The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions by Gurbaksh Chahal Read Free Book Online

break and I stayed behind with the visitor to talk business. Back in London, he had created a few Web sites, and he was trying to sell ads, though not too successfully. The software was serviceable, but it needed changes, and we talked about how he might rewrite the program. I didn’t know anything about programming, mind you; all I knew is what
I wanted the program to do
. So, again, I was thinking like a businessman—thinking about my needs. Still, I knew enough to know that it would never be a great program. In talking to him, it was clear it had its limitations, especially regarding the amount of traffic it could handle—but with some modifications I also knew it would be good enough for my needs. And while I couldn’t program it myself, I was certainly able to describe what I needed. At the end of the day, I didn’t mind the fact that the program was a long way from state of the art, because that meant I could get it for a reasonable price.
    He had dinner with my family the two nights he was there, listening to them speak Punjabi, saying nothing, and on the third day my brother and I took him to the airport. I said I would wait for the changes to the program and sent him on his way.
    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 mentionedthe 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.
    “Great,” he said.
    “I’ll be in touch,” I said.
    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 week the deal was signed, I figured out how to incorporate online, and I spent $99 to do it. I called my company Click Agents, and I made myself the marketing director, but I put the company in my brother’s name. I was a minor, and I didn’t want to be breaking the law, and my brother was willing to take the financial risk—which I appreciated. (I certainly didn’t want my parents taking any risks!) Then I began calling advertising agencies, as I had done during the research-and-information phase, but this time I was dead serious. I neededsomeone 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