The journey of an entrepreneur is a rollercoaster ride filled with immense highs and crushing lows. Despite facing several setbacks and failures, they battle their struggles and achieve their dreams. It’s a story weaved with sheer dedication, perseverance and a burning desire to bring an idea to life. And one such entrepreneur who fought all the odds and became successful is Jay Chaudhry. From growing up in a family of small-scale farmers in rural India to starting a prominent company, his unpredictable journey is truly remarkable.
The CEO and founder of cybersecurity firm Zscaler never imagined he would run a business, amass a fortune, or help popularise an entire industry. During an interview with CNBC Make It, the entrepreneur expressed that even when he moved to the US in 1980 to study marketing and engineering, or after securing jobs at tech giants Unisys and IBM, he didn’t have plans to start a company.
As per the portal, the 65-year-old entrepreneur said, “I have no background in 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?’ My reply would be ‘not really’.”
Elaborating further, Zscaler CEO shared that the tremendous success of tech startups like Netscape during the dot-com boom in Silicon Valley fascinated him and ignited his entrepreneurial ambitions in 1996. He thought that if Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen could start a company at a tender age who was just out of college, why shouldn’t he do the same.
After this, he quit his executive role at Atlanta-based IQ Software, and his wife Jyoti supported him in the decision and left her job as a systems analyst at BellSouth. The duo together invested their life savings of around $500,000 (approximately Rs 4 crore) into establishing a cybersecurity software startup named SecureIT in 1997.
Recalling his memories, he said that maybe less than 5 percent of Fortune 500 companies had firewalls at that time. Within 18 months, their company had deployed firewalls in about 50 percent of the Fortune 500.
In 1998, they sold their startup to VeriSign in an all-stock deal worth nearly $70 million. Then, the couple founded two more cybersecurity companies and an e-commerce business over the next decade, all of which were acquired. Their strategies worked, and by 2007, they were successful entrepreneurs.
Later, Jay decided to launch a big company, and with 200 percent focus, they established Zscaler. With the aim of helping companies transition from outdated firewalls to the cloud era, the couple invested $50 million of their own money. Now, Zscaler has a market value of roughly $30 billion and generates $1.6 billion in annual revenue. According to Forbes, Jay Chaudhry boasts an impressive net worth of $11.6 billion (over Rs 96,000 crore).
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