By Cara Newman, YOUNG MONEY Editor
23 February 2009

Gurbaksh Chahal (aka “G”) is the young entrepreneur behind Click Agents (which he sold for $40 million at age 18) and Blue Lithium (which he sold to Yahoo for $300 million at age 25). G recently bought a $6.9 million penthouse in San Francisco, published his first book, The Dream, a memoir of his road to success, and filmed his first television role in Fox’s Secret Millionaire.

In Secret Millionaire, young, sheltered, multi-millionaires go “undercover” in impoverished neighborhoods as… poor people. They spend a whole ten days living on a welfare budget and meeting as many people as they can until they find someone worthy enough to get a piece of their golden pie.

YOUNG MONEY spoke to G about the start of his first business and his newest role as undercover TV philanthropist.

YM: You started your first company for $99. Tons of people have started Internet companies, what did you do differently? What is your secret to success?

G: The first important thing is that I didn’t come from a place of money, so I didn’t have easy access to money. Part of that teaches you discipline, and need versus necessity. In terms of what you need it teaches you the importance of sweat equity versus capitol. The biggest companies out there are basically driven on an idea and the execution of an idea, rather than just putting a ton of money into it. And the second element is that whenever you start something you don’t need to start something revolutionary that’s going to blow away the world. There is a theory that every investor or venture capitalist always asks why you’re different, I disagree with that. Both my companies were products that were already out in marketplace. You could say that there was a crowded space already, but when you focus on execution, and focus on discipline, you can catch up to the big guys.

YM: If there was a crowded marketplace already then why did you choose that industry to go into?

G: A lot of it was probably dot com euphoria, there was so much going on. The business I ended up entering was a business of supply and demand but I didn’t really need any inventory. I wasn’t selling something that was a physical product; it was basically the supply of ads and the demand of ads. The whole idea of advertising on the Internet was in its infancy so it wasn’t defined yet. There were some basic principles and people were doing well in them, and it was all about taking it to the next level.

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YM: How do you get into the position to sell your first company?

G: In the beginning of 2000 people were recognizing Click Agent. I got a call from an investment banker in New York. He asked me if had thought about what I wanted to do with the company in terms of an exit strategy. I had no clue because I was 17 at the time. But I took the meeting, and he flew me to New York. I ended up visiting Double Click, the company which had actually inspired me to get into this industry because I had seen them go public. Here I was, a year and a half later in their offices, their worldwide headquarters, pitching them to buy my company. They ended up passing on me, but they introduced me to Value Click and we ended up doing a deal.

YM: So, tell me about Secret Millionaire.

G: Last year after I sold Blue Lithium to Yahoo, I ended up taking a different path with my life in terms of pursuing different opportunities. I finished my book and I signed with William Morris. I had a couple of ideas in terms of programming and television reality shows in a business “Apprentice-type” format. Then my agent came across “Secret Millionaire.” I ended up casting for it and I fell in love with underlying premise of the show. Here was an opportunity to go undercover and try out this social experiment where no one really knows you. You kind of lie to the community you’re in and say you’re doing a documentary of the neighborhood. That gives a cover for the cameras, but the whole idea is that a documentary doesn’t have the high visibility of a network primetime show. It doesn’t create the same cachet. People are still willing to speak and talk in the normal tense, and here I was dressed down so nobody really knew who I was.

It was a great experience to meet people and realize how they would treat me knowing that I was one of them, and then figuring out the people who were doing great with their lives and just needed a second chance. And that’s the climax of the show, me selecting a few people that I want to help personally.

YM: Your Secret Millionaire segment was filmed in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. You live in San Francisco so you must have been to the Tenderloin before. Did anything surprise you?

G: For my first 21 years I lived in San Jose. I bought my penthouse in San Francisco and it wasn’t ready yet, so the first place I technically lived in was the Tenderloin.

My biggest surprise was just going there and digesting everything. You are no longer doing it in a typical sense—like when you are driving in a car and you can drive faster if you feel unsafe. Or when something’s wrong and you can just cloud everything away. But when you are actually physically there you can’t close your eyes to what you see. You are seeing drug use openly and drug deals openly; you can see how sad the situation really is.

YM: So was that hard for you?

G: It was an adjustment shock but I quickly realized the mission I was there for.

YM: Out of everything you’ve done, what are you the most proud of?

G: I would say that based on a success standpoint I’m glad that my core values have stayed the same and my closeness with my family has increased. I think that a lot of times you can kind of get stuck in the euphoria of money and you can kind of get lost in it. You see it all the time in the magazines, but for me, maybe it hasn’t hit me yet. But I haven’t gotten lost in the fact that money changes people.

YM: What advice would you have for other young entrepreneurs?

G: At the end of the day, you have to look at your life. Are you where you want to wake up every morning? Do you enjoy what you’re doing? I think that a lot of times we get stuck doing stuff because we are either forced by our families because that’s who they want us to be, or forced because we are doing it for money. I think the bigger picture is, like in my story, money came later, the journey and the passion of doing what I want to do came first. And so as long as you can mirror that in your own life then you can enjoy the process and the time it takes creating that wealth—rather than wondering if you really should be here.

The Dream (Palgrave-Macmillian, 2008) is available through Amazon.com. For more information about G visit www.gurbashchahal.com.