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Gurbaksh Chahal- became Millionaire by selling web sites twice

 

       NRI's Company "BlueLithium" sold for $300 Million to Yahoo


Gurbaksh Chahal is one of the youngest and one of the most successful internet entrepreneurs of recent history.Chahal has created companies worth over $340 million by the age of 25.

In 1985, Gurbaksh moved to US at the age of two along with his parents. His father Avtar Singh Chahal was a commissioner for persons with disabilities at Santa Clara County, California.

On December of 1998, at the age of 16, he dropped out of Accel Middle College to start his first venture ClickAgents. ClickAgents was one of the first performance-based advertising networks in the industry. Two years later, on November 1st 2000, ValueClick announced it agreed to buy ClickAgents in a $40 million all-stock merger. Chahal had a three year non-compete with ValueClick. He was 18 years old at the time.

Gurbaksh said:

I have only one business goal for 2006, to deliver the greatest value to our advertisers and thus become the No. 1 ad network. That's it. Everything else we do -- technology innovation, hiring the best people in the business, building a reliable, high-quality publisher network, making it easy for agencies to work with us -- in support of this one goal.

The early days of the Internet represent a sort of Big Bang. From just a few sites grouped tightly around a small number of ideas, we suddenly had massive quantities of content exploding in all directions at an ever-accelerating rate of speed. And we had the Internet users following them. Today, some of the most valuable real estate for advertisers is out on the fringes, on social networking sites, video, multimedia and photo community sites, and other places that didn't exist two years ago. As user-generated content sites become more predictable, those will become valuable to advertisers as well. Ad networks are the best way for advertisers to get at the juiciest, fastest-growing parts of the Internet, supplying inventive technologies that improve efficiency and doing it cost-effectively, with scale in a way that's easy to buy.

BlueLithium

"BlueLithium" was founded by Gurbaksh Chahal in on January 12, 2004. The company's office was set up office in San Jose, CA, and got investment from Walden Venture Capital and 3i. The company, which has 120 employees and its network focused on data, optimization, analytics and a pioneer of behavioral targeting. Gurbaksh Chahal has been recognized as an innovator in the online advertising space by Business 2.0 as well as a sought-after speaker, featured at conferences including Red Herring, JP Morgan, Bear Stearns and Ad:Tech.

Under his leadership, BlueLithium was named one of the top 100 private companies in America three years in a row by AlwaysOn. On September 4th 2007, Yahoo! announced that it has agreed to buy BlueLithium for $300 million in cash. He remains CEO of the company through the transition period

BlueLithium was serving 100 million+ unique users and reached more than 60% of US internet users. What’s more, they made $100M+ in revenue in 2006 - run the sums and you have another huge acquisition price (DoubleClick, by comparison, did $300 million in revenue in 2006 - Google paid $3.1 billion for that one).

BlueLithium already serves up 8 billion ad impressions a month to 100 million users of the Web's top sites. Each of those ads drops a cookie on your browser, and when you show up on another site that serves BlueLithium ads or on one of its advertisers' Web sites, it adds that history of clicks to its database. Using this "clickstream" data, it determines within 10 milliseconds which ad to serve up the next time you come to any of the 1,000 handpicked sites where it buys ad inventory.

By building a picture of your clickstream, BlueLithium can target you individually. "The more we see you, the more we know about you," Chahal says. He might not know your name or address, but he knows what sites you've visited, what ads you've clicked on, and what ads other people with similar clickstreams have clicked on. Most display ads on the Web are random because they're targeted to the site, not to the viewer. But if you visit T-Mobile's Web site to check out pricing plans and then click off to a news site, BlueLithium might show you a T-Mobile ad even though you're now reading about Iraq. Chahal is also using BlueLithium's 100 million clickstream histories to direct behaviorally targeted video ads.

Couldn't Google do the same kind of thing? "They might be coming out with the next microwave too," Chahal quips, "at the rate they're going." Chahal knows that Google was a classic disruptor. But in his view, this time around Google is the incumbent -- and Chahal has the disruptor's advantage.

The acquisition of BlueLithium enables Yahoo! to accelerate its advertising, product, and engineering roadmaps, and gives the company increased capabilities to sell and measure performance-based campaigns both on and off the Yahoo! network.

BlueLithium and Yahoo! share a common goal of providing both advertisers and publishers with high quality inventory and the essential targeting and analytical tools that are necessary to reach the right consumers at the right times. The addition of BlueLithium is the logical next step in creating the largest and most effective online ad network globally, which also includes inventory on Yahoo!’s owned and operated properties, the Yahoo! Publisher Network, and the Right Media Exchange. We believe that together Yahoo! and BlueLithium will help drive the next evolution of the online advertising industry.

The BlueLithium acquisition is about boosting Yahoo's behavioral-targeting capabilities for display advertising across its network and third-party sites, according to Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. He added that it's also about increasing the size of that network.

"This acquisition can be seen as partly offensive and partly defensive, as an effort to retain brand advertisers that have more choices today across the Internet and to build out a broad and efficient online ad network that offers a kind of one-stop shop: huge reach, as well as targeting and search," Sterling noted.

Sterling pointed out that that display and search advertising were recently consolidated at Yahoo under David Karnstedt, which is now part of a new larger organization within Yahoo headed by Hilary Schneider and called Global Partner Solutions. That group is now responsible for sales, marketing, and business development.

BlueLithium will become a subsidiary of Yahoo. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval, and is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2007.

It's not often that you find a startup CEO openly mocking Google (Charts). But Gurbaksh Chahal, founder of BlueLithium, thinks Google is a one-trick pony when it comes to Web ads. "They've miserably failed in the last year with display ads," he notes, "because they look at the world through text advertising

 


NRI Gurbaksh Chahal, is one of the youngest and one of the most successful internet entrepreneurs

  • At the age of 16, he set up ClickAgents and sold $40 million
  • At the age of 25, Yahoo! announced that it has agreed to buy his company "BlueLithium" for $300 million in cash