"You will have bad days. There will be setbacks. You will have more than your fair share of failures. But at the end of the day, you pick yourself up and keep going. That’s the Big Secret of Life. You fall down, you get up… Fight like hell. Defy the odds… Some people think success is the best revenge, and they may be right, but for me it’s much simpler than that: Success is its own reward."- The Dream, page 252
There it is. That’s what the book breaks down into. Need it even shorter? Here you go:
Gurbaksh enjoyed the thrill and excitement of the dotcom bubble of the late 90s. He enjoyed studying companies that started off penniless, grew quickly without making any money at all and yet ended up being valued, bought and sold for several millions of dollars each.
He parlayed this interest into a passion in order to understand what made these companies – and their investors – tick, and figured out how he could leverage these findings to his own advantage.
Was it easy? No.
His father tried his hand at investing and got burned when the dotcom bubble burst. The family had to suffer the humiliation of moving one step down on the economic ladder, but that was part of the challenge; yet another the obstacle to be overcome.
Gurbaksh soon identified online advertising as the death of traditional media, and realized that the online advertising industry was still a nascent enterprise, one that had yet to be consolidated by big players. This represented an opportunity that was just waiting to be seized.
By doing his research, he found that he didn’t really need technical knowledge in order to operate on the web – he simply found others who could build his online advertising tools for him. Partnerships were key, so he leveraged them judiciously and worked the scale and expanse of the web to pitch his business to potential customers over a period of several weeks, build up a reputation with a few clients at a time, and then focus on growth.
While he was busy making money hand over fist, “reality reared its ugly head” (page 78). Turns out it wasn’t the crash of the dotcom bubble that he had to worry about – it was a shabby partnership.
"Watch your back. Somebody should make a T-shirt that says: “For every back, there is a knife.”"- The Dream, page 110
His business partner turned on him, called foul and played it equally well. Now all of a sudden his business stopped operating, customers threatened deadlines and cash inflow dipped into the red.
The same thing happened later on in his career, too. After selling his first company to a former competitor, his new business partners double-crossed him, filed a lawsuit and forced him to settle by attacking his reputation.
In the first instance he turned the tables on his erstwhile colleague. Research told him that his partner was in poor standing with his business’s service providers. By carefully positioning himself as a hero to his clients and surreptitiously undermining his rival’s standing with service providers, Gurbaksh pushed his partner into near financial ruin, removed him from the equation and soldiered on with business as usual.
In the second case, the challenge was the lawsuit itself. “Any determined person can sue anyone over anything… Business people have to accept that as a reality of doing business. Still, it’s deeply troubling… At the end of the day, it seemed that the motivation behind this suit had one aim: to ruin my chance to get [my company] off the ground.” (page 178).
He had to settle – the lawsuit was causing the business to bleed cash and was destroying his reputation, which, of course was its intended purpose all along.
This was a lesson learned: always surround yourself with people who are at least as good as you are, who want you to succeed and who are not afraid of providing reality checks along the way. Strength is the only natural safeguard for success, and strength can only be maintained through friendships, partnerships and personal growth.
"Always negotiate from a position of strength. If you need something from the other guy, you’ve already lost. People want what they can’t have. Become the thing people want."- The Dream, page 233
How do you move into a position of strength?
As the author puts it, “I didn’t reinvent the wheel. I simply found something that captured my imagination, and then I figured out how to do it better than the next guy” (page 235).
Make sure all of your efforts incorporate at least as many of the above recommendations as possible. The more you pursue, the more effective your efforts at creating value will be, and the faster your business appeal will rise. Funnily enough, so will the price you command.
I loved The Dream because of the candor with which it was written. This is a no-holds-barred narrative infused with the confidence of a person who has nothing to lose from sharing his knowledge.
G was born in the town of Tarn Taran, near Amritsar in Punjab, India to Avtar and Arjinder Chahal. In 1985, his parents received a visa for America through a lottery-based system in India, and the following year, when he was four, the family settled in San Jose, California. His parents had arrived with only $25 to their name, and they struggled at menial jobs to make a future for their four children.
