Gurbaksh Chahal

At the age of 16, Gurbaksh dropped out of high school to pursue his dream as an entrepreneur and started his first company, ClickAgents. It was one of the first ad networks focused around performance based advertising. Eighteen months later, he sold it for $40 million to ValueClick.

In January 2004, Gurbaksh founded his second company, BlueLithium, this time with an insight into sophisticated new ways that data, optimization and analytics could help Web advertisers with behavioral targeting. BlueLithium was named one of the top 100 private companies in America for three years in a row by AlwaysOn, and in 2006, it joined Google, Skype and Salesforce.com in being named Innovator of the Year. In 2007, Yahoo acquired BlueLithium for $300 million in cash.

At 30, Gurbaksh is already leading his third online ad company, RadiumOne. RadiumOne launched it's Programmatic Advertising Platform that leverages real-time social interaction from across the Open Web. It's patent-pending ShareGraph™ technology also amplifies seeds and social interaction signals to continually expand target audiences via 25 billion RTB ad impressions they access every day.

On April 2010, Chahal was awarded the Leaders In Management Award and an Honorary Doctorate degree in Commercial Science from Pace University in 2010 in recognition for his career achievements as an entrepreneur. Much of that story Chahal himself told in his international best-selling book, "The Dream."

Gurbaksh's successes as an entrepreneur has also been noted in The New York Times, Entrepreneur magazine, Forbes and BusinessWeek. He has also been profiled on Oprah Winfrey Show, Bonnie Hunt and EXTRA.

Inspired by the deadly events relating to the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting, Chahal founded the BeProud Foundation with $1 million of his own money. The foundation is designed to create awareness campaigns to stop future hate crimes.