Jay Chaudhry didn’t grow up thinking he’d run a company, let alone become a billionaire.
Today, a man named Jagtar Singh Chaudhry is known as Jay Chaudhry, the founder and CEO of Zscaler. The cybersecurity company currently has a market capitalization of $26.6 billion. Yahoo Finance’s compiled data, while Forbes estimates Chaudhry’s net worth at $9.4 billion.
His story began in a much more humble way, in a family of small farmers in Himachal Pradesh. Entrepreneurship was not part of the family background, and he did not seriously consider it either.
“Coming from a family of small farmers, I have no entrepreneurial experience. So if you ask me, “Did I ever think about being an entrepreneur as a child?” [or] the first years of my career?’ Not really,” says Chaudhry, the billionaire founder and CEO of cloud security company Zscaler. CNBC Do it in an old interview.
Netscape made him rethink his career
After moving to the US in 1980 to study engineering and marketing, Chaudhry pursued a career in technology, working for companies such as IBM and Unisys. He eventually took a management position at IQ Software in Atlanta.
Then came 1996 and the dot-com boom.
His attention was drawn to the rise of Netscape. More than the company’s success, however, Chaudhry was fascinated by what the growing Internet could mean for businesses, as well as the security concerns that could come with it.
“It happened because I love to read and I love technology. In 1996, Netscape had just launched and gone public, and I was fascinated by it. I said, “If [Netscape co-founder] Marc Andreessen could have started a company – he was a young guy [right] after college, why don’t I start a company?”
He added: “My wife and I talked about it several times, and the more we thought about it, the more confident we were in it: [Netscape’s web browser] it is a way to access information and it should become popular. But if every company is connected to the Internet, that means there will be security risks.”
The idea was compelling enough for the couple to take a serious financial risk. Chaudhry left IQ Software in 1996, and his wife Jyoti retired from her job as a systems analyst at BellSouth. Together, they invested about $500,000—their savings—in SecureIT, a cybersecurity software startup, in 1997.
At the time, enterprise cybersecurity was still a relatively young market.
“Maybe less than 5% of Fortune 500 companies had firewalls,” Chaudhry recalls. “In 18 months, we installed firewalls in approximately 50% of [the] Fortune 500″.
The startup’s rapid growth culminated in its sale to VeriSign in 1998 in an all-stock deal valued at nearly $70 million.
He continued to build companies
SecureIT was not a one-time experiment. Over the next decade, Chaudhry and his wife founded two more cybersecurity companies and an e-commerce business. All three were eventually acquired.
By 2007, he had already achieved success as an entrepreneur. But he wanted to stop dividing his attention between different enterprises.
Chaudhry, “bored” without work, decided it was time to create “one big company and give it 200% attention,” he says.
The company’s goal was different from his first cybersecurity venture: to help companies move from traditional firewall-based security to the cloud. The couple invested $50 million of their own money into Zscaler.
A simple lifestyle eased the risks
The willingness to invest his savings in an uncertain business also had to do with the way Chaudhry approached money, he said.
He recalled growing up without much money and said his lifestyle in the U.S. remained relatively simple even as his career progressed.
“Our house in Alpharetta, Georgia, cost $200,000—a nice, typical middle-class house at the time—and we didn’t have fancy cars or fancy payments.
Our only child was attending public school at the time. There wasn’t much overhead. We said, “Let’s take a chance.”
Chaudhry later revealed that the amount he invested in Zscaler was only a small portion of his net worth.
