Background and career
Gurbaksh Singh Chahal (born July 17, 1982) is an Indian-American entrepreneur who has founded, managed, and frequently sold several internet advertising companies. Chahal founded his first advertising network at the age of 16 and two years later became a millionaire after selling it to ValueClick for nearly $40 million. In 2004, he co-founded BlueLithium, which went on to become the fifth-largest internet advertising network in the United States before being sold to Yahoo in a $300 million deal. Chahal has since founded other internet-based companies including RadiumOne, Gravity4, and BNN Breaking. He is currently the CEO of VendorCloud and RedLotus. In 2010, Bloomberg Businessweek named him to its list of the 15 best young entrepreneurs of the year. In April 2011, Men's Health called him one of "The World’s Richest and Fittest Guys", reporting his net worth to be $150 million. The next year, Chahal was listed among the 25 richest entrepreneurs under the age of 30 by Complex magazine, and in 2013 he was one of Ernst and Young's entrepreneurs of the year. Also in 2013, Chahal went to trial on charges of domestic violence and battery; although he pleaded not guilty, he was convicted and sentenced to probation. He was fired as CEO of RadiumOne by the board of directors. In 2016, after he was charged with domestic violence against a second woman, his probation was revoked. He resigned as CEO of Gravity4 and served six months in jail.
Chahal was born on July 17, 1982, in Tarn Taran Sahib, a city near Amritsar in India's Punjab state, in a Sikh family. He was the youngest of four children. His father, Avtar Singh, was a police officer and mother, Arjinder Chahal, was a nurse in Tarn Taran Sahib. In 1985, during the aftermath of the Khalistani insurgency, Chahal's parents emigrated to the United States, his father having won a green card lottery. Chahal was raised by his grandmother for a short time. He emigrated the following year, at age four. The family lived in a one-bedroom apartment in San Jose, California. His father took a job with the Postal Service and his mother worked as an nurse's assistant. He has two elder sisters — Nirmal and Kamal, and an elder brother Taj Chahal; the latter two had worked with Chahal in his ventures. His family were devout followers of Sikhism and Chahal and his brother used to wear a turban, a type of headwear based on cloth winding. He has said that he was the subject of intense racial bullying from the age of 5 in the local elementary school. At the age of 10, he was forced to remove his turban, at knife-point. Chahal was an average student during schooling, earning B and C grades in his studies. To support his family, he bought second hand printers from the local market for $50 and resold printers on eBay for $200 at the age of 15. Chahal bought the Dell.net and HP.net domain names in 1997 and sent a letter to the companies offering to sell the names back to them for ten thousand dollars. He started receiving cease-and-desist letters and had to give the domains back. All of his family members had to work double shifts after his father incurred losses in stock market trading.
Although his parents hoped he would become a doctor, 16-year-old Chahal dropped out of Independence High School in 1998 to pursue a career in internet advertising. While still in high school, he had taken college-level computer courses on the campus of what is now Evergreen Valley College. After leaving high school, Chahal launched a digital advertising company called ClickAgents, which as recently as 2008 he asserted was the riskiest decision he has ever made.
Chahal started his career buying and reselling printers on eBay, after being turned away from a job at McDonald's. His initial forays into the business world were to support his family and largely derived from his father's interests in stock trading.
In 1998, at the age of 16, Chahal founded ClickAgents, which was among the first pay-per-click networks. It started as an advertising network focused on performance-based advertising, on the lines of DoubleClick. By 2000, it had numerous customers and had 34 employees. It was acquired by ValueClick in November 2000 in an all-stock deal valued at nearly $40 million, which made Chahal an overnight millionaire.
In 2004, Chahal founded BlueLithium, a company that specialized in behavioral targeting, a technique whereby web users' online habits are tracked in order to show customized ads. The ad-tech industry praised it with Business 2.0 listing it among the 11 most disruptive innovations of 2006, and by the same year, it had expanded operations to other countries, having purchased AdRevolver. The same year, the company again received the title of Top Innovator of the Year for 2006. MingleNow, a social network was simultaneously launched, which was accorded a partnership deal by Anheuser-Busch. It was named among the top 100 private companies of America by AlwaysOn for three consecutive years and in 2007, Yahoo! bought it for $300 million in cash; Chahal remained CEO during interim period. It was the fifth largest ad-network in the United States and the second largest in the UK at the time of sale.
