Indian-American entrepreneur Jay Choudhury never imagined he’d become a business mogul, much less a billionaire or an industry pioneer.
“I come from a small farming family and have no entrepreneurial experience, so did I ever think about starting a business as a child? [or] “Early in your career? Not at all,” said Chaudhry, founder and CEO of cloud security company Zscaler. CNBC.
“Marc Andreessen [Netscape co-founder] He was a young man who could start a company. [right] Why not start a company after graduating from college?
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Who is Jay Choudhury?
Growing up in rural India and moving to the US in 1980 to study engineering and marketing, he didn’t foresee a future as an entrepreneur, even after taking jobs at tech giants IBM and Unisys.
Choudhury began thinking about starting a business when the City by the Bay boomed in 1996. Inspired by the success stories of those around him, he decided to quit his executive job at IQ Software in Atlanta. “I’m going to raise some venture capital money,” he said.
His wife, Jyoti, left her job as a systems analyst at BellSouth to join her husband’s venture, and the couple invested their life savings, about $500,000, in their first cybersecurity startup, SecureIT, in 1997.
“At that time, less than 5 percent of Fortune 500 companies had firewalls,” Chowdhury recalls. “Within 18 months, we had firewalls in about 50 percent of companies. [the] It is a Fortune 500 company. In 1998, SecureIT was acquired by VeriSign in an all-stock transaction for nearly $70 million.
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How Zscaler became a cloud security giant
Over the next decade, Chaudhriz founded two more cybersecurity companies and an e-commerce company, both of which were eventually acquired. By 2007, they were already successful entrepreneurs, but the Indian-American businessman decided to “start one big company and put 200% of his focus on it.”
The new venture is Zscaler, a company founded to help businesses move from traditional firewalls to cloud-based security solutions.
“We were trying to solve a futuristic problem. Will we be successful? Will the market take off? Will it not? It was all unknown,” he said, sitting down. CNBC Make Its.
The couple founded Zscaler with $50 million in personal investment, and the company now has annual revenue of $1.6 billion and a market capitalization of approximately $30 billion.
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According to Forbes magazine, Choudhury’s personal net worth is estimated at $11.5 billion.
