
How A 26-Year-Old Built A $100 Million Net Worth - AndrewWarner
http://mixergy.com/gurbaksh-chahal/
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rewind
I'm a big fan or your style and work, Andrew, and I like the attention-
grabbing titles you choose, but this one is a bit over the top. Should really
be "How a 26-Year-Old Built a $100 Million Net Worth In Under 10 Years". The
current version reads too much like it's a 16-year-old who's worth $100
million (a bit bait-ish). It's like if you write an article about Bill Gates
titled "How a 16-Year-Old Became a Billionaire in 15 Years" ;-)

Love the site and love what you're trying to do with your business model
(whether it works or not). Keep the interviews coming.

~~~
AndrewWarner
I don't see the headline as misleading, but maybe I'm too close to it right
now.

I changed it on my site.

I left the reference to him being 16 because that's when he got into the ad
business. But I said he was 25 when his net worth hit $100 mil.

By the way, including dollar signs in so many of my headlines feels out of
touch with my mission. I wish I knew a better way to communicate the size and
importance of my guests' achievements in 10 words or less.

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akc
I used to work at Yahoo. This guy was a tool. A cursory search on Google
explains all.

[http://images.google.com/images?oq=gurb&sourceid=chrome&...](http://images.google.com/images?oq=gurb&sourceid=chrome&q=gurbaksh+chahal&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=KqeRS8avPI3p8QaFsd32BA&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CCcQsAQwAw)

~~~
pedalpete
Why are there so many photos of him without a shirt on?

~~~
bobbyi
You don't get to be a millionaire by throwing your money away on frivolous
things like clothing for your upper body.

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CoachRufus87
i'm surprised by the level of hate exhibited in these comments...sure the guy
has lots of pics with no shirt & maybe he comes across as narcissistic &
arrogant, but he's also a high school drop-out & the son of poor immigrants
who ended up coming to our country and creating an immense amount of wealth
for himself plus jobs for others... how many of us can say we've done even 10%
of that? i know i can't (at least not yet)

~~~
mortenjorck
Success is demanding. Extreme success is extremely demanding. I don't think
any of us truly know how we deal with success until we experience it. I'm not
defending Chahal's arrogance, but neither can I claim to understand his
perspective.

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jgilliam
I didn't realize the Mixergy guy is the same guy who called himself "G" on the
reality show, Secret Millionaire.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMAKwl1GW-I>

~~~
jackowayed
He's not "the Mixergy guy", he's the one the Mixergy guy, Andrew Warner, was
interviewing that day.

And Andrew mentioned that in passing. I think right at the beginning.

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Confusion
_Oprah showed how dramatic his transformation for internet entrepreneur,
Gurbaksh Chahal_

As nobody has yet commented on this, I have started doubting my command of the
English language, but here goes: it's hard to take a site seriously when it
botches the first sentence of an article like this. No care for the language
== no care for the facts.

~~~
PostOnce
Welcome to the interwebs. Leave your grammar and vocabulary at the door.

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constantinople
"And the women who love him. Today on Jerry Springer."

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coryl
I think his story highlights the importance of picking your markets, or being
in the right place at the right time.

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budu3
I love Andrew's interview but his headlines are beginning to get monotonous.

~~~
maxklein
How many different variations of headlines do you think exist? You think that
it's possible to just come up with new and exciting headlines all the time?

This headline is descriptive and it works. Just because you've seen other
headlines like that does not mean that new people discovering the site have.

~~~
budu3
I don't think it's that hard to come up with a different headline for each
interview. That said, the headlines don't take anything away from the
interviews. I guess the "How a --- made a $1 billion by ----" headlines are
part of Mixergy's brand.

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Raphael
Eternal youth potion? (I'd write "starting at 16".)

~~~
Raphael
Cool, title changed from "How A 16-Year-Old Built A $100 Million Net Worth In
Under 10 Years".

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quizbiz
He knows how to make money off of making money very well. But he's no hacker.

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rortian
Short of a weird issue with is first company. Check this out:

>And ValueClick in Westlake Village, Calif., which offers performance-based
online advertising services, acquired Click Agents.com in Fremont, Calif.,
which offers those same services. As part of the deal, Click Agents
shareholders will receive 5.3 million shares of ValueClick stock, valued at an
estimated $20 million to $24 million.

>Click Agents, which has 31 employees and revenue estimated at $14 million,
will initially operate as an autonomous unit of ValueClick. Gurbaksh Chahal,
26, chairman, chief executive and president at Click Agents, continues as
president.

(Source: search nytimes for ClickAgents its November 8, 2000 (the url is
obnoxious)).

(26 in 2000? Weird)

He likes to say $40 million since that was the value of the shares when the
deal was announced. Sort of silly but that is true. However he asserts that he
got some amount in between. He could of but not if he didn't own all of the
shares (he could of but that would be weird since he was talking about sweat
equity) or if he sold between 2001 and early 2003.

Interestingly, if he had just held those shares until May 25, 2007 he (or the
shareholders collectively) would have had $173.2 million.

This didn't come up in the interview but this comes out about BlueLithium on
nytimes:

>It is backed by venture capital firms including WaldenVC and 3i.

[http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/yahoo-buys-
blue...](http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/yahoo-buys-bluelithium-
for-300-million)

Given that the VCs had a portion of this venture as well as the people from
Belarus that got $15 million its seems likely that G could have gotten more
money by selling ValueClick's stock after holding it then doing any work in
that period of time.

