For a 28-year old, Gurbaksh Chahal has had a busy life. By the age of 25, he had founded two companies worth $340 million. He has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show exhibiting his beautiful penthouse apartment and glowing white car. And, Oprah has famously described him as “one of the youngest and wealthiest entrepreneurs on the planet”.

Such extraordinary success for a guy who spent his childhood bullied for being different, and left school at the age of 16, must seem like a dream.

Growing up in a family of seven in a one-bedroom apartment in San Jose, his life is a true tale of the rags-to-riches metamorphosis so much prized in American culture.
Moving to San Jose was not easy for a young Indian boy wearing a turban. “In the 1980s, it was pretty tough living in the projects, being an ethnic minority. My parents embraced our religious background. It was a difficult environment, but all in all, it just made us stronger,” he recalls.

Chahal acknowledges that the bullying he faced when he was growing up helped to define his personality. “As a child you have a choice, you can either become an introvert, or you can think to yourself: I’m different, what do I do now? How do I go ahead and make the best of it?” he says.

However, leaving school early in pursuit of a career was not necessarily just a case of making the best of things. Chahal found that there were certain advantages to relying on instinct rather than on formal business training.

He explains, “The upside of not having an education was that I didn’t know the rules, what to say and what not to ask. I had the freedom to just be curious, and I think that the younger you are, the more ambitious you are: you don’t yet know the rules of life.”

However, he is quick to affirm that leaving school early may not necessarily be a viable option for everyone. “I am 100 per cent pro-education. Everyone has their own way of learning. But I am more a creative personality; I learn outside the classroom,” he says.

Entrepreneurs such as Chahal are proof that the internet has radically altered the dynamic of who can become a business titan. At 16, he started an internet advertising company in his room called Click Agents. Two years later, he sold that company for $40 million.

By the age of 25, he had sold his second company, Blue Lithium, for $300 million to Yahoo.

“I knew how to use the internet but that’s the extent of the expertise I had. The rest of what I know I learned along the way,” he says.

Chahal seems to have a natural instinct for what makes a successful business. “Business is more about emotion and people. The real world is all about people and it’s all about solving problems,” he explains.

Chahal says that he is inspired by the thrill of creation, and the possibility of swift execution and responsiveness enabled by the internet, rather than the lure of profit. Unsurprisingly, he is a perfectionist, unwilling to look back and praise his achievements.

“I’m 28, I’m already on my third company. It’s not really about the money. It’s just the fact that I love building things out of nothing,” he says.

Nonetheless, he acknowledges that there were certain small moments when he felt the glow of success: “When I was 16, I could buy myself a new car. When I sold my company, I was able to pay off the mortgage for my parents.”

The message of his bestsellling book Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions is that “everything starts with a dream”.

These words can be taken as encouragement by any aspiring entrepreneur. Chahal reflects on his own experience, “I was an underdog. I made mistakes and learnt from them. Once you recognize you have passion there are possibilities that will work for you.”

But, in the current economic climate, is it still relevant to dream? Chahal’s advice seems different compared to what many students are being told to think.

With rising concerns about employment prospects, many students are being told to be realistic and not to expect too much in the next few years.

Chahal thinks a cultural difference between America and England might lie at the heart of that message. “I think that’s the big difference between the American mentality and the rest of the world. It’s not arrogance; it’s ambition. You have to dream really, really big, and you might actually have a shot at getting there,” he explains.

Chahal, like most self-made men, is a great believer in the value of his own mistakes. Yet, in a world in which the whole of society pays the price for the adrenalin-fuelled errors made by a few bankers, surely one should be wary of risk-taking? Chahal believes that there is a right kind of risk and a wrong kind of risk.

As he puts it, “In business it’s all about risk, but it’s the right risk. There is a big divergence between greed and ambition. If you have a talent and you have a passion, you are definitely going to take a lot of risks around it.”