You may not have heard of Gurbaksh Chahal, but any 27-year-old who has already started and sold two companies for a total of $340 million, and has just secured more than $12 million in venture funding for his third, deserves the attention of all entrepreneurs, current and aspiring.
“G,” as he’s known, was born in India and came to the United States at age 3 with his parents. His father was a police officer and his mother was a nurse at a large hospital. They came to the U.S. virtually penniless. His father took a job as a security guard and his mother as a hospital orderly. To help out his family (he has three older siblings), G dropped out of school to start his first company, Click Agents, when he was 16. He sold the Internet advertising company two years later for $40 million. Then he started BlueLithium, another advertising business, which he sold three years later to Yahoo! for $300 million in cash. Last year he launched gWallet, a company in the digital payments business, which just closed on a major round of venture capital financing.
Aside from starting and selling companies for lots of money, G starred in Fox’s Secret Millionaire show and has appeared on Oprah and other major TV shows. He also published a memoir, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions
He clearly likes the spotlight (check out his website and do a Bing image search on his name). He lives in a $ 7 million San Francisco apartment and drives a $240,000 car. You may or may not relate to the flashiness of his image or his lifestyle, but he offers a plain-spoken manner and willingness to share some pretty valuable ideas.
In our interview (listen to the complete podcast), he talks about some issues that are very important to business owners:
- Can you be successful if you’re driven by the desire for a financial payoff instead of a passion for your business?
- Entrepreneurs need to be passionate but not emotional. How do you manage what seems like a contradiction?
- If you’ve never had business owners in your family, where does the entrepreneurial DNA come from?
- What’s the most important factor in hiring for your startup?
- Why he follows only 31 people on Twitter (he’s @gchahal), including Ryan Seacrest, Janet Jackson, Tony Robbins, Oprah, Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google), MC Hammer and Ivanka Trump. (He has about 3,900 followers on Twitter, and another 79,000+ fans of his Facebook page.)
- And a lot more…
Call Him G… As in ‘Gajilloinaire’ Entrepreneur originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 at 10:35:55.
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