His story, though, starts a world away from Silicon Valley's hustle and bustle
The journey of Jay Chaudhry from a small-scale farming family in rural India to a billionaire tech mogul is just incredible. At 65, Chaudhry was a living example of what it means to have a vision, patiently go through it, and have the guts to chase one's dreams. He founded and is CEO of Zscaler, a cloud security company worth about $30 billion today. His story, though, starts a world away from Silicon Valley's hustle and bustle.
In his own words, "I have no background of entrepreneurship in my family of small-scale farmers. So if you asked me, 'Did I ever think about becoming an entrepreneur in my childhood [or] early years of my career?' Not really." It was in 1980 that Chaudhry made a rather bold decision to move to the United States to pursue higher education in engineering and marketing. This decision marked the first steps towards his pioneer status later in technology.
After his studies, Chaudhry worked with technology giants like IBM and Unisys. These jobs offered him excellent industry experience and a solid placement in technology. Still, the boom in Silicon Valley in the 1990s made him an entrepreneur at heart. Chaudhry recounts his motivation for this career shift: "If Marc Andreessen [Netscape co-founder] could start a company—he was a young guy [right] out of college—why shouldn't I start a company?"
Chaudhry started considering entrepreneurship during the City by the Bay boom in 1996. The jackpot stories around him motivated him to resign from his executive role at IQ Software in Atlanta. "Let's go get venture capital funding," he said. His wife, Jyoti, quit her job as a systems analyst at BellSouth and moved with him to help him in this venture. Together, they invested $500,000 of their combined life savings into the first cybersecurity start-up, SecureIT, in 1997.
"At the time, maybe less than 5% of Fortune 500 companies had firewalls," he said. "Within 18 months, we had deployed firewalls in about 50% of [the] Fortune 500." In 1998, SecureIT was acquired by VeriSign in an all-stock deal valued at nearly $70 million.
In the next decade, the Chaudhrys established two more cybersecurity companies and an e-commerce business, all of which were sold. By 2007, they were already successful entrepreneurs, but the Indian-American tycoon decided to launch "one big company and put 200% focus on that."
By 2007, Chaudhry was poised for his greatest challenge yet. "Let's go get venture capital funding," he declared, diverting all his energies into a new distinction. Working with a $50 million personal investment pooled with Jyoti, he set up Zscaler. The company was aimed at helping corporations migrate from traditional firewalls and consider adopting cloud-based security solutions.
Launching such a futuristic project in business was quite uncertain. Chaudhry admitted, "We were trying to solve a futuristic problem. Will it be successful or not? Will the market take off or not? That was all unknown."
Today, Zscaler is one of the biggest success stories of all time: it generates $1.6 billion in revenue a year and has a market value of some $30 billion. According to Forbes, Chaudhry's personal net worth alone is an estimated $11.5 billion.
