How Jay built the fortune
Jay Chaudhry is a serial entrepreneur whose career has followed the shifts in how companies protect their networks. Before Zscaler he founded and sold several businesses in internet security, each time spotting a problem that large vendors had not yet solved. Those exits gave him the capital and confidence to fund his next company largely on his own.
Zscaler, started in 2007 and launched commercially in the following years, was built on the idea that security should sit in the cloud rather than in hardware boxes at the edge of an office network. As employees began working from laptops and phones and companies moved their applications to cloud providers, that approach, often described as zero trust, gained wide acceptance. Zscaler routes customer traffic through its own global platform, inspecting it for threats and enforcing access rules.
The company went public on Nasdaq in 2018. Chaudhry kept a large ownership stake after the listing, and the growth of the business through the years of remote and hybrid work is the main source of his wealth.
Chaudhry is known for funding much of Zscaler's early development with his own money instead of raising large venture rounds at the start, which allowed him to keep a bigger share of the company. When outside investors did come in, the firm was already generating revenue from enterprise customers.
Companies and holdings
Chaudhry's track record includes several companies that were sold to larger groups:
- SecureIT, a security services firm acquired by VeriSign
- CoreHarbor, a managed hosting company acquired by AT&T
- CipherTrust, an email security company acquired by Secure Computing
- AirDefense, a wireless security company acquired by Motorola
- Zscaler, founded in 2007, where he is chairman and chief executive
He and his wife Jyoti, who worked alongside him in several of these ventures, are the largest individual holders of Zscaler shares.
Zscaler's customers include large multinational companies and government agencies, and the firm runs its service from data centres around the world. Its revenue comes mainly from subscriptions, which gives it predictable income from year to year.
Early life and career
Chaudhry grew up in a small village in Himachal Pradesh in northern India, in a family of farmers, and has described studying without electricity at home as a child. He earned an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) in Varanasi before moving to the United States for graduate study.
At the University of Cincinnati he completed master's degrees in computer engineering and industrial engineering as well as an MBA. He then spent years in sales and marketing roles at large technology companies including IBM, NCR and Unisys, followed by a stint at a software firm, before leaving in the mid 1990s to start his first company in Atlanta.
Those years in corporate sales gave him an understanding of how large organisations buy technology, a lesson he has said shaped the way he designed and sold his own products. His first venture was built around services that helped companies secure their early internet connections, a market that was barely formed at the time.
He has described his move to Cincinnati as his first time on an aeroplane and his first experience of living away from rural India. The university years exposed him to American business culture and to the computer industry, which was then centred on mainframes and early networking.
Philanthropy and public life
Chaudhry has supported education, particularly at the institutions where he studied. He and his wife have made gifts to the University of Cincinnati, and he has spoken publicly about wanting to help students from backgrounds similar to his own.
He generally keeps his personal giving out of the spotlight, and most of his public appearances focus on cybersecurity, zero trust architecture and Zscaler's business rather than on his own wealth.
In interviews he often returns to his upbringing and to the value of education, and he has encouraged other immigrant entrepreneurs to start companies in the United States. He holds positions on industry and advisory panels related to cybersecurity.