Hi Steemit, Gurbaksh Chahal here, Journey of a 16-year-old high school drop-out to being a 4-time successful Entrepreneur & Philanthropist

Hello Everyone,

I've been a big believer of taking risks to innovate & bring positive change in the world. You can say I took the biggest risk when I was just 16 by taking a giant leap towards entrepreneurship. Had that life-changing moment not happen, my journey would have been very different from today. I started my first online advertising company from my bedroom at the age of 16. Three months later, my company generated over $100,000 in revenue. My parents also took a big risk by letting me drop out of high school for a year to pursue my dream.  Unlike, many startups during the dot-com boom, my company grew to generating double-digit millions in revenue with profit, and I never had to raise any venture capital. My company was called ClickAgents, which introduced cost-per-click banner advertising. This model was later adopted by many search engines. After 18 months later, I sold the company for $40 million. 

My grandmother was a big influence in my life. Without her support, I would have never been able to achieve my success. Unfortunately, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. Not a day goes by where I wish I had spent more time with her while she was here.

At the age of 21, my non-compete had expired, so I started BlueLithium, with the premise of innovating again within the online advertising space. This time, the focus was to add a data component and introduce "retargeting" to the growing online advertising space. This type of advertising is widely now known as “behavioral targeting.” Three and half years later, I sold BlueLithium for $300 million cash to Yahoo. I also waited until the press wires hit that day, to finally announce my true age to the world. I was 25. My family was proud and I still recall the memory of that moment in my father's eyes.

I shortly left Yahoo and was stuck again in the non-compete phase. I took this time to reflect on my journey and decided to write a book called “The Dream.” My goal was to leave a positive impact, even if only on one person. To my surprise, it became an international best-seller, a required reading in many universities throughout the globe, and was translated in many different languages. You can read more about The Book at: https://chahal.com

I was also thrilled to get a call from Oprah Winfrey, who took interest in my life story. While I didn't expect it, after sharing my story with Oprah, I lost my anonymity and became a public eye. I only realized later in life, the heavy price that cost me. You can view my interview here.

After my non-compete had expired, I started my third company, RadiumOne. It focused on becoming a leader in programmatic advertising by leveraging social data. There I developed ShareGraph and was awarded 10 patents by the USPTO. RadiumOne was acquired by RhythmOne.

In 2014, unbeknownst to me at the time, I launched my biggest success yet, Gravity4, a big data marketing cloud. It, too, like my previous three companies – is within the advertising sector. But, it has innovated miles further in product offerings, technology and is solving a much bigger problem. With programmatic expected to account for around 67% of display advertising globally by 2017, our focus has shifted to deep learning, as it is essential to solve pattern recognition and data correlation issues. Industry scientists and large media companies are utilizing image, speech and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to overlay deep learning to match the ads on the basis of emotion and context of simple keywords. Much of this was not possible when I started my three previous companies. The computational advances for digital advertising to use machine learning and deep learning happened just in the past 3-4 years ago.

I consciously chose to keep Gravity4 focused as a plug and play platform that was ready for IoT (internet of things), Mobile, Video and AI – something none of my previous companies were in position to do. Introducing Mona Lisa A.I. within our integrated marketing stack, sets us apart from Oracle, Adobe, and the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. You can learn more about Mona Lisa here.

We are also now evolving the #blockchain framework to fix the current ad latency & transparency problems by creating a hyper-frequency method to handle large volumes of metadata. Our $230 billion+ global digital advertising market is ready to disseminate digital media data to an immutable ledger. For those interested in learning more, you can email us at: [email protected] 

I also founded “'The Chahal Foundation” with five core goals in mind for the foundation: creating awareness of social causes, university scholarships and mentorships, supporting disaster relief efforts, improving schools in third world countries, and to build awareness to eradicate child sex trafficking. You can learn more about the foundation at: https://www.chahalfoundation.org/

Happy to join this community and share my thoughts with all of you.

You can also feel free to follow me on some of my other social accounts as well:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/officialGChahal/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/gchahal

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gchahal

Personal Blog: https://belimitless.com

Official Website: https://gurbakshchahal.com