The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions (9 page)

There were times when I didn’t really believe all these good things were really happening. I kept taking the company to the next level, and to the next level after that, but sometimes I’d look at my reflection in the mirror—at that turbaned seventeen-year-old, staring back at me—and I’d be filled with doubt. Up until that point, I’d been operating almost exclusively on the phone, doing business with people who had no idea I was just a kid. But the company was evolving at a spectacular rate, and I knew that someday soon I would have to come out of hiding. I began to give serious thought to getting rid of the turban.

Still, it was a very tough decision. In the Sikh religion, males are required to wear turbans, and they are not permitted to cut their hair—
ever
. The turban didn’t mean that much to me—with or without it, I was still a Sikh—but over the years I had been ridiculed for wearing it, and this had caused
me more than my fair share of anguish. I wanted to talk to my father about the possibility of removing it and of cutting my hair, but I knew he would never agree to it, and I was deeply conflicted.

For a time, I tried not to think about this. I put it out of my mind and focused on growing my business. Click Agents was becoming a force in the advertising world. We were noticed for all the right reasons: We were reliable, we produced results, and we were beginning to separate from the pack.

Whenever I walked into the office, I would think,
Here I am, where I belong
. I loved work. I loved success. I would reach my desk, take a seat, and it was almost like a hit of adrenaline.
How do I make today an even better day than yesterday?
I would ask myself.
What do I have to do to leave the competition in the dust?

Seriously, now—who could ask for anything more?

A
s 1999 got under way, Silicon Valley was still caught up in the dot-com euphoria. Wall Street was as strong as ever, and the Nasdaq was going through the roof. Venture capitalists were still spending obscene amounts of money on start-ups whose entire value was their tenuous connection to the Internet; college kids with
vague ideas became instant millionaires; and companies with unproven business models were still executing IPOs, their crazy stock prices based on little more than the relative novelty of the dot-com concept. Everyone wanted to
get big fast
, and there was so much venture capital around that just about all of them were given a chance to do so. Lots of these new companies
did
get rich, but the vast majority went bust. Most of them you never heard of; some might ring a faint bell: Pets.com. Flooz.com. Kozmo.com. Etoys.com. Webvan.com. Boo.com (one of the biggest disasters in dot-com history). The list of casualties was endless.

There was one thing that set Click Agents apart from the many failures, however, and it was pretty simple: We were actually making money. We were a viable business. We had nothing to prove.

In January 2000, less than a year after my official launch, I got a call from an investment banker in New York. “I hear Click Agents is doing very well,” he said. “Have you thought about selling your company?”

He flew out from New York to meet me, and I was actually a little nervous. I was seventeen years old, and I had a beard, which made me look a little older, but I also had a turban, and I was frankly worried about the kind of impression I was going to make. He didn’t seem at all put out—or, if he was, he didn’t show it. “I’m going to put together a list of
companies that might be interested in buying you, and we’ll go through the list together, and then we’ll pitch Click Agents to them for a hundred million dollars.”

I don’t mean to be immodest here, but that didn’t seem like an unreasonable number. Other companies that had no business being in business, and were in fact slated for the slag heap of dot-com history, had been evaluated at much higher prices, so this was actually a reasonable number. I was being valued on performance, results, and revenue, unlike some of those other companies, which were still talking about their
potential
. My fundamentals were real. I was running an actual business.

A few weeks later, the investment banker arranged for me to fly to New York to meet with the brass at DoubleClick, the company that had initially sparked my interest in this whole crazy business. I was a little nervous, understandably, but on my way to the meeting I kept telling myself to be fearless. That’s key in any business situation. If you show fear, they sense weakness, and that can be deadly. You must always negotiate from a position of strength.
They want me
, I kept telling myself.
They need me
.

When I arrived, I was in total awe of their offices. They had sleek, high-end furnishings, magnificent views of the Hudson River, and a basketball court on the roof. It was an incredibly posh environment, the exact opposite of our offices in
San Jose, and this only added to my tension. Still, the meeting went very well. None of them seemed fazed by either my youth or my appearance, and they listened attentively when it was my turn to speak. I described my performance-based model, talked about the speed at which the company was growing and about our profitability, and when I left their swank offices I felt as if I had definitely piqued their interest.

By the time I got back to San Jose, though, it was clear that DoubleClick was not going to be buying Click Agents, but they did arrange for us to meet with Value Click, another big player. I flew down to Los Angeles and took a cab to the ValueClick offices in West Lake Village—I was too young to rent a car—where I met with Jim Zarley, the CEO, and a couple of other executives, including Sam Paisley. The conversation was a little awkward, mostly because I needed to protect my company’s ideas, and I was careful not to reveal too much about our business model. Still, I knew what they wanted to hear, and I wasn’t shy about discussing the bottom line: Click Agents was a hugely profitable company, and it was continuing to grow at a robust pace.

But I didn’t have to say much beyond that. In the middle of our guarded conversation, I got the distinct impression that they had already made up their minds. They needed us—we were taking away market share—and they were eventually going to buy us. Maybe not that day, or the day after
that, or even in the next month or two, but I was confident it would happen before long.

On my way out of the office, I overheard a few whispered comments about the turban, and I found it more than a little disturbing. These people were either bigoted or plain stupid. The turban is a religious symbol, no different from a gold crucifix or a yarmulke, and I thought the behavior of those few employees was both childish and disrespectful.

On the flight home, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I was still thinking about it long after I’d landed. Up until that point, I had been a disembodied voice, communicating on the phone or via e-mail, hidden away in my office. But my company was evolving, and it was time to show my face to the world. I needed to be comfortable with my appearance.

Two weeks later, I found out that DoubleClick had decided to invest in ValueClick, not in Click Agents, which was not totally unexpected. In March, with the Nasdaq at over
5000 and close to peaking, ValueClick came out with an initial public offering (IPO). It sold for $18 a share, becoming one of the last companies to go public before the dot-com bust. The price quickly shot up to $24, but it began to sink almost immediately, and it dropped all the way to $7. At that point, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I heard from ValueClick again. The company would be looking for an investment to boost its value, and we were just the ticket. Click Agents was still going strong and still making serious money.

As I waited for that to happen, I remembered that first meeting with ValueClick, and I went to see my sister, Kamal. She was in her office, working away.

“I need you to do me a favor,” I said.

“What?”

“Go with me to get my hair cut.”

“What? Are you crazy? Dad is going to kill you!”

“I don’t care,” I said.

We got into my Lexus and drove to Supercuts. When we walked inside, everyone turned to stare.
A guy with a turban getting a haircut. How weird is that?
Suddenly I was afraid to my very core. Maybe my father would never forgive me.

I could feel my heart beating like crazy.

“You all right?” my sister asked.

“No,” I said. “But my mind’s made up.”

When it was my turn, I sat in the chair, removed my turban, and let seventeen years’ worth of hair fall to my shoulders. “Cut it,” I said.

“All of it?”

“Well, no. Just, you know—I want a regular haircut, like a regular person.”

In less than an hour, it was gone. I looked in the mirror and hardly recognized myself, but I liked what I saw.

Kamal and I got back into the Lexus and made our way back to the office. “You look so different,” Kamal said.

I took my eyes off the road and found her staring at me. “Different good or different bad?” I asked.

“Neither. Just different. It’s going to take me a while to get used to it.”

“I like it,” I said. “Maybe people will actually stop staring when I walk into a room.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but you better brace yourself for Mom and Dad.”

“I don’t know why they’re going to be upset,” I said. “I’m still me. I love my family, I love my culture, and I love my religion. The only thing that has changed is my physical appearance, and I don’t need to be defined through the way I look.”

“Well, if I were you, I’d still brace myself,” she said.

When I walked into the office, I got a lot of strange looks from the employees, but they said nothing, and they got used
to it pretty quickly. What choice did they have? I was the boss.

Out in the street, the change was instant. Without the turban, people no longer noticed me, and I loved it. I could walk into Starbucks, stop for a magazine, pump gas, and I was
just like everybody else
. It felt great.

Deep down inside, though, I was still the same guy. I was still a proud Sikh through and through. In removing the turban, I wasn’t less of a Sikh and I wasn’t disavowing my religion. And in fact I didn’t believe that in cutting my hair I would be somehow offending God. With or without the turban, I was a man of faith. I knew that without faith nothing was possible and that with faith nothing was impossible.

At the end of the day, issues of faith notwithstanding, I still had to face my parents, and when I walked through the front door of the house my heart started again beating like crazy. My mother was the first to see me, and her mouth dropped open in shock. She was so horrified that she couldn’t speak. She turned away and walked out of the room, supporting herself against the walls. “Just wait until your father gets home,” she said weakly.

I waited, growing increasingly nervous. Months earlier, when the idea of getting rid of the turban first began to percolate, I had thought about asking for his blessing, but I knew that it was never going to happen. And if I had gone
ahead and done it at that point, against his stated wishes, it would have been much worse. Still, this was bad enough, and I was bracing myself for a real firestorm when he came home.

The moment he walked through the front door, he delivered on my expectations. “I cannot believe you did this!” he said, shouting. “You disrespect your family, and, worse, you disrespect your religion.”

“It has nothing to do with respect or with religion,” I said.

“I came to this country to make a new life, but I never lost my faith!” he continued, drowning me out. “You are a coward! You are a huge disappointment to me! I will remember this day as one of the most disappointing days of my life!”

It was all I could do not to burst into tears, but the Chahal men seldom express emotion. It hurt, though, to have disappointed my father. As every child knows, letting your parents down can be painful. At the end of the day, though, even in that tough, emotional state, I knew I had made the right decision. Life is about choices, and you can’t make everyone happy, so at some point you have to learn to live for yourself. This applies in business situations too, by the way. When you make decisions, it’s fine to listen to the people around you, but the final decisions need to be yours. If you can’t trust yourself to make decisions, you’ll never succeed. And if you
make the wrong decision from time to time, don’t sweat it—you won’t make the same mistake again.

For weeks and months afterward, I would look up to find my parents staring at me as if I were a stranger. And in some ways I
was
a stranger. My father had come to America to live out his dream, only to find that his son had dreams of his own.

For a period, I avoided my parents and they avoided me. I found myself spending more time with my grandmother, who was in declining health. She was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and there were days when it was impossible for her to connect the dots. Sometimes she didn’t know who I was. I would sit with her, holding her hands in mine, and patiently answer her questions.

“What are you doing for work?” she would ask again.

“I have a company that makes a lot of money, and I think I’m going to be selling it for millions of dollars,” I said. “We’re going to be rich. Good things are in store for the whole family. What do you think of that? Your grandson is a big success.”

“Success? Success is to be married with three children.
That
is success.”

I’m sure she believed that, but it would have been nice if she’d been clear-headed enough to be happy for me. Half the time she confused me with my brother, who was not married either. And she was fixated on this marriage business. Two or
three times a week she’d ask me why I wasn’t married, and wondered what I was waiting for. “You are not a young man anymore,” she would say.

“I’m seventeen,” I protested, laughing.