The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions (5 page)

That first night—with the kitchen still a long way from unpacked—we splurged on Kentucky Fried Chicken. We ate with our hands, grinning at each other across the table. We were happy. We were
home.

The next day, before dinner, my father ran a brief
ardas
ceremony, in which we thanked God for his generosity. And over the next two weeks, we performed the
akhand
path, reading the entire Holy Book to give thanks, again, for our many blessings. The real ceremony usually takes place over the space of three days, and it is supposed to be performed, uninterrupted, by a team of professional readers, but my parents had jobs to go to and my siblings had school
and
jobs, so we spread it out over a longer period without suffering any ill effects.

So there we were, living the middle-class dream. My parents had made it. We had left the projects for a nice neighborhood. Things were looking good.

I, meanwhile, had become obsessed with CNBC, with making something of my life. I was driven. I wanted to be successful, and I wanted it to happen quickly. Inspired by the
many entrepreneurs I kept seeing on the news, I decided I would build a company from the ground up, something that was wholly mine. I remained drawn to the Internet, which was still in its embryonic stages. Nowadays, of course, everyone knows what the Internet is, and life would be almost unimaginable without it, but back then, it was still uncharted territory. I was fascinated by the madness and euphoria that seemed to affect everyone connected to it.

In the fall of 1998, I finally got accepted into the accelerated program at Accel Middle College. When I did the math, I realized I could be a doctor by the time I was twenty-five, which of course would have been the fulfillment of my parents’ dreams. But I had absolutely no interest in becoming a doctor—despite the fact that George Clooney made it look so cool on
ER.
My heart was in business.

Much as I disliked school, it was refreshing to be in an adult environment, among mature students who were thinking about their future.

The school hours were also a big plus. I had mandatory classes between twelve and two, Monday through Friday, but the rest of the time I was pretty much on my own. And I didn’t have to attend any of the college courses as long as I did the required work and kept up my grades. I also used the opportunity to challenge myself. For example, I was a bit of an introvert, so I signed up for public speaking. On the first day of
class, the professor launched right in. “I am going to hand out a list of topics, at random,” she said. “Whatever topic you get, be prepared to come in and make a speech about it next week.”

My topic was Viagra, which was new on the market. How was I going to talk about erectile dysfunction? This was an especially difficult topic for me, partly because I was a virgin and partly because the topic of sex—even chaste near-kisses in Bollywood movies—was completely taboo in our house. I couldn’t go to my mother and say, “Well, you’re a nurse, and there’s this new drug on the market, and maybe you can help me out with my talk.” And I couldn’t discuss sex with my siblings because I suspected that they knew even less about the subject than I did.

I thought back to an incident some years earlier, back in the eighth grade, when one of the girls in my class phoned the house.

“Who was that girl?” my father asked, visibly angry. “What kind of girl calls a boy? What did she want from you?”

“She wanted to know what we had to read for homework,” I said.

“That is unacceptable!” my father almost shouted.

On another occasion, a different girl called about another assignment, but I didn’t hear about it till the following day, when she revealed that my father had told her angrily
never to call the house again and abruptly hung up on her. “I’m sorry,” I said. “He was napping. The phone must have startled him.”

I’m not sure she believed me. My father was old-fashioned and rigid. He simply didn’t understand. He came from another world, and the idea that his children might adapt to this new, “morally questionable” land must have terrified him. I was interested in women, of course. Very interested. But I didn’t think they were interested in me.

At the end of the day, I realized I had to get through this class assignment without help, and I plunged in. I researched the subject in the library and on the Internet, and before long I had put together a coherent speech. I practiced at home, in front of the mirror, with the door locked: “Among the various causes . . . redirecting the flow of blood to the penis . . . the psychological implications . . .” and so on and so forth. On the big day, I got to my feet, made my way to the front of the class, and managed to get the nervous tremors under control. When my five-minute speech ended, right on time, the class applauded. I had been expecting a standing ovation, but I wasn’t totally crushed. And the professor really liked it: She gave me an A.

I also took Philosophy 101. I was just a kid, but I was curious. What does life
mean? What do the Great Thinkers say it means? What could I learn from them? I did a paper on Socrates, comparing his thinking to other philosophers of the time, and there are two quotes from him that I remember to this day. The first is: “Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, and undue depression in adversity.” And the other one, on a lighter note: “By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”

Gurbaksh at age sixteen, outside a classroom at Accel Middle College
.

I plugged along at Accel, though not with any great joy. Even here, most of my classes began to feel like a monumental waste of time, and I was eager to get on with my life. I wanted to do something in the world of Internet advertising, like that monolith DoubleClick, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about it.

Meanwhile, I looked around for other business opportunities. I noticed, for example, that a lot of blue-chip companies had been slow about adapting to the Web, so I went out and bought a dozen domain names for twenty bucks apiece. The process was simplicity itself: I went online and registered names like Dell.net, HP.net, and so forth, then parked myself in front of the family computer and wrote emails to each of the companies, offering to sell them their own domain names for $10,000. This did not go over very well. Forty-eight hours later, I received a package from Federal Express, which my mother found more than a little disturbing. “You are just a boy,” she said. “Who is sending you things by Federal Express?”

It was one of the companies I had contacted, and they weren’t exactly thrilled by my so-called offer. The letter was basically a cease-and-desist order, and it included a request that I immediately surrender the domain name. The next day there were two more FedEx letters, from two other companies, and the language was almost identical. One of them
talked about “trademark violations” and gave me only hours to make things right. I honestly hadn’t known I’d been infringing on a trademark, and I immediately wrote the companies to let them know that they could have their names back,
for free.
“I am just a high school kid,” I explained. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

I had gone into that misguided little venture thinking I was going to be rich, but I hadn’t done my homework. There is a big difference between trying to scoop up domain names for profit and infringing on a trademark—and I had done the latter. Somebody else, somebody smarter than I, had acquired the name “business.com,” and he subsequently sold it for $7.5 million. But he had done his research. Nobody owned that name. I promised myself that there would be no shortcuts next time. If I had a job to do, no matter how small, I would always do it right.

One day I found myself at a local flea market, talking to a guy who was selling refurbished printers for $50. I had seen identical printers on eBay for $300, so I bought his entire inventory, put them on eBay for an unbeatable $200, and made $150 on each one. Every week I would go back to the flea market and take the printers off the guy’s hands, and every week I was making money. Not much, mind you, but more than I would have been making at McDonald’s.

Still, I am not a patient man. I knew nothing happened overnight, but I also knew I had to have a concrete plan. I told myself that I would give myself five years to make my dreams come true and that everything I did from that day forth would be a step in that direction, even if that step seemed a little oblique. I wasn’t exactly sure what I hoped to accomplish, but Internet advertising remained at the top of my list. This was a world well worth exploring. Money was flowing from the more traditional venues, such as newspapers and television, to the Internet, and lots of young start-ups were looking for ways to cash in.

DoubleClick was still the Big Kahuna. The company was a leader in brand advertising, luring advertising dollars to the Internet in much the same way newspapers and magazines attracted advertising to their pages. But some of the newer outfits were introducing performance-based advertising. These companies—ValueClick, Advertising.com, Flycast, and others—had software that could track when someone clicked on an ad, and the advertiser was charged only if and when a buyer dragged a mouse across the screen and clicked through. I saw this as a tremendous opportunity. There weren’t that many guys in performance-based advertising
yet,
and I thought I could be one of them. What’s more, it looked to me as if performance-based advertising
was the wave of the future. That model gave advertisers a concrete way of gauging performance, and the company that delivered the most clicks, most consistently, was clearly going to get the most business. DoubleClick might have been the 800-pound gorilla in the world of brand advertising, but its creators could see that the business was changing, and they began to change with it.

In an effort to make sure I understood the intricacies of the business, I started calling around to see what I could learn from anyone who was even remotely connected to Internet advertising. As I mentioned, I was something of an introvert, and I was a little nervous, so I kept practicing my pitch in front of the mirror. I lowered my voice a notch and tried to sound older than my sixteen years. “Hello,” I said. “My name is Gary Singh”—Singh is my middle name—“and I do performance-based advertising.” That’s a fancy word for pay-per-click. “I have a Web site, and I want to know a little about your operation.”

I
did
have a Web site, but it was a bit on the cheesy side. Some weeks earlier, thinking ahead, I had used a rudimentary program called Microsoft Frontpage to design it. I’d done a decent job, but it didn’t look too professional, and I had promised myself to hire someone to redesign it as soon as I generated a little income. Still, the Web site wasn’t critical. I didn’t think anyone would actually look at it, and if they did,
all they’d learn was that I was an advertising network—like every other fledgling network.

Meanwhile, as a result of these many calls, I was learning something new every day. I discovered, for example, that the vast majority of the Web sites got their ads directly from advertising agencies. A successful ad agency might have ten or twenty clients, but you only needed
one
to get started. If an ad agency took a chance on me, and I delivered, I imagined the doors would swing wide open. And how hard could that be? It was basically a numbers game. He who delivers the big numbers wins.

I kept doing my homework, pumping various companies for information. I needed to know who their customers were; which Web site owners they were working with; how they got paid; and, even more important, how
fast
they got paid. And of course I was very curious about the kind of revenue-sharing agreements that existed among the ad network, the advertiser, and the Web site owners. In other words, who got what piece of the pie?

The Web was virtually limitless, I realized. I just had to convince
one
agency to give me
one
client and I’d be competing with the big boys.

In order to get started, however, I needed to find the right tracking software. I spent a couple of weeks looking around the Internet for a viable program.

Finally, I found a company in London that had a decent tracking system. It was less sophisticated than some of the other stuff I’d seen but looked like it might fit the bill, and I suspected I could get it for a fair price. I picked up the phone and made that first, fateful call. The company turned out to be a one-man operation, and the one man was eager to talk business. A week later, he flew to San Jose to meet me. I hadn’t told him I was sixteen, that I was Indian, or that I wore a turban, because I didn’t think any of that was germane. I was a businessman, interested in doing business. Period.

We met for dinner at a local Wyndham Hotel. My brother had a driver’s license, so he drove me over in Dad’s car, and I introduced him as my business partner. I was a little nervous, understandably, because I was eager to strike a deal, but the guy seemed even more nervous than me. He was twenty-one, very pale, and had a pronounced English accent. In the middle of dinner he confessed that he didn’t have much money. He said he saw this potential deal as an opportunity to keep his little company from bankruptcy. That certainly helped my cause: He was negotiating from a position of weakness, which immediately put me in the driver’s seat. I no longer had reason to be nervous. I had reason to
rejoice
.