How A 26-Year-Old Built A $100 Million Net Worth
mixergy.com
mixergy.com
Love the site and love what you're trying to do with your business model (whether it works or not). Keep the interviews coming.
I changed it on my site.
I left the reference to him being 16 because that's when he got into the ad business. But I said he was 25 when his net worth hit $100 mil.
By the way, including dollar signs in so many of my headlines feels out of touch with my mission. I wish I knew a better way to communicate the size and importance of my guests' achievements in 10 words or less.
Lot's of people made a lot of money with the internet boom, pg and Mark Cuban among them. However, they are still people that did not enter the 'you cannot comment on me unless your wealth is greater than or equal to mine' club.
Frankly, I'd prefer if our comments stood on their own merits (or lack thereof), but perhaps you've hit upon the next social media craze. Instead of simply using karma scores, we could multiply one's karma by the amount of currency tracked in their covestor account.
I would expect a good correlation between charisma and entrepreneurial success, of which being well-spoken can be a large component. People here often look to succeed by use of technical acumen, which is another trait that can serve you well, but don't overlook having someone around that is able to connect with people on a more basic level.
That's an interesting observation. I actually watched the video again to try to pick out the parts which could cause you to think so. But, nothing seemed to stand out. His manner of speaking was not distinguished in a sense, but at the same time, it seemed more like means to an end, and wasn't something that caused me to think any less of him.
I bring up this issue because I feel I am not "well-spoken" and am trying to see how I can address this deficiency.
1) Overuse of cliché.
2) Inability to use adverbs.
I'd have to review to go in more depth but those things are a little jarring to me. If you'd like to work on improving how you sound I'd recommend reading (a lot but preferable some stuff that has general interest, not necessarily fiction) and practice in a relaxed atmosphere. In college there was brewery tour nearby. That was the perfect place to have a dozen different conversations without anyone being wasted enough to remove any lucidity from the participants.
I personally have qualms about the guys ethics. He got his start by lying about his capabilities, which isn't the worst thing I ever heard but he got lucky on not getting caught. Then, he hired someone with money that he didn't have. I'm sure many people would be irate about this no matter the outcome in the end.
I think many people would be doing much better if they had 10% of the luck this guy had.
And Andrew mentioned that in passing. I think right at the beginning.
As nobody has yet commented on this, I have started doubting my command of the English language, but here goes: it's hard to take a site seriously when it botches the first sentence of an article like this. No care for the language == no care for the facts.
This headline is descriptive and it works. Just because you've seen other headlines like that does not mean that new people discovering the site have.
>And ValueClick in Westlake Village, Calif., which offers performance-based online advertising services, acquired Click Agents.com in Fremont, Calif., which offers those same services. As part of the deal, Click Agents shareholders will receive 5.3 million shares of ValueClick stock, valued at an estimated $20 million to $24 million.
>Click Agents, which has 31 employees and revenue estimated at $14 million, will initially operate as an autonomous unit of ValueClick. Gurbaksh Chahal, 26, chairman, chief executive and president at Click Agents, continues as president.
(Source: search nytimes for ClickAgents its November 8, 2000 (the url is obnoxious)).
(26 in 2000? Weird)
He likes to say $40 million since that was the value of the shares when the deal was announced. Sort of silly but that is true. However he asserts that he got some amount in between. He could of but not if he didn't own all of the shares (he could of but that would be weird since he was talking about sweat equity) or if he sold between 2001 and early 2003.
Interestingly, if he had just held those shares until May 25, 2007 he (or the shareholders collectively) would have had $173.2 million.
This didn't come up in the interview but this comes out about BlueLithium on nytimes:
>It is backed by venture capital firms including WaldenVC and 3i.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/yahoo-buys-blue...
Given that the VCs had a portion of this venture as well as the people from Belarus that got $15 million its seems likely that G could have gotten more money by selling ValueClick's stock after holding it then doing any work in that period of time.