Jay Chaudhry never imagined he'd run a business, amass a fortune, or help popularise an entire industry. Not while growing up in India, not when he moved to the US in 1980 to study engineering and marketing, and not even after securing jobs at tech giants IBM and Unisys, the CNBC Make It reported.
"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?' Not really," Mr Chaudhry, the billionaire founder and CEO of cloud security company Zscaler, tells CNBC Make It.
The dot-com boom in Silicon Valley, marked by the wild success of tech startups like Netscape, sparked Mr Chaudhry's entrepreneurial ambitions in 1996. He made the bold decision to quit his executive role at Atlanta-based IQ Software, and his wife Jyoti left her job as a systems analyst at BellSouth. Together, they invested their life savings-around $500,000-into founding SecureIT, a cybersecurity software startup, in 1997. At that time, "maybe less than 5% of Fortune 500 companies had firewalls," Chaudhry recalls. "Within 18 months, we had deployed firewalls in about 50% of [the] Fortune 500."
Their timing was impeccable: in 1998, Mr Chaudhry sold SecureIT to VeriSign in an all-stock deal worth nearly $70 million. Over the next decade, the couple founded two more cybersecurity companies and an e-commerce business, all of which were acquired.
By 2007, they were already successful entrepreneurs. Mr Chaudhry, who gets "bored" without something to work on, decided it was time to launch "one big company and put 200% focus on that," he says. That company was Zscaler, aimed at helping companies transition from outdated firewalls to the cloud era. The couple invested $50 million of their own money. Today, Zscaler generates $1.6 billion in annual revenue and has a market value of roughly $30 billion. Mr Chaudhry's net worth is estimated at $11.5 billion by Forbes.
In an interview with CNBC Makeit, Mr Chaudhary shared what prompted him to stake his entire life's savings on a startup idea. "This thing 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 start a company - he was a young guy [right] out of college - why shouldn't I start a company?"
He added, "My wife and I talked a few times, and the more we thought about it, the more conviction we got around it: [Netscape's web browser] is the 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."
Mr Chaudhary further revealed that he never had money in his early childhood and had a simple lifestyle. "Our house in Alpharetta, Georgia, was $200,000 - a nice, typical middle-class house at that time - and we didn't have any fancy cars or fancy payments.
Our only child at that time was going to a public school. There wasn't a lot of overhead. We said, "Let's take a chance."
He revealed that the amount he invested in Zscaler was a small fraction of his net worth.
