Already 15 minutes late to his next meeting, Deepak Agarwal stands on a corner in Manhattan’s Diamond District, waiting for a hired car to whisk him 20 blocks south. The 29-year-old founder of a bargain-bin e-retailer called Nomorerack.com has just finished placing orders with a jeweller inside a stuffy, dimly lit fifth-floor office. Next up: A bedding merchant. Short and plump, Agarwal perspires in the late spring heat. A buzz cut makes him look like a teen; so do the canvas shoes, jeans and Oxford shirt with a flyaway collar. He grins as a black Suburban pulls up and a black-suited driver jumps out to open the door. “I’m a VIP customer,” he says with his trademark giggle.
Agarwal issues no instruction to hurry, knowing that people are waiting. Tough. Meetings begin when he shows up. The duvet suppliers know this as well as the jeweller, who waited 45 minutes for Agarwal to show.
They excuse his behaviour because no site moves its merchandise like Nomorerack. Since Agarwal, called Dee by all who know him, founded the company in November 2010, he has traded low gross margins (roughly 25 percent) for immense volume (more than 24 million items sold). Nomorerack sells cheaply priced tablets, knife sharpeners, rings, boxer briefs, sundresses and LED bulbs. Go to the site—or sign up and be hounded by e-mails—to find 50 percent to 80 percent discounts over other retailers.
If you believe Agarwal, sales have exploded from $9 million in 2011 to $340 million last year, when the company made an estimated $85 million. This year, he claims, revenue will surpass $700 million. Maybe. Maybe not. Nomorerack is privately held. Says Sucharita Mulpuru, an e-commerce expert at Forrester, “I’m not going to fully believe anything that’s not audited by the SEC,” assuming it goes public. Agarwal claims he has hung on to about 65 percent of the company through two equity raises that brought in $52 million from adoring, small-name investors. No one will comment on the exact valuation, but Agarwal offers up Zulily as a point of comparison, which on the face of it seems reasonable. If valued like that fast-growing e-retailer, Agarwal’s stake is ostensibly worth just under $800 million.
If these sound amazing, they are. Over the last three years, 2,670 customer complaints—mainly about shoddy merchandise, lousy phone reps and foot-dragging refunds—have been filed with the Better Business Bureau, which has assigned Nomorerack an “F”. That’s an extraordinarily high number, considering that Wayfair, with $915 million in sales, had 502 complaints over the same period. Nor does Wayfair have such active haters. Sites like Ripoff Report and Complaints Board bulge with angry testimonials; various Facebook groups such as Nomorerack Is Evil have proliferated. Agarwal shrugs. “For every one screamer out there, we probably have 20 to 25 happy customers.” Which still means 4-5 percent of his clientele despise him.
Then there’s his past, parts of which he isn’t eager to discuss. Agarwal got his start—and his nest egg—running a Philippines-based outsourcing firm and working within the pornography industry, becoming inextricably linked with a number of adult websites. When first confronted by these facts, Agarwal says, “There are a lot of rumours out there. I’ve read rumours about me being part of the Illuminati.”
Agarwal prefers the sanitised biography, which starts with his parents dropping him off to live on his own as a high school student in Orlando while they returned to India. After graduating in 2003, he says, he moved to the Philippines, where he launched Contact Center, an outsourcing company that did data entry and phone support. Four years later, he followed his girlfriend to her native Vancouver, British Columbia, then sold his business. In 2010, he launched Nomorerack with four people.
Matt Groover, a high school buddy, remembers the past differently. Teenaged Agarwal, he says, developed a fascination with porn. In 2003, he registered a site with a name suggestive of violent oral sex. Agarwal used an address in Sanford, Florida—the small ranch house where Groover lived and, for several years, collected Agarwal’s mail and deposited stacks of arriving checks. Groover still occasionally gets mail for Agarwal, though he’s tried to stop it and hasn’t spoken with Agarwal in perhaps a decade.
Over the next two years, Agarwal registered at least another seven sites using this arrangement, perhaps two of which are printable: Daddysfriend.com and DeeCash.com. The sites didn’t make skin flicks but mostly offered the kind of movies you would’ve seen in the theatres that once crowded Times Square. Back in the early 2000s people still paid for porn on the web, and the sites registered by Agarwal, say a couple of sources in the business, could easily have brought at least $10 million a year.
A former business partner emphatically describes Agarwal as the mastermind behind the sites. “He’s got balls you could see from space,” he says. One ex-rival, Jim Carter, claims Agarwal poached some of his best Filipino employees from his staffing company, which also serviced the adult industry. He has little fondness for Agarwal: “He’s a f--king snake.”
Agarwal denies he ran or owned the porn sites. Instead, he says, Contact Center provided designers to create ads and programmers to ensure the ads drove the traffic to the porn websites. So if Dee Agarwal didn’t own sites like DeeCash.com, who did? “There were various owners of various businesses,” he says. “To ask me who owned what is a broad question.”
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(This story appears in the 25 July, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)