Indian-Origin Man Who Quit Job, Drained Savings To Start Business, Now A Billionaire

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.”