Chahal was born in City Tarn Taran Sahib in Punjab, India to Avtar Singh and Arjinder Chahal. In 1982, his parents received a visa for America through the Diversity Visa (DV) program, also known as the Green Card Lottery, and the following year, when he was four, the family settled in San Jose, California. On December 15, 1998, aged 16, Gurbaksh Chahal dropped out of high school to work full time at his first venture, ClickAgents. ClickAgents was an advertising network focused on performance-based advertising.
Gurbaksh Chahal rode the wave of online ad networks and online ad optimization to a lucrative career, having founded and sold ClickAgents (sold to Valueclick in 2000 for $40 million in stock) and BlueLithium (sold to Yahoo in September 2007 for $300 million in cash). The company was focused on data, optimization, and analytics and became a pioneer of behavioral targeting. BlueLithium was named one of the top 100 private companies in America three years in a row by AlwaysOn, and in 2006, it received highest honor as Top Innovator of the Year. (Previous winners included Google, Skype, and Salesforce.com.) This was all accomplished before the age of 25, leaving Chahal with a personal fortune of $100 million from his efforts. He completed his memoir, “The Dream” which globally released the day of his apperance on the Oprah Winfrey Show. In September 2009, Chahal started his third Company, gWallet, a virtual currency platform for social media. Three months later, gWallet raised $12.5 million in its first institutional round of funding. The day after his non-compete expired with Yahoo, he re-positioned gWallet as RadiumOne, a next generation ad network focused around overlaying social and intent data. He is living proof that no matter how humble one's beginnings, there is truly no limit to what an individual can achieve.
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