked.

“This is amazing!”

“If you want to teach someone to swim, the trick is to throw him into the water,” he said.

Over the course of the next two weeks, he took me driving a few more times. I kept improving, but I couldn’t parallel park to save my life, and I can’t parallel park to this day. That was my downfall when I went to take my driving test in San Jose—that damn parallel parking. But a week later I tried again, at the DMV in Gilroy, because I’d heard that they usually didn’t ask you to do any parallel parking, which turned out to be the case. I actually passed the driving test. I was stunned. For the next few days, I kept taking my wallet out of my pocket to admire my learner’s permit.

Now here I was, just a few years later, getting behind the wheel of my very own Lamborghini, learning how to use a clutch with the help of a very accommodating stranger. By the end of the hour, I could drive a stick shift. I felt like a total badass.

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). All 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.