The Dream Quotes

“I wanted to start living, not endlessly preparing.”
― Gurbaksh Chahal, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions

“The next day, I hired someone to overhaul my company Web site. I wanted it to look like the portal to a very serious corporation. I needed to impress people. Perception was key. And the guy did a great job. Anyone looking at the flashy graphics and the 3-D logos must have thought they were dealing with a major player. Most of them probably never even looked at my Web site, of course, which was fine with me. All they knew was that Gary Singh delivered, and that’s all they cared about. They had no idea they were dealing with a sixteen-year-old kid because I presented myself as a serious professional. Once again, perception is reality. That’s not a kid on the other end of the line. It’s a guy who delivers on his promises. Before”
― Gurbaksh Chahal, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions

“I didn’t have a consortium of Web sites—I had no real connection to any legitimate Web sites—but they didn’t need to know that, and that wasn’t the point, anyway. I was a simple salesman.”
― Gurbaksh Chahal, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions

“Then I began calling advertising agencies, as I had done during the research-and-information phase, but this time I was dead serious. I needed someone to take a chance on me—anyone. And it was hard. Getting people on the phone was a piece of cake, but finding the person who made the decisions was almost impossible. I would leave one voice-mail, no more—because I didn’t want to sound desperate—then follow it up with an e-mail. If I didn’t have an e-mail address, I’d guess, which really isn’t that complicated. First initial, last name, @whatevercompany.com. And whenever someone actually responded, I was ready. “I have a company called Click Agents,” I would say. “We have a consortium of Web sites. I can get your ads on those sites, and I will price them on a per-click basis.” I”
― Gurbaksh Chahal, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions

“Suddenly I was in business. I didn’t know anything about computers—not about programming, not about security, nothing—but I didn’t have to. I was a salesman, remember? A broker. I had the software; all I had to do now was make it work for me; all I needed were the advertisers and the publishers. If I could get an advertiser to commit to one ad, and if I could get a Web site owner to put up that ad, there’d be no stopping me. The”
― Gurbaksh Chahal, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions

“After he returned to London, we talked on the phone almost every day, and he got busy tinkering with the software. After I took a look at the finished version, I agreed to take the tracking system off his hands for $30,000. I sat down and wrote a simple agreement in which I outlined the general terms and conditions. I am not a lawyer, of course, but I thought I’d done a pretty good job of writing my first contract. And the way I did it was simplicity itself. I went online and did my homework. I looked at dozens of sample contracts, to try to get a handle on the way these things were written, and found everything I needed on the Web. (It’s even easier today; you can get a variety of contracts from various sites, at no charge.) The agreement stipulated that I would pay him in ninety days, once I had tested the program, but I already knew that it was working fine. The fact is, I needed those ninety days to generate enough income to pay him—though he didn’t need to know that. I also told him that if things worked out, I might want to hire him to run the software for me, on a month-to-month basis, when the company was up and running, and I mentioned the possibility of paying him $10,000 a month. I know that sounds like a huge number, and it was certainly a huge number to me, but I had been looking closely at my competition and at the staggering amounts of money that were being generated, and I knew that all I needed was one little deal to get my business off the ground.”
― Gurbaksh Chahal, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions

“I kept doing my homework, pumping various companies for information. I needed to know who their customers were; which Web site owners they were working with; how they got paid; and, even more important, how fast they got paid. And of course I was very curious about the kind of revenue-sharing agreements that existed among the ad network, the advertiser, and the Web site owners. In other words, who got what piece of the pie?”
― Gurbaksh Chahal, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions

“Meanwhile, as a result of these many calls, I was learning something new every day. I discovered, for example, that the vast majority of the Web sites got their ads directly from advertising agencies. A successful ad agency might have ten or twenty clients, but you only needed one to get started. If an ad agency took a chance on me, and I delivered, I imagined the doors would swing wide open. And how hard could that be?”
― Gurbaksh Chahal, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions

“In an effort to make sure I understood the intricacies of the business, I started calling around to see what I could learn from anyone who was even remotely connected to Internet advertising. As I mentioned, I was something of an introvert, and I was a little nervous, so I kept practicing my pitch in front of the mirror. I lowered my voice a notch and tried to sound older than my sixteen years. “Hello,” I said. “My name is Gary Singh”—Singh is my middle name—“and I do performance-based advertising.” That’s a fancy word for pay-per-click. “I have a Web site, and I want to know a little about your operation.” I”
― Gurbaksh Chahal, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions

“Still, I am not a patient man. I knew nothing happened overnight, but I also knew I had to have a concrete plan. I told myself that I would give myself five years to make my dreams come true and that everything I did from that day forth would be a step in that direction, even if that step seemed a little oblique. I wasn’t exactly sure what I hoped to accomplish, but Internet advertising remained at the top of my list.”
― Gurbaksh Chahal, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions

“One day I found myself at a local flea market, talking to a guy who was selling refurbished printers for $50. I had seen identical printers on eBay for $300, so I bought his entire inventory, put them on eBay for an unbeatable $200, and made $150 on each one. Every week I would go back to the flea market and take the printers off the guy’s hands, and every week I was making money. Not much, mind you, but more than I would have been making at McDonald’s. Still,”
― Gurbaksh Chahal, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions

“Somebody else, somebody smarter than I, had acquired the name “business.com,” and he subsequently sold it for $7.5 million. But he had done his research. Nobody owned that name. I promised myself that there would be no shortcuts next time. If I had a job to do, no matter how small, I would always do it right. One”
― Gurbaksh Chahal, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions

“Sacrifices must be made,” my father kept saying, and he never got tired of showing us how it was done. This also proved to be a valuable lesson. I learned perseverance from him. I learned that the road to success is paved with failures. Most of all, as I’ve said, I learned that one should never, ever give up. Tough as things were, my father had pulled himself together. And he never got tired of reassuring us that we were going to be all right. A”
― Gurbaksh Chahal, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions

“I watched the transformation in my father as he picked one winner after another, and I liked what I saw. As he watched the stock climb, he would break into a big, broad smile, until he was literally beaming. He was having a very good time. He was loosening up. He finally felt that he was getting ahead. This was why he had come to America, to make a life for his family. Often I would help him with his decisions. If he was interested in a particular company, I would research it for him, and we would discuss the possibility of buying a few shares. He treated me like an equal, like his partner. Together we learned about buying on margin, about options trading, about puts and calls. Before long I found myself leaping out of bed at the crack of dawn, pouring myself a bowl of cereal, and parking myself in front of the television. I had the morning newspaper to my left and a pad and pencil to my right. The fact is, anyone can do this. It’s just like homework, except it’s the real world. It takes time and effort to get an A, and the same rules apply here, but the difference is that this is worth taking very, very seriously. After all, we’re not talking about grades—we’re talking about serious money.”
― Gurbaksh Chahal, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions

“As any business person will tell you, the value of a traditional company is based on thirty times its EBITDA (earnings before income and tax depreciation of assets). If the company makes $1 million a year, it is said to be worth $30 million. But the Internet wasn’t measured in those terms because most people weren’t making any money. Instead, Internet companies were evaluated on the perception that someday, in the not-too-distant future, simply because of their connection to the Internet, they would be rolling in huge amounts of cash.”
― Gurbaksh Chahal, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions

“As any business person will tell you, the value of a traditional company is based on thirty times its EBITDA (earnings before income and tax depreciation of assets). If the company makes $1 million a year, it is said to be worth $30 million.”
― Gurbaksh Chahal, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions

“It took me several years to learn that happiness is elusive without balance. In”
― Gurbaksh Chahal, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions

“Always surround yourself with people who want you to succeed. That seems simple on the surface, but when you get out there, in the real world, you will discover that most people are rooting for you to fail. Stay away from them.”
― Gurbaksh Chahal, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions