The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions (14 page)

When I spoke to my father about it, he repeated what he had told me years earlier: “Some people are like crabs. If they can’t get over the wall, they will pull you down to keep you from climbing over.”

I was also reminded of something I’d once heard said by Simon Cowell, one of the judges on
American Idol.
He claimed that he found it depressing whenever any of his friends succeeded; the interviewer laughed, thinking he was kidding. But Simon wasn’t kidding at all. He
hated
to see his fellow crabs making it over the wall.

I also heard a famous quote on the subject, attributed to author Gore Vidal: “It’s not enough to succeed; others must fail.”

I don’t understand that kind of thinking. I’m not like that. When I see someone succeed, I find it inspiring. I’m not jealous. I’m not resentful. On the contrary, I figure if they can do it, I can do it too. But some people seem to resent success in
others, and it was clear that I wasn’t about to change their thinking.

Unhappy with the way things continued to deteriorate at Planet Bollywood, I looked for other ways to occupy my time, and at one point I flew to San Jose, Costa Rica, to meet with the owners of a Korean-based software firm. They had expressed an interest in working with me, and for the next few months I flew back and forth between the two San Joses, trying to help them get their company off the ground.

While this was going on, I got a call from Sam, back at ValueClick, who was eager to talk business. “You are the second largest shareholder in the company,” he said. “The only person who has more shares than you is the founder. You have more shares than
I
do. We were wondering if you might want to sell your stock to us. We’d be willing to buy you out for cash.”

This sounded a little suspect. When the shares were at $7.50, they had been worth $40 million. At $2.50, they had lost two-thirds of their value. Sam offered me $3 a share, which didn’t seem particularly generous, but I told him I’d think about it. Before I did anything, however, I wanted more information on what the company had been up to lately. I’d been out of the loop for a year, so I was in the dark about recent developments. Sam said he didn’t have a problem with that; he’d put something in the mail to me and send
me the relevant information as soon as I signed. In a matter of days, I received a document stating that ValueClick intended to buy all of my stock at $3 a share but that nothing would move forward until I’d received the requested information on the company’s near-term goals. It was a nonbinding agreement, and the document talked only about the
proposed
sale, so I went ahead and signed it.

One Sunday night, I returned home from yet another trip to Costa Rica and fell to bed exhausted. Just before eight the following morning, my phone rang. It was my brother, and he was in a panic. “Get over to the restaurant right now!” he said.

“Dude,” I said, still only half awake. “I got in late last night after a long-ass flight from Costa Rica. I’m beat.”

“The restaurant is on fire,” he said.

I jumped out of bed, dressed in a hurry, and raced over, and I arrived to find the place engulfed in flames. Fire engines were everywhere, but the firemen were fighting a losing battle. The restaurant looked as if it had been bombed, and it appeared deliberate.

In the days ahead, we talked to the fire department and to the police, and from everything we saw and heard it looked like a case of arson. But they had nothing to go on, so they did nothing. That’s when we started hearing the rumors. People in the Indian community—my own people—were saying that
the restaurant had turned out to be a bad investment and that we had burned it down for the insurance money. They were wrong on both counts. The restaurant had been a very good investment, but it had attracted the wrong crowd, and after only four months it was all over. And we didn’t have enough insurance to cover a fraction of what we had put into it. In fact, we lost a small fortune on the venture. Still, the rumors persisted, and there was absolutely nothing we could do to dispel them.

The idea that people in our own community, fellow Indians, would think we could be so dishonest was very upsetting to us both. Our intentions had never been anything less than honorable.

My brother and I went to talk to the arson unit again, begging them to investigate, but they said they had already tried. “We couldn’t find anything,” they said. “It certainly looks like arson, but maybe it’s not arson. Maybe it was just a freak accident.”

For weeks afterward, in my own neighborhood, at the coffee shop, at the grocery store, I would find people smiling at me conspiratorially, as if I’d gotten away with burning down my restaurant. Again,
these were my own people.
What part of this didn’t they understand? Even if the place had been fully insured, which it wasn’t, the restaurant was not and never had been about the money. I had been trying to do
something for the community, and clearly that had been a big mistake. It taught me yet another lesson: Forget noble motivations. Pursue your own interests and focus on making yourself happy. That’s what I’d done with Click Agents, and I had made myself very happy indeed. I had also made a lot of other people happy, people who had worked hard to make the company a success. Many of them would never have to work another day in their lives, and that had nothing to do with noble intentions. I had pursued my dreams and others had shared in my success.

After the fire, I went into a funk. For a while, I felt completely lost. I was an entrepreneur, and I missed exercising that talent. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I was restless and unfocused and probably more than a little irritable, and my parents became deeply concerned. “Why don’t you go back to school?” my father said. “It’s been three years since you dropped out, and you’re very close to getting your high school diploma.”

“What’s the point?” I said. “It feels like a giant backward step.”

“The point? The point is this: One day you will have kids of your own, and they will give you trouble. ‘My dad doesn’t have a high school degree and look at him! Why should I pay attention in school? I want to be a dropout, like him.’”

Okay. Point taken. A few weeks later, I found myself scrambling to complete my high school requirements while
taking a slew of new courses at San Jose State. I tried to be optimistic. I told myself that experience might lead to something new and exciting.

One day an Indian girl approached me after class. “You’re Gurbaksh Chahal, aren’t you? The restaurant owner.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I hear you burned the place down for the insurance money.”

Man, it was all I could do not to explode. I tried to count to ten, but I only got as far as five. “Listen to me,” I said. “I don’t know who told you that story, but it’s bullshit. If you want to know the truth, I’m a cheap bastard, and I was grossly underinsured. I got $100,000 from the insurance company. That’s it. And after paying off my debts and the lawyers, I was left with nothing. Zip. Zero. I put a million dollars of my own money into that place, and I lost every penny of it.”

I guess my outburst startled her a little. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“You should be,” I said, and I stormed off.

Two weeks later, I dropped out of school for a second time. It was boring. Nothing about it was remotely interesting to me. And you know, I’m probably going to be taken to task for this, but I have no regrets about dropping out—not the first time and not that second time. I am sure I would have learned plenty in school; I might have even learned a few
things that would have helped me make smarter, more informed decisions; but I’m just not a textbook kind of guy. And sure, there are things I don’t know—I don’t know much about art or literature—but if and when the time comes, I can pursue those interests on my own. So no: absolutely no regrets. Maybe in the early part of my adventures other people would have been more comfortable if I’d had a degree—the stereotypes, remember?—but a degree wouldn’t have made real difference in my life.

I went back to my apartment in Fremont and waited for my noncompete agreement to expire. As I began to think about my next venture, I made a horrendous discovery: The team at ValueClick had purchased the balance of my shares at $3 a share, transferred them out of my account, and left me with the proceeds from the sale. This was bad enough, but it was only the beginning: Right on the heels of that transaction,
the price of the stock began to climb.
I didn’t understand it. I had signed an agreement in which I agreed to the
possibility
of selling my shares back to the company, but somebody had jumped the gun. Clearly this was a mistake. Was it possible the mistake had been mine?

I called Sam to find out what was going on, but I didn’t hear back from him, and I kept calling without success. He ignored both my calls and my e-mails.

In a matter of months, ValueClick hit $8 a share, and I was completely dumbfounded. Since I wasn’t getting answers from Sam and the team, I hired a lawyer and sued them for securities fraud. I was the second largest shareholder in the company, and the company had a fiduciary responsibility to me. Even if the mistake had been mine, the situation didn’t add up. As you might imagine, the whole thing was incredibly depressing. Every time the stock went up a point, I despaired a little more.

My father tried to comfort me, quoting from a scripture: “Hatred finds a place in hell; forgiveness is where He is.”

A month later, while the lawyers were still battling it out, I left Fremont and took a high-end apartment in Santana Row, an upscale development just outside San Jose. The area had dozens of restaurants and bars and chic stores, and I liked the fact that I could walk to all of them.

I spent Christmas with my family, as always. Christmas is not a Sikh tradition, but we celebrate in our own small way. When I was younger, we’d save our money and our parents would drive us to McFrugal’s or to the 99-cent store, and we’d buy presents for each other—presents that actually meant something. A little teacup for my mother, say. Or a pocket comb for my father’s flowing beard. I was older now, and I could afford more, but I still put plenty of thought into the
presents. My dad got a Rolex. My mother got several cashmere sweaters. And my grandmother got a beautiful cane because she was having trouble walking. She was deteriorating in other ways, too. By this point, she was so physically weak that she’d sit at the table, immobile, and we had to remind her to eat. It was painful for me. I thought back to the way she had comforted us as kids, and I wanted to do the same for her: I wanted to tell her that everything was going to be okay, but of course it wasn’t going to be okay, and it broke my heart. This was the woman who had hidden my bad report cards from my parents, who had let me sleep in her bed when I was afraid of the boogeyman, who had comforted me when I was reluctant to go to my own parents for comforting, and Alzheimer’s was slowly and surely turning her into a stranger. She was the pillar of the Chahal family, so it was the one sour note in an otherwise pleasant Christmas.

As 2003 got under way, Taj and I decided to buy some property. He was still living at home and figured it was time to move out, and much as I loved my Santana Row apartment I was throwing my money away on rent.

We went to look at a couple of houses at The Ranch on Silver Creek, an upscale country club development on the outskirts of San Jose, and ended up buying unfinished homes right next to each other. For the next six months I spent a lot of time and money fixing up my place. It was a 5,000-square-foot
house, and I installed built-ins, and miles of marble, and a state-of-the-art sound system. Every room in the house was wired, including the bathrooms. But whenever I was over there, checking on the workmen, I would look out at the sweeping, golf course views and wonder what I’d been thinking. I didn’t play golf and I had no interest in playing golf. The whole place—the
idea
of the place—was way too Zen for me. I like action and adrenaline, and golf seemed to be the antithesis of that.

During this period I started dating again and met a few interesting women, but nothing serious developed. Part of it was my problem, admittedly. Most of the women knew who I was, and it was hard to tell whether their interest was genuine. I think I erred on the side of paranoia.

I had similar problems with friends. I was close to guys like Troy and Krishna, who wanted nothing from me except friendship, but a lot of other people seemed to be forever on the make. They wanted a deal or a job or a loan or a free dinner. Regarding the dinner business, these lesser friends always stuck me with the tab. The check would arrive, and they’d sit there as if they’d suddenly lost the use of their arms, and I’d find myself reaching for my credit card. I understood their thinking, of course—they figured a day’s worth of interest on my money added up to more than I could spend in a month—but that wasn’t the point. It would have been nice if they had
reached for the tab from time to time, if only as a gesture, but they never did, and I eventually stopped seeing them. I take friendship seriously, and I have since learned how to spend my time wisely surrounded only by genuine people. It’s funny, because I’d already learned this lesson—the notion that you need to surround yourself with people who want you to succeed—but I couldn’t always put it into practice. I like people. I like having friends. And sometimes I’m a little too forgiving. But at the end of the day I had to learn to watch my back, because sometimes staying on top is harder than getting there. Never lose sight of the definition and presence of the word “real.”

Later that same year I discovered Las Vegas. Troy was about to get married, and he had his bachelor party in Sin City. I was among the half dozen friends he asked along, and I fell in love with the place almost immediately. I liked the energy. I liked the restaurants. I liked the night life. Most of all, I liked the anonymity. Back in San Jose, where information was only a mouse click away, people knew way too much about me, most of it wrong. But in Vegas, where I didn’t even have to share my name, I could be whoever I wanted to be.