The first time Divyank Turakhia walks on the wing of a plane is in England. He wants to do something crazy. Not medium crazy, like stunt flying in Los Angeles, which is his go-to hobby. Or shark-cage diving in South Africa, which he’s long ago checked off the list. He wants to do something outlandish. A few phone calls and several days later, he’s standing on top of a 1934 Boeing-Stearman bi-plane, its double wings sandwiching the cockpit like an Oreo cookie as it climbs toward the cloud line. Turakhia is a slim guy, and his willowy body is harnessed to a pole that juts up from the plane’s center, his legs and arms free to move around. “Think of it as a freestyle Six Flags roller coaster,” he says. As the pilot accelerates to 120 miles an hour, his body fights the air. The skin on his cheeks and neck begins to flap, and there’s so much noise: the deafening buzz of the engine, the whoosh of the wind, the methodic thumping of his heart propelling blood through his body. Then he looks out on the fields from the top of the plane, and all sensations recede.
As far as he can see, the atmosphere is open and vast and he is charging into it.
Turakhia is no macho daredevil. He’s not chasing danger. He has osteoporosis, so the kind of accident that might cause a sprain to a normal ankle would likely shatter his entire leg. But he believes he won’t break his leg while walking on the wing of a plane because his actual obsession is managing risk. “I’m very risk averse,” he says, noting that he wears a harness and travels with a pilot, and hell, he even knows how to fly a plane. “Everything I do could kill me, so I make sure I know exactly what I’m doing,” he says. And whether you actually believe that or not doesn’t matter, because he believes it, and the belief spurs him to take on increasingly crazy-seeming new experiences.
Call this his creed. Turakhia has taken the same approach to building companies — making ever larger bets that seem improbable from the outset, and then pay off big. He was 16 when he and his older brother, Bhavin, started their first venture with a $500 loan from their dad, an accountant who raised them in a middle class Mumbai family. They have built a number of businesses including Directi Group, a global company they run from offices all over the world. (They have homes in Dubai, Mumbai, Vancouver, and San Francisco.)
While the Turakhia brothers jointly own Directi, where Bhavin is CEO and incubates startup ideas, Div is the guy who created their largest success so far: a contextual advertising business called Media.net. It has just sold to a Chinese consortium for $900 million. Because the brothers have never raised venture funding, instead using the profits from each company to fund the next, they will pocket nearly all of it, catapulting their net worth to $1.3 billion. “This will make the highwater mark for an individual gain on an adtech sale,” says Luma founder Terry Kawaja, who tracks adtech acquisitions.
Of course, that kind of money isn’t even all that special in 2016. It doesn’t get you on the Forbes 400, for which $1.7 billion is this year’s cut-off. But the money is not what makes Div Turakhia’s story worth sharing. Rather, he is emblematic of a group of global entrepreneurs who don’t land cameos on HBO’s Silicon Valley, but trace billion-dollar fortunes to this high-tech Californian Garden of Eden. Div started from nearly nothing, and by the force of his intellect and the luck of his origin, managed to harness the birth and rise of the internet to build a business empire. In many ways, this scrappy Indian kid is a living embodiment of the American dream, a dream that hardly works for Americans any more, if it ever did. At 34, he’s just getting started.
Growing up, Div Turakhia was obsessed with video games. He loved to play them, sure, but he really loved to create them. He started coding at age eight, staying late after school because his family didn’t yet have a computer. He spent most of his 13th year writing a game with Bhavin in which the player is a businessman who has just lost his entire company to a deceitful partner. The point of the game was to create a new business from scratch. To win, you had to capture 100% of the marketshare. That was 1994. Do you remember the Internet in 1994? In the United States, it was so newly commercial that the Today Show hosts debated whether the “@” symbol in an email address was pronounced “AT” or “ABOUT.” The New York Times wondered if the web was overhyped. Less than 14 million people were online. (That was a quarter of one percent of the global population.) And in India, Div used a 2400-baud modem (about 4300 times slower than today’s broadband) to launch his own BBS, or bulletin board system, so friends could dial in to play games.
From the start, Div had a strong entrepreneurial bent. For $10, he did the rich kids’ coding homework assignments. That seemed like good money until corporations came calling. He’d helped the technology organization NASSCOM get temporary connectivity up and running for an Internet conference. The Internet was still new enough that not many people knew how to do it. “After that, every time some large company had a problem, they’d ask NASSCOM, who’d say, ‘oh, there’s this kid we know who can solve your problem,’” he says. So there was Div, at 16 years old, newly in possession of his own computer in the bedroom he still shared with his brother, setting up websites and corporate email accounts for some of the country’s largest companies.
Div quickly tired of consulting. There were not yet 50,000 people on the internet in India, but he and Bhavin understood that there was no going back. People — and thus businesses — were going to come online. They devoured books on U.S. tech entrepreneurs like Bill Gates. “I think I read 11 books about him,” says Bhavin. They wanted to build a company that didn’t require them to work closely alongside every last customer. So they took a small loan from their dad to rent a U.S. server and start a web hosting company; their first customers were the businesses for whom they’d consulted. Within a month, Div remembers, they had enough clients to pay their dad back and rent the server for three more months. Their client list included NASSCOM and the Nationalist Congress Party. By the time Div was 18, he’d made his first million dollars.
From there, the business kept growing, as one opportunity led to the next. To promote their web hosting business, the brothers started selling domain names, undercutting competitors to give clients their web addresses, and in 2001, they bought their own domain registrar. Orders soon started spilling in from other countries. “My mom said, ‘I understand you’re doing what you’re doing, but you have to get a college degree! Do that much for me,’” Div remembers. He enrolled at a local college, skipped most of the classes, and sat for the exams. He earned the most generic of college degrees, the “b-com,” at age 20, two years after he had become a millionaire.
Most people who know Div have a story about him, and most of those stories sound outrageously ostentatious, bordering on improbable. Like the time that Stefan Weitz, who was then still a senior director of strategy and partnerships at Microsoft, called Div during a nine-hour layover in Dubai to see if he happened to be in the country. Div volunteered to pick him up. As Weitz wheeled his suitcase to the airport’s curb, Div popped out of a stretch Rolls Royce limo. After taking Weitz to dinner on the 122nd floor of the Burj Khalifa, Div suggested a night safari. “He makes a phone call and we haul ass out to the middle of the desert in one of those Mercedes Defenders with night vision goggles, looking for scorpions and marsupial-type creatures,” says Weitz, who made it back to the airport at the last possible moment to catch his connecting flight.
Div loves being rich. Money has always come to him, much like gold medals to the best Olympic swimmers or accolades to Juilliard piano prodigies. The way that he struts his wealth is decidedly un-Silicon Valley. In California, if you’re a billionaire, you signal it passively. Maybe you wear jeans and sneakers, but you post Facebook photographs of yourself with Hillary Clinton at a $30,000-ticket fundraiser, or of your twins sitting in the third row at Hamilton.
In contrast, Div is all flash. He dresses in Gucci blazers. When Jackie Reses was Yahoo’s chief dealmaker, he showed up to pick her up for a meeting in his Ferrari 458 Spider. That’s his U. S. car. In Dubai, he has a Rolls-Royce Phantom. In Mumbai, a Mercedes-Benz S-Class and a Porsche.
And he’s always trying to dial up that flash. When a friend held a 40th birthday party in the Swiss Alps, Div showed up wearing Lederhosen and he flew in a Michelin star chef. The first time he arrived in Dublin for the European tech conference F.ounders, Div booked the presidential suite of the Westbury Hotel, the nicest place in town, upstaging Lady Gaga who was also in town for the weekend, and bringing along a young girlfriend he’d met at Disneyland.
Div has had a number of girlfriends, and he says that he wants to marry someday, but his relationships have not worked out because so far in his life, his first passion remains his work. He is silly in love with it. It really lights him up. “Always in the end it takes up most of my time,” he says. Because as cool as the money and attention is, the best part of having a fortune is making the fortune. Div appears happiest when he is seated at the large desk that sits in his San Francisco living room, a video feed streaming in scenes from the Mumbai or Dubai offices, crunching through spreadsheets to decide whether a deal is worth doing, or whether there’s possibly a more efficient way to re-imagine a business that appears to be mature. It pulls at him. It consumes him.
I’ve asked Div what he plans to do with all of his money, and whether he has any charitable ambitions. He talks about an unspecified time in the future when he can imagine that he’ll turn his attention to giving it away, likely targeting education, with the same fierce approach he has taken toward making it. But that time isn’t now. And in the meantime, he doesn’t want to delegate that job to anyone else because he doesn’t feel anyone else can do it as well as he will one day be able to. Being involved early on, says Div, “makes it more operationally efficient.”
I ask Bhavin why his brother works so hard, and what he sees as the purpose of all the money they both make. “Each of us has a human responsibility to make an impact that is proportionate to our potential,” Bhavin tells me. Because they can be successful in business, they have no choice but to do it.
Div started thinking about Media.net in 2005. By then, most of his businesses were on autopilot, and Bhavin had turned his attention to incubating startup ideas. Div wanted to do something outlandish — to pursue the biggest opportunity he could envision. People made the most money online through advertising. “I thought, ‘how do I get into ads?’” he says. “Obviously, I’m late,” he thought, and he was right. Google’s AdSense business, which most intrigued Div, had been running for five years by then. But Div saw an opening. He was already running a domain registration business, Radix, which operated a group of generic domains like .store, .tech, and .online. He studied the way AdSense got started: long before Google bought the company that created the technology, it had got its start by writing contextual targeting technology that displayed relevant ads on undeveloped domains. Div figured he could do that. He first built a business to license ad-matching technology to domain publishers. “It was a logical step to start building a system that makes use of that information,” says Weitz. “There was this very organic moment in time when he had an insight and capitalized on a need and was persistent.”
That moment was 2011. Carol Bartz was then the CEO of Yahoo. Div already had a relationship with Yahoo through an earlier business, and he offered to do for the company what AdSense did for Google — to build a network that would decide which ads were placed in a page’s ad spots, based on the subject matter of the web page that the user is reading. “They said, ‘we’ve tried it. It’s hard,” Div remembers. “We said, ‘let’s test it anyways.’” Powered by the data Div had collected, his ad network did a better job of drawing an audience to Yahoo’s ads, pleasing its advertisers. The following year, Yahoo signed an exclusive deal with Div that prevented him from selling his company to Google, or working with the search giant. In exchange, Div had the right to call his company a Yahoo network.
Media.net became so crucial to Yahoo’s business that the company considered buying it three times, according to Mel Guymon, vice president of search products at Yahoo until this past June. Guymon led the first of three efforts in early 2013, shortly after he arrived from Google. Not everyone agreed with the deal, however. In the preceding years as a Yahoo partner, Div had gained a reputation as an aggressive negotiator. The deal stalled.
The second attempt was in early 2015. Media.Net’s search business was expanding, while Yahoo’s core businesses continued to struggle. The deal was killed yet again when Yahoo moved to dramatically reduce its overseas development staff; most of Media.net’s employees were in India. The final attempt came late in 2015. By then, Yahoo was in cost-cutting mode, and the deal didn’t survive.
That year, Div got serious about selling Media.net. He hired bankers, and fielded interest from private equity funds in the United States and Europe, but their offers seemed paltry compared to the interest and offers that arrived from Chinese companies. He went with Zhiyong Zhang, chairman of the telecom equipment company Beijing Miteno Communication Technology, who raised money to purchase Media.net through a consortium. Pending regulatory approvals, Miteno plans to buy it from the consortium. (The technical term for this process is a “major asset restructuring.”)
Zhang saw opportunity in the company’s massive, profitable American ad business; Media.net reported $232 million in sales this year, more than half of which came from mobile ads and nearly all of which came from U.S. advertisers. More important, the company has developed technology that doesn’t yet exist in China, where the online advertising market is more nascent. This excites Div. He’ll continue to run businesses with his brother, but he will also run Media.net as part of Miteno and hopes, in the process, to learn more about how to build a business in China.
When Div is in San Francisco, he lives in a three-story house at the very top of Russian Hill. To the West, the drop is so steep that the sidewalk gives way to stairs that lead down to the bay. I stop by to visit on the first day of July, and he offers to take me for a drive.
It’s a typical week for Div. On Monday, he flew from Dubai to Seattle, with Media.net’s chief technology officer and chief operating officer. A car took them to Bellevue, where they were vetting Infospace. “We had a bid,” says Div, as we head to the garage where his Ferrari is parked. “They told us that they needed us to pay a certain price, and we wanted to complete due diligence.”
If you’re an Internet history buff, you probably remember Infospace, the company founded by former Microsoft executive Naveen Jain. At the height of the boom in ’00, it was valued at $31 billion. But by earlier this year, it had devolved to become the declining phantom limb search business of financial services company Blucora. This is exactly the kind of acquisition that interests Div, who says, “Every business is worth something. And it makes sense to buy almost everything if the price is right.” But while that’s a good philosophy, it only delivers returns when the price is right. Div couldn’t come to agreeable terms with the Blucora executives, so he passed on it.
Jain hasn’t been involved with the business for many years, but he’s a friend. That evening, he picked Div up for dinner at a local restaurant, and they retired to Jain’s home, just around the corner from his neighbor, Bill Gates. They enjoyed a nightcap on Jain’s boat while exchanging ideas about tech’s trajectory and the investment opportunities it might create. Div made it back to the hotel in time for a video conference at 1 am with a team from his Mumbai office, catch three hours of sleep, and jump on an early morning conference call with auditors working on the Media.net sale, before popping down to SF.
That kind of living might exhaust some people, but it feeds Div, who brags that he can fall asleep anywhere for any length of time, wake up and work, and then immediately fall dead asleep again. We are now in the front seat of his cherry red sports car, its convertible top folded back. He edges to the corner, where the street spills down at a steep grade to the Bay, offering a perfectly framed view of Alcatraz. We swoop down the hill, the wind hitting our foreheads as we pick up speed. For a minute, it feels too fast. I worry I’ll topple out of the car and land on the asphalt. Then, he taps on the brake and the car comes to an immediate graceful halt. “You want to drive?” he asks me.
I shake my head, no thanks.
We drive a couple more blocks, Div accelerating sharply and then cutting the speed. Then he stops the car in the street, and gets out.
“No really,” he says. “Your turn.”
There is not enough money in my expense account to cover a nick to a $275,000 car. That’s what I’m thinking as I change seats with Div reluctantly. I hit the “start engine” button on the steering wheel, and the engine revs so loudly that I’m embarrassed. An older Chinese woman on the sidewalk stares at us. I touch the gas pedal gingerly with my foot. The car sputters and nearly stalls. “You have to give it gas,” says Div. “It wasn’t built to go slow.” So, I floor it. We fly up to the top of a hill, and with a tap to the brake, we come to a complete and gentle stop. We are at the top of Green Street now, down the block from his house. I am newly confident, powerful. The road stretches out before me, open, so I feel I could charge ahead into the city.
I look over at Div, but he isn’t looking at me. He’s taking in the streets below us. It’s this city to which Div, like so many entrepreneurs before and after him, has come to make his wealth. And he has done it. In a month, he’ll close on the sale of Media.net, the biggest deal of his life.
But it’s still early — for Div, and for tech. San Francisco is merely a second chapter in a book that is still being written. The climax is ahead, in Asia. Later this afternoon, Div will fly to Dubai. Soon, he’ll add a Beijing stopover to his rotation of destinations. “This is just the beginning of what can be done with the China partners,” he says.
For a moment, I can see Div at 13. He’s the protagonist in his own videogame, the businessman trying for 100% of the marketshare, and he’s made it to the next level! He’s winning! He’s so close, now.
Creative Art Direction by: Redindhi Studio
