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How a small-scale India farmer’s son Jay Chaudhry built a $30 billion cybersecurity empire
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Indian-origin technology expert Jay Chaudhry’s journey to becoming a successful entrepreneur was far from predictable. Growing up in a family of small-scale farmers in rural India, entrepreneurship was not on his radar, even after moving to the US in 1980 to pursue engineering and marketing studies and working at tech giants like IBM and Unisys.
“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,” Chaudhry told CNBC Make It.
The dot-com boom of Silicon Valley in the 1990s altered his outlook. The triumphs of tech startups, especially Netscape, motivated him to consider launching his own venture in 1996. This prompted him and his wife, Jyoti, to make a daring choice: they both resigned from their positions, he as an executive at IQ Software and she as a systems analyst at BellSouth, to co-found a cybersecurity software startup called SecureIT. They invested their life savings of approximately $500,000 into the enterprise.
“At the time, maybe less than 5% of Fortune 500 companies had firewalls,” Chaudhry recalls. Yet, within 18 months, SecureIT had deployed firewalls in about half of these companies. This early success led to the company’s acquisition by VeriSign in an all-stock deal worth nearly $70 million in 1998.
In the following decade, the Chaudhrys established two more cybersecurity firms and an e-commerce business, each eventually being acquired. By 2007, having already attained substantial wealth, Chaudhry decided to launch one major venture and devote all his efforts to it. This venture was Zscaler, a company aimed at assisting businesses in transitioning from traditional firewalls to cloud-based security solutions.
Investing $50 million of their own money, Zscaler has grown into a powerhouse, generating $1.6 billion in annual revenue with a market value of roughly $30 billion.
Currently, Forbes estimates Chaudhry’s net worth at $11.5 billion. Looking back on his journey, Chaudhry attributes his success to a combination of intuition, risk tolerance, and a simple lifestyle influenced by his humble upbringing.
When asked about his decision to risk his life savings on a startup, Chaudhry credits his passion for reading and technology. The success of Netscape particularly inspired him. “If [Netscape co-founder] Marc Andreessen could start a company — he was a young guy out of college — why shouldn’t I start a company?” he thought.
Despite challenges in raising venture capital, especially in Atlanta, which was not known for its VC funding at the time, the conviction he and his wife shared about the potential of the internet and the need for cybersecurity led them to take a leap of faith with their own money.
Chaudhry explains that his risk tolerance was shaped by his simple lifestyle. “I never had money in my early childhood, so there was never a notion that I must buy A and B and C,” he says. Their modest lifestyle and confidence in finding new jobs if the venture failed helped them make peace with the risk.
“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,” Chaudhry told CNBC Make It.
The dot-com boom of Silicon Valley in the 1990s altered his outlook. The triumphs of tech startups, especially Netscape, motivated him to consider launching his own venture in 1996. This prompted him and his wife, Jyoti, to make a daring choice: they both resigned from their positions, he as an executive at IQ Software and she as a systems analyst at BellSouth, to co-found a cybersecurity software startup called SecureIT. They invested their life savings of approximately $500,000 into the enterprise.
“At the time, maybe less than 5% of Fortune 500 companies had firewalls,” Chaudhry recalls. Yet, within 18 months, SecureIT had deployed firewalls in about half of these companies. This early success led to the company’s acquisition by VeriSign in an all-stock deal worth nearly $70 million in 1998.
In the following decade, the Chaudhrys established two more cybersecurity firms and an e-commerce business, each eventually being acquired. By 2007, having already attained substantial wealth, Chaudhry decided to launch one major venture and devote all his efforts to it. This venture was Zscaler, a company aimed at assisting businesses in transitioning from traditional firewalls to cloud-based security solutions.
Investing $50 million of their own money, Zscaler has grown into a powerhouse, generating $1.6 billion in annual revenue with a market value of roughly $30 billion.
Currently, Forbes estimates Chaudhry’s net worth at $11.5 billion. Looking back on his journey, Chaudhry attributes his success to a combination of intuition, risk tolerance, and a simple lifestyle influenced by his humble upbringing.
When asked about his decision to risk his life savings on a startup, Chaudhry credits his passion for reading and technology. The success of Netscape particularly inspired him. “If [Netscape co-founder] Marc Andreessen could start a company — he was a young guy out of college — why shouldn’t I start a company?” he thought.
Despite challenges in raising venture capital, especially in Atlanta, which was not known for its VC funding at the time, the conviction he and his wife shared about the potential of the internet and the need for cybersecurity led them to take a leap of faith with their own money.
Chaudhry explains that his risk tolerance was shaped by his simple lifestyle. “I never had money in my early childhood, so there was never a notion that I must buy A and B and C,” he says. Their modest lifestyle and confidence in finding new jobs if the venture failed helped them make peace with the risk.
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