Gurbaksh Chahal

Before the 34-year-old crumbled, Chahal was a model of young and flashy entrepreneurial success. As a fresh multimillionaire in 2008, he appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, where he recounted selling his first company at age 18 for $40 million and his second at 23 for $300 million, landing him a leadership role at Yahoo! During the interview, Chahal discussed growing up as a young Sikh child in San Jose, where bullies at school used to tease him about wearing a turban and made him cry. (He’s since stopped wearing it.) His actions over the next several years seemed to reflect a different mantra. He was charged with 47 felonies stemming from the 2013 attack and pled guilty to lesser a charge after the video was ruled inadmissible. He also railed against the victim by writing a since-deleted blog post that said she was having unprotected sex with other people for money. He was still furious about getting booted from RadiumOne Inc., the previous startup he founded and nearly took public. Chahal used his own money to form a new ad-tech startup in 2014 and tried to buy his old company. RadiumOne scoffed at the proposal from Chahal’s Gravity4. Chahal had picked Dan Grigorovici to be his co-founder and tasked him with building the technology that tied everything together. But the platform never worked, said six people familiar with the situation. Gravity4 failed to connect services from each company it acquired, the people said. Last year, Gravity4 was hit by two civil lawsuits from former employees, with allegations including gender discrimination, harassment, and wrongful termination. The line between personal and professional projects began to blur for Chahal. He produced a hip-hop record called The Legacy, which features a smoky set of angel wings on the cover with the tagline, “Hope. Love. Destiny.” The Gravity4 holiday party, where employees from recently acquired companies gathered in the top-floor office to meet their new CEO, unexpectedly turned out to be an album release party, said people familiar with the event. Under pressure from his second alleged domestic-assault incident, Chahal used ad credits from the company’s Facebook Inc. account this year to promote a page he created on the social network calling San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón a racist. Grigorovici left the company in February, and dozens of other employees followed him out the door. Some staff who were promised company shares never received stock certificates, said three people familiar with the situation. The shrinking company moved out of its fancy digs into a co-working space. Kamal Kaur took the reins last month after her brother was found to be in violation of his probation. Chahal was ordered to turn in his passports. Gravity4’s U.S. business, which had a staff of about 50 a year ago, now has just a few, said people familiar with the situation. Most of what remains of the company, according to its website, is its overseas acquisitions in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Chahal still retains a sort of twisted admiration from some followers. People who worked with him said he could have easily taken his millions and moved on after RadiumOne and his criminal conviction. Instead, he chose to try again and pursue his vision. Such dedication is, in some ways, what Silicon Valley celebrates.