Gurbaksh Chahal

Gurbaksh Singh Chahal (born July 17, 1982) is an Indian-American internet entrepreneur who is the founder of several internet advertising companies.

Chahal founded his first advertising network at an age of 16 and two years later, became a millionaire after selling it to ValueClick at nearly $40 million.

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.

At age 16, in the year 1998 Chahal dropped out of Independence High School to pursue a career in Internet advertising; his parents wished him to be a doctor.

While still in high school, he took college course on the campus of what is now Evergreen Valley College.

In 1998 Chahal launched a digital advertising company with the name ClickAgents, Chahal has since noted this to be the biggest risk-prone decision taken in his career.

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, he co-founded BlueLithium, which went on to become the fifth largest ad-network in United States, before being sold to Yahoo in a $300 million deal.

Chahal has since founded other internet-based companies including RadiumOne and Gravity4.

He is currently the CEO of VendorCloud and RedLotus.

In 2010, Bloomberg Businessweek named him among the 15 best young entrepreneurs of the year.

In April 2011, Men's Health reported his net worth to be $150 million.

In 2012, Chahal was listed among the 25 richest entrepreneurs under the age of 30 by Complex magazine.

In 2013, he was named as one of the entrepreneurs of the year by Ernst and Young.

In 2013, Chahal was convicted of domestic violence and battery and was sentenced to probation.

In court he pled not guilty.

He was terminated from his role 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.