Gurbaksh Chahal

At 42 years old, Gurbaksh Chahal has this physical status:

Gurbaksh Singh Chahal (born July 17, 1982) is an Indian-American internet entrepreneur best known for establishing numerous internet ad agencies.

In 2013, and 2018, he was jailed twice for domestic violence and battery offenses.

Early life

Chahal was born in Tarn Taran Sahib, a city near Amritsar in India's Punjab state, on July 17, 1982, in a Sikh family. He was the youngest of four children. Arjinder Chahal, the father of Avtar Singh, was a police officer and mother in Tarn, Sahib. Chahal's parents immigrated to the United States in 1985, after his father won a green card lottery. Chahal was raised by his grandmother for a short time. He immigrated the following year, at the age of four. The family lived in San Jose, California, in a one-bedroom apartment. His father worked with the Postal Service, and his mother served as an nurse's assistant. He has two elder brothers, Nirmal and Kamal, and an elder brother, Taj Chahal; the latter two had worked with Chahal in his ventures. Sikhism and Chahal's brother, as well as his brother, used to wear a turban, a form of headwear based on cloth winding. He has said he was the object of ferocious bullying at the age of 5 in the local elementary school. He was compelled to remove his turban at knife-point at the age of ten.

Chahal was a typical student in school, receiving B and C ratings in his studies. He purchased second hand printers from the local market for $50 and resold printers on eBay for $200 at the age of 15. Chahal purchased the Dell.net and HP.net domain names in 1997 and sent a letter to the businesses requesting to sell the names back to them for ten thousand dollars. He started receiving cease-and-desist letters and was obliged to transfer the domains back. Since his father suffered losses in stock market trading, all of his family members were compelled to work double shifts.

Education

Chahal dropped out of Independence High School in 1998 to work in Internet advertising; his parents wished him to be a doctor. He took a college course on the campus of Evergreen Valley College while still in high school. Chahal founded ClickAgents, the most risk-prone move in his career, and he has since described it as the most risk-prone decision of his career.

Personal life

Chahal formerly lived in San Francisco Bay, but is now based in Hong Kong.

Chahal has attracted notice for his physique and luxurious lifestyle, as well as a fleet of luxurious cars and a penthouse apartment. He was featured in The Secret Millionaire, where he went undercover in San Francisco and gave away $110,000 of his wealth. In 2011, Men's Health named him seventh in the top 10 nations' most fittest and richest men list.

Chahal claimed to be a devout Sikh and was greatly inspired by his grandmother.

Chahal was a regular contributor to Democratic candidates; he was twice invited to the White House during Barack Obama's presidency.

He is also a motivational speaker, promotes a one-dollar salary for CEOs, and has written The Dream, a memoir.

Since 2019, Chahal has been in a film with Punjabi film actress Rubina Bajwa. Chahal and Bajwa were married in San Francisco on October 23, 2021.

Following an assault on his then-girlfriend, Chahal was arrested in 2013 and charged with 45 criminal charges. Chahal smothered the woman with a pillow and kicking her 117 times in a half-hour video clip, which was caught on a camera in Chahal's bedroom ceiling.

Chahal was charged by the San Francisco District Attorney's Office (SFDA) with domestic violence against his mother in August 2013. The incident was ruled inadmissible because there was no warrant for its seizure. Chahal pleaded guilty, but the charges of domestic violence battery and one charge of battery were settled, but a no contest plea was entered nonetheless. He was sentenced to three years' probation, ordered to pay a fine, and ordered to complete a 52-week domestic violence training course as well as 25 hours of community service. He was fired from his position as CEO of RadiumOne later this year (Chahal argued that RadiumOne's board had forced his guilty plea).

Chahal was found guilty of violating the terms of his September 2014 probation after he committed acts of domestic assault against a second woman. He was sentenced to one year in prison for his resignation as CEO of Gravity4; he resigned from his position as CEO of Gravity4 after the court. The California State Appeals Court upheld the decision in April 2018 and Chahal served six months in San Francisco County Jail.

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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, Chahal founded BlueLithium, a company that specialized in behavioral targeting, a technique whereby web users' online habits are tracked in order to show customized ads. The ad-tech industry praised it with Business 2.0 listing it among the 11 most disruptive innovations of 2006, and by the same year, it had expanded operations to other countries, having purchased AdRevolver. The same year, the company again received the title of Top Innovator of the Year for 2006.

MingleNow, a social network was simultaneously launched, which was accorded a partnership deal by Anheuser-Busch. It was named among the top 100 private companies of America by AlwaysOn for three consecutive years and in 2007, Yahoo! bought it for $300 million in cash; Chahal remained CEO during interim period. It was the fifth largest ad-network in the United States and the second largest in the UK at the time of sale.

In 2009, Chahal launched gWallet, a venture that partnered with brand and game developers to bring users virtual currency offers. The startup worked directly with brands instead of using any kind of affiliate model. It used branded video campaigns to engage with consumers. Disney, Best Buy, K-Mart, Nestle, and The History Channel used their video campaigns on the social network. The startup's research showed that only 2-4% of users chose to pause a video game and opt to explore brand engagement and any offers like earning a virtual currency. This meant that the current method of advertisement and engagement by most games was not very effective and lacked the required engagement from its users. gWallet instead introduced its own concept of a brand bar which was supposed to be an ingame concept. The brand bar would act as a top menu bar on the game play screen which would allow the users to view advertisements while playing a game, or access options to earn virtual currency while playing the game. With this model, in its contrast to existing separate menus for such engagements, gWallet eventually raised $10 million in funding.

In 2010, Chahal founded RadiumOne, another online ad company of a slightly different genre, which started as a loyalty and rewards program but later migrated to the targeted-advertising domain, having acquired multiple social-media-centered startups. It garnered reputation for its patented ad-technology with Chahal being poised to be a billionaire, and was valued at about US$500 million at its peak. In 2017 it was purchased by RhythmOne, a public company on the London Stock exchange, for US$22 million.

Chahal was nominated and awarded the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year Award for RadiumOne in 2013.

In July 2014, Chahal launched Gravity4 (since renamed to DaVinci Marketing Cloud). It made a failed bid to buy back RadiumOne and closed in 2017, being unable to integrate the purchased ad-tech startups. Gravity4's main area of business was gathering customer data regarding user experiences to allow marketers to improve their ad targets. It also started working in the AI sector and launched a marketing cloud for blockchain. The company launched two applications named MonaChain and MonaBrowse that aimed to target fraud and ad blockers.

In 2019, Chahal founded TaaraLabs, an incubator helping build companies to address problems in the fields of artificial intelligence, IoT, and data sciences. The lab is connected to over 7 billion IoT devices globally. In the same year, he founded RedLotus in Hong Kong, which specializes in AI-based targeted advertising. This service was provided mainly in the form of customer engagement through this AI platform. This company went in for its initial funding of $50 million, intending to use this initial capital for R&D and expansion worldwide.

In 2020, Chahal founded ProcureNet and is its CEO. It is a supplier of pharmaceutical materials and vaccines consumables and a subsidiary of VendorCloud.

Chahal has been the Chairman of the Chahal Foundation since August 2012. The Foundation supports the families of hate crime victims, educational scholarship, combat child trafficking in India, and helps in disaster relief efforts in India.

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