Part IThe Story
Sometime in 1998, after the papers were signed, the employees of a small internet security company called SecureIT threw a farewell for their founder. Nobody seems to have recorded what was served or who gave the toast. Perhaps the decorations were nicer than usual. Jay Chaudhry, who has told the story more than once, does not dwell on the party. He remembers what he did after he left it. He went home, opened a spreadsheet listing the stock options held by each of his roughly eighty employees, and multiplied each line by the current share price of VeriSign, the company that had just bought SecureIT for about $70 million in stock.
— Jay Chaudhry, to CNBC Make It, 2024I went home that night and looked at the spreadsheet of all the [stock] options they had, and I multiplied by the stock price of VeriSign. That's when I realized that the math was about 70 or 80 millionaires, with stock options.
"It was impressive," he added, with the flatness of an engineer reporting a test result. He had not, he admitted, understood beforehand what the sale would do to the people who worked for him. The windfall was a byproduct of a plain decision. He and his wife, Jyoti, had paid for the company with their own life savings, about $500,000, after every venture capitalist they approached had sent them away. Because no outside investors were waiting to be paid first, there was more equity to hand down the org chart. VeriSign's stock then climbed through the last delirious stretch of the dot-com boom, and something like seventy of the eighty employees became millionaires, at least on paper. "People were going crazy in the company," he recalled, "because they had never thought of so much money." They bought houses and cars. Some took time off. They could, as he put it, do what they wanted to do.
The paper part mattered. VeriSign's shares collapsed when the bubble burst, and whether any one employee kept the fortune depended on when they sold. The arithmetic Chaudhry did that night was accurate for that night only, which is the only kind of arithmetic markets permit.
Still, the scene holds a good deal of what came later: a man doing the math on other people's money after the fact, as though checking a result he had not quite trusted himself to predict. He had been doing this kind of calculation for a long time. Four kilometers to school each morning, four back. A plane ticket he could not afford. A loan from a stranger that was supposed to be repaid so the same money could be lent to someone else. Thirty-odd years later the boy from a Himalayan village without electricity would be worth more than $17 billion, the richest Indian immigrant in America by Forbes' 2025 count. He would have built his fortune on one premise, stated so plainly that it reads like a hostile act: no one is trusted until they have been checked.
That is an odd creed for a man whose life was made possible, at every turn, by people who decided to trust him.
By the Numbers
From Panoh to the Zero Trust Exchange
800Population of Panoh, the village where Chaudhry was born
4 kmHis daily walk to high school in neighboring Dhusara
$200Roughly what he carried when he landed in the U.S. in 1980
~$500KThe Chaudhrys' life savings, staked on SecureIT
70 of 80SecureIT employees who became millionaires on paper after the VeriSign sale
$50MThe couple's own capital invested to launch Zscaler
500B+Transactions the Zscaler cloud processes each day
A Village With Nothing to Guard
The facts of the beginning are slightly unstable. Depending on the source, he was born on August 26 or August 7, in 1958 or 1959. The name on the record was Jagtar Singh Chaudhry. The youngest of three sons of Bhagat Singh and Surjeet Kaur, he grew up in Panoh, a village of about 800 people in the Una district, roughly 230 miles north of New Delhi, in the foothills where the plains begin rising toward the Himalayas. When he was born, Panoh belonged to Punjab. It now belongs to Himachal Pradesh. The border moved and the village stayed where it was. In the shorthand of rural Indian mail, a letter would have gone to V.P.O. Panoh, village and post office, followed by the district. Remember that address.
His parents were small-scale farmers. They worked a modest plot of wheat, corn, and sugarcane, and Chaudhry has spoken of farming with oxen as a boy. The village had no electricity until he reached eighth grade and no running water until tenth. With no lights in the house, the obvious place to read was outdoors, so he studied under a tree. The high school was in Dhusara, the next village, nearly four kilometers away, and he walked there every day.
The four kilometers were a privilege his father never had. "My father never got a chance to study because the nearest school was 10 km away," Chaudhry told a reporter in Las Vegas in 2024, at Zscaler's annual customer conference, of all places. "When I was young, there was a school about 4 km away and I could walk to it. My parents encouraged me to study well because they couldn't." The difference between ten kilometers and four was the difference between a life on the farm and everything that followed. On a LinkedIn post after a 2024 convocation speech he wrote that his parents "saved every rupee to ensure my educational opportunity." It is about the most sentimental sentence he has published, and it reads like a ledger entry.
Not every son left. An elder brother, Daljeet, stayed in the district and retired as principal of a government school in Una. When reporters arrived in March 2021, after Jay appeared on a list of the richest Indians in America, Daljeet told them his brother had been a hard worker who faced many problems in life and never gave up. Teachers from the old school remembered a brilliant student and a class topper. That is the usual material of a village legend. Its plainness is the interesting part. Nobody in Panoh describes a visionary. They describe a boy who did the work.
Panoh had no network to defend and nothing worth stealing. Its infrastructure was a footpath, a tree, and a school four kilometers off. Decades later, Chaudhry would predict that cybersecurity would become a utility, something closer to electricity or water than to a product you buy. He grew up without both. The comparison may be pure metaphor to him. It is hard to hear it as only that.
Three Questions About Background
His account of how he got out of Panoh is notable for how little he claims credit for it. He calls his path into engineering "more accidental than designed or chosen." A high school headmaster saw raw talent and pushed him. He finished pre-university as a gold medalist under Himachal Pradesh University, topping the state, and had never heard of the Indian Institutes of Technology until another teacher told him to apply. He got into the Institute of Technology at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, now IIT (BHU), and became the first person from his village to attend an engineering college.
The choice of discipline came down to a dislike of blood. "At that time, they used to say: 'Good students become doctors or engineers,'" he has said. He "didn't like to deal with blood," so it was electronics engineering.
Varanasi, the ancient city on the Ganges where Hindus come to die, was an odd place to train as an electronics engineer, and he speaks of it with a warmth he rarely spends on anything else. He walked the ghats. He wandered the Lanka neighborhood near campus. He swam. Mostly he sat for hours in the Central Library, which he credits with improving his English and widening his sense of the world. A village kid in the 1970s, studying among some of the strongest students in India, he found the shortest route to parity was the reading room. Among his classmates in the electronics engineering class of 1980 was a student named K. Kailash. Hold onto him too.
At IIT everybody talked about going to America, and he wanted to go. "I had to choose a school that gave me tuition scholarships," he said. "I got into University of Cincinnati but almost missed it because I couldn't arrange a loan for the air tickets." Cincinnati would cover tuition. It would not fly him there. The family could not cover the fare. He kept searching and came across a Tata loan scholarship for Indian students going abroad. That year he was one of about thirty recipients.
The interview is where the story slows down. JRD Tata, patriarch of the conglomerate that bore his name and then in his late seventies, met each final candidate himself. Chaudhry's interview lasted four minutes. Tata asked three questions, all about his background. Then he wished the young man good luck.
Chaudhry explained the logic later. The scholarship was a loan, and Tata wanted students who would succeed and repay it so that the money could be lent again to some other student. It was not charity. It was a judgment about one person's reliability made in four minutes: where are you from, who are you, can you be trusted to bring this back. "That was a major turning point in my career," Chaudhry said.
In 1980, at twenty-one or twenty-two depending on which birthday you believe, he boarded an airplane for the first time. One later account says he landed in the United States with about $200. The University of Cincinnati gave him three degrees: a master's in computer engineering, a master's in industrial engineering, and an MBA in marketing. The third is the one to notice. An electronics engineer who had learned English largely in a library chose to study the discipline that is mostly talking to people.
The decade that followed was ordinary, which he does not hide. He worked at IBM, at NCR, at Unisys, then as an executive at an Atlanta software company called IQ Software. He started in technical roles and moved into sales and marketing. He describes that move, in a speech to students at his old campus, as the moment he understood that building an excellent product was only half the work, and that the other half was knowing how a market behaves and how a sale gets made. Elsewhere he has listed what he had to learn at IBM, including his English, as plainly as a farmer listing repairs. In Atlanta he became active in TiE, the network of Indian-origin entrepreneurs. An old acquaintance from those meetings would write to him decades later that he had been a pioneer in security "way before it was cool!"
None of it looked like a launch pad. A family with no tradition of business had produced a sales executive with three American degrees and a mortgage-grade job. That would have been enough of a story, and in many households like his, it was.
Two Resignations and a Business Plan Nobody Wanted
What changed things was reading. "This thing happened because I love to read and I love technology," he told CNBC. In the mid-1990s Netscape shipped its browser and went public, and the business press filled with a company that promised to connect every household to what people were still calling the information highway. Chaudhry read everything he could find. He was struck less by the browser than by its founder. "If Marc Andreessen could start a company — he was a young guy [right] out of college — why shouldn't I start a company?"
It is a revealing kind of envy. Andreessen was in his early twenties, a Midwestern coder who had helped write the Mosaic browser as a student at the University of Illinois. Chaudhry was in his late thirties, had a family, and had a decade of corporate employment behind him. He was not looking at Andreessen's genius. He was looking at Andreessen's permission. If that was allowed, why not this?
He also drew a conclusion that the other enthusiasts of 1996 mostly missed. They saw the internet as a way to sell things. He saw it as an exposure. If every home and business was about to be connected to everything else, then every home and business was about to be reachable by people who meant them harm. "I realised that security would be an important piece to protect homes and businesses from the bad guys," he said. Firewalls were the obvious first purchase. Almost no one had one.
He and Jyoti wrote a business plan and took it to venture capitalists in Atlanta, where they lived. "Probably not the best place for VC funding," he said later, with the dryness of a man who can afford the joke. "They all told us to first go and do a start-up and then go back to them for funding." That is the circular answer of capital: show us you don't need us and we will be happy to help. The couple had two options. They could give up the idea or give up their jobs.
Jyoti Chaudhry is the second protagonist of this story and the least visible. Her parents were in the Indian Air Force, a family of uniforms and postings rather than fields and harvests. She had an MBA and a finance background and worked as a systems analyst at BellSouth, the telephone company that dominated the American Southeast. She was the steady one. Her husband describes himself as someone "ready to jump off the cliff" when an idea excites him. "She can pull me back," he says. Both of them quit. They put in their savings, roughly $500,000, or about ₹4 crore in the figure Indian papers prefer. The money came from both of them, and so did the risk.
The division of labor was clear from the beginning. He ran sales and marketing. She ran finance, human resources, systems, and operations. "I don't know how to incorporate a company. She does," he has said. "I've never figured out payrolls and benefits." About their own household finances: "I have no clue." He says this without embarrassment, the way some men say they can't cook, and it comes with a recommendation that sounds old-fashioned now: "If you want to do a great startup, get your spouse involved as a partner." In his IIT address he called the arrangement lucky: "Jyoti and I, with our complementary skills, were together 24 hours a day." Asked who mattered most to his success, he answers without hedging. "The most important person for my success is my wife." He has also said, more broadly, "Nothing significant gets done by an individual person."
The founding date is itself uncertain. Some accounts say 1996, others 1997. The timing was not. "At the time, maybe less than 5% of Fortune 500 companies had firewalls," he says. "Within 18 months, we had deployed firewalls in about 50% of [the] Fortune 500." Over eighteen months, SecureIT, which his biographies call the first pure-play internet security service, went from cold-calling to selling into half the largest companies in America. The company built and protected the walls around corporate networks, which was exactly what the moment needed.
Then came VeriSign, about $70 million in stock, the farewell party, and the spreadsheet.
What the couple took from the experience is worth noticing, because it is not what most founders take from a first exit. He has said SecureIT taught him what actually drove him, and that it was not money but "the sense of accomplishment that came with bringing an idea to life." The money mattered mainly because it meant they would never again have to ask permission to start something.
A Decade of Better Walls
VeriSign moved him to San Francisco to run its security services division. He stayed about a year and left in 1999. Big-company management suited him about as well as the beach does, which is to say not at all. Of the beach he has said: "I can go to the beach, and in a couple of hours I'm bored."
What followed was a run of companies in quick succession, almost in parallel, and its pattern is clearer in hindsight than it could have been at the time.
In 2000 he started CipherTrust, an email security company. The idea came straight out of SecureIT, where he had gotten to know the full catalog of vulnerabilities and attacks the internet now made possible. The technology was built from scratch, and the product was marketed as the industry's first email security gateway: a checkpoint between the outside world and the inbox. Secure Computing acquired it in 2006 for $274 million, and it eventually ended up inside McAfee.
Also in 2000 he started CoreHarbor, a managed e-commerce platform, the one company in the series that was not strictly about security. USi bought it, and it passed into AT&T.
In 2002 he started AirDefense, a wireless intrusion prevention system that monitored the airwaves between laptops and Wi-Fi access points and watched for whatever moved across that invisible border. Motorola acquired it in 2008.
Look at the products together and they form a single argument made in sequence. A firewall at the network's edge. A gateway at the mail server's edge. A sensor at the edge of the radio spectrum. For roughly ten years Jay Chaudhry made his living building better walls, each one guarding a frontier the previous one had missed, and each one sold to a larger company that wanted to own the newest stretch of the perimeter.
Ernst & Young named him its Entrepreneur of the Year for the Southeast. He became wealthy several times over. He is unusually candid about how lopsided the record is. Asked in 2025 about Jensen Huang's well-known remark that he would not have started Nvidia had he known how painful it would be, Chaudhry did not claim comparable suffering. "Start-ups always come with challenges," he said. "I was fortunate because all my start-ups worked."
Something nagged at him all the same. He described it to a journalist years later in the plain language of an accounting problem. "Since 1997, when I started my first cybersecurity company, I saw the number of attacks grow every year. I saw the budget for IT security grow every year. Then I asked myself, the attacks are growing; breaches are growing."
The rest of that sentence is the founding logic of everything that came next. Spending on walls rose every year, and so did the number of people getting over them. A man who had sold four generations of walls was starting to suspect that walls were the problem.
Fifty Million Dollars of Patience
By 2007 the Chaudhrys no longer needed to work, and he could not stop. He wanted, he said, to launch "one big company and put 200% focus on that." The earlier companies had been narrow wedges sold early. This one was meant to last.
The world around him was moving to places firewalls could not follow. Salesforce had shown that serious enterprise software could live in someone else's data center and be rented by subscription. Amazon had started renting out computing. The iPhone arrived that year and promised that employees would soon reach company data from anywhere, on devices the company did not own. Applications were leaving the building, and so were users. The castle walls now enclosed an emptying castle.
His model, he has said, was Marc Benioff. He wanted to build the Salesforce of cloud security. The company was first incorporated as SafeChannel, Inc., and later renamed Zscaler, pronounced zee-scaler. He had a co-founder from a long way back. K. Kailash, his electronics engineering classmate at IIT-BHU, class of 1980, became the technical partner. Chaudhry has described the founding as starting with running into that classmate decades after graduation, two boys from the same Varanasi lecture halls who had taken separate routes into American technology and met again in middle age with the same unfinished idea. The partnership that built Zscaler, like the scholarship that got him to Cincinnati, rested on a judgment about character formed long before the money was at stake.
The Chaudhrys funded it themselves, again. This time the stake was about $50 million, money from the earlier exits. A later podcast introduction noted that it was "a bold bet in the middle of a market downturn," and the platform launched in 2008, as the financial system was failing. The bet was not just that the market would recover. It was that a market existed at all. "We were trying to solve a problem that was futuristic," he told CNBC. "Will it be successful or not? Will the market take off or not? That was all unknown."
The engineering was harder than the pitch. Running security inline for a large company's internet traffic, from the cloud, at speeds users would tolerate, meant going down to the plumbing. The team, by his account, rewrote not only the go-to-market approach for security but the TCP/IP stack, the basic networking code computers use to talk to one another. He has a phrase for this kind of focus that sounds like something said about digging a well: a startup should be "a foot wide and 20 feet deep."
Selling was worse, and the reason was almost comic. Chaudhry, the old IBM salesman, did what salesmen do and called on the people who bought security, which meant the people who managed the firewalls. They listened politely. Then, as he recalls it, they asked him directly: "hey if I bought your service, what would I do." He was offering to remove the thing they were employed to maintain. "Then I realised I was talking to the wrong people," he said, "and that I needed to talk to senior-level management." The buyer for a replacement is never the person being replaced.
This is where self-funding stopped being a matter of pride and became structural. "It took us a few years to really start getting traction in the market," he said, "and VCs can write you off and move on." No one could write Zscaler off, because no one besides the founders had money in it. The first outside round came in August 2012, $38 million, five years after founding. TPG led a $100 million round in August 2015. In February 2017 the company hired Remo Canessa as chief financial officer, a choice the Wall Street Journal noted was made for his IPO experience. By then the plan was clear. Bloomberg later reported that Zscaler had turned down takeover offers before going public. For the first time in his career, Jay Chaudhry declined to sell.
Who Are You? Where Are You Going?
The idea at the center of Zscaler sounds simple once someone has explained it to you, and that is usually a sign it was hard to see in the first place.
Corporate security had been organized for decades like a medieval town. The industry called it "castle and moat." The firewall was the moat. Anything inside the network was trusted and anything outside was suspect. The model had one fatal assumption, which was that the inside could be clearly separated from the outside. Once a laptop was in an airport lounge, the payroll system was in a SaaS vendor's data center, and a contractor in another hemisphere needed access to both, the moat no longer surrounded anything. And once an attacker crossed it, through one stolen password or one unpatched appliance, the attacker was inside and trusted, free to move from system to system.
The alternative became known as zero trust, summarized in four words: never trust, always verify. No user, device, or application is trusted by default, wherever it sits. Each connection is checked, each time, and allowed only to the specific thing it needs. Chaudhry's best explanation is not technical at all. He compares Zscaler to an old telephone switchboard:
— Jay Chaudhry, on The Reboot Chronicles, 2025You come to us, we say, who are you? Where are you going? And if you are allowed, we connect you and you only.
The phrasing matters. Who are you? Where are you going? These are an immigration officer's questions, and an admissions committee's, and the questions a man in his late seventies asked a farmer's son for four minutes in a room in India before deciding to pay for his plane ticket. Chaudhry has crossed many checkpoints, and in his telling each crossing came down to someone deciding, on a short look, that he was who he said he was and would go where he said he would go. He built a fortune on making that look mandatory, continuous, and automatic for every connection on the corporate internet.
One Indian-diaspora newsletter put it in a single line: he grew up in a village that got electricity in his teens and named his company's philosophy after trusting no one, and "the two facts are not unrelated." That is a little neat, as tidy lines tend to be. Chaudhry himself has never drawn the connection publicly. He talks about zero trust in terms of attack surfaces and lateral movement, not autobiography. But the connection is in the material whether or not he states it. One correction is worth making to the newsletter's version: zero trust does not mean trusting no one. It means trusting no one by default. The trust comes after the questions. Everyone in his own story who trusted him first asked the questions.
His most quotable form of the doctrine came later and sounds like a proverb: "If you are reachable, you're breachable." Zscaler's approach hides applications from the open internet altogether, so that an attacker scanning for a door finds only a switchboard operator asking for credentials. He likes to frame the commercial argument in terms of time instead of fear. A customer, he says, wants to know: "Can I open a new office in Kuala Lumpur in three days rather than wait for three months, because some routers, firewalls, boxes need to be shipped and things slow down?" A company that is buying another should not need eighteen months of transitional agreements to connect the two networks.
He is a combative evangelist and has never pretended otherwise. In 2018 he told an Indian trade publication that network security had become irrelevant. In 2022, as the established firewall vendors began advertising their own zero trust products, he said they had "hijacked" the term. In 2024 he predicted that Palo Alto Networks' new bundling strategy would "unravel over time." Firewalls, he says, will go the way of mainframes. This is a man who spent the first decade of his entrepreneurial life selling firewalls, and he speaks of them now as a reformed sinner speaks of sin. It reads less like hypocrisy than like a ledger kept honestly. He built the walls, saw the breach numbers rise along with the budgets, and changed his position.
The World It Was Built For
Zscaler went public on the Nasdaq on March 16, 2018, under the ticker ZS. It priced above its range at $16 a share, raised $192 million, and closed its first day at $33. Barron's headline called it a nice day for the tech veteran. On paper, Chaudhry was a billionaire. The Forbes 400 of 2020 put him at No. 85, worth $6.9 billion, one of seven Indian Americans on the list.
Then came the pandemic, and the company's founding premise turned into the global operating condition almost overnight. Office workers went home. Their laptops left the castle and stayed out. VPN concentrators built for a tenth of a workforce collapsed under all of it. "There is an accelerated market shift towards work from anywhere," Chaudhry said after an early 2021 earnings report, "which is the world Zscaler was built for." That quarter's revenue was $157 million, up 55 percent from a year earlier. Hurun estimated his net worth had risen 271 percent in a year. On December 17, 2021, Zscaler joined the Nasdaq-100. That October, Forbes placed him at No. 45 among the richest Americans, with $16.3 billion, the wealthiest Indian American in the country. He and his family owned about 42 percent of the company.
Almost nobody knew who he was.
Arjun Malhotra, a co-founder of the Indian IT firm HCL and a longtime Silicon Valley figure, told the Times of India he admired that Chaudhry stayed private and low-profile, and that without Zscaler's market capitalization few people would have heard of him. Chaudhry has said he does not like talking about his personal wealth. When he does, it is mostly to explain why he finds it uninteresting.
"Personally, I don't have a lot of attachment to money," he told CNBC in 2024. "I never had money in my early childhood, so there was never a notion that I must buy A and B and C."
— Jay Chaudhry, to CNBC Make It, 2024Some people get money [and] need to buy five houses and boats and planes and all of this kind of stuff. That's a headache to me.
He has the contempt of someone who used to keep a farm's books for the Valley's furniture budgets. "I've seen in [Silicon] Valley, people raise a lot of money. Then they go and get very fancy buildings and mahogany desks and all that nonsense." Nonsense is a word he uses often. It works as a verdict and as a matter of house style.
The life described in profiles fits. For years the family lived in Saratoga, California, where Jay and Jyoti took after-dinner walks around the neighborhood with their children, Simi, Yash, and Samir. The family called them "bonding walks." He is a vegetarian. He hikes and goes white-water rafting. He reads history, global politics, and psychology. The family later moved to Reno, Nevada. Some admiring profiles say he flies commercial and takes customer calls himself, which may be true or may be the kind of detail that accumulates around a modest billionaire. What is documented is how he spends his time: by his own count, at least a third of it with customers. "The #1 sales person in any company needs to be the founder," he says. The old IBM salesman never left.
The company grew around him to a size that makes the old SecureIT spreadsheet look small. Fiscal 2024 revenue was $2.17 billion. The headcount was 7,348, about 40 percent of them in India, which brings the story partway home. Zscaler says its cloud handles more than 500 billion transactions a day, enforces more than 25 billion policies, and blocks an average of more than 165 million threats daily. Roughly 45 percent of the Fortune 500 run traffic through it. Its customer-satisfaction score is above 75 on a scale where the average software company, the company points out, scores 30. Gartner named it a leader in secure web gateways ten consecutive times before the category was renamed around it. In fiscal 2024, with $2.17 billion in revenue, it still reported a net loss of $58 million under standard accounting, and its founder did not seem to mind. He was building for the long term.
His hiring philosophy is a two-part sorting question: "Are you a builder or are you an operator?" Builders, he says, do well in chaos. "Startups succeed because of tons of passion and hardly any process." Operators prefer structure and know how to scale it. People who can do both are "a rare thing." He can say this credibly because he has had to become both, the founder who once cold-called firewall administrators and the chairman of a company with eight thousand employees. He also has a rule for his leadership team that captures his whole management style: "If you have two strong people who agree with you all the time, one of them is redundant."
Made for This Moment, Again
Fortunes that big move constantly, and his has moved in large swings. Forbes put it at $11.5 billion in July 2024 and $9 billion by that September. In 2025 Forbes' list of America's richest immigrants ranked him No. 8, worth $17.9 billion. He was the only Indian-born person in the top ten, well ahead of Sundar Pichai at 119 and Satya Nadella at 120, the two Indian-born executives Americans actually recognize. The Indian press greeted the list with something like a national celebration. India had overtaken Israel as the leading birthplace of immigrant billionaires in the United States, with twelve, and the farmer's son from Una led them. That summer, at Zscaler's conference in Prague, the company's market capitalization was close to $50 billion. A trade journalist described his life as a fairy tale and framed it with the principle of obliquity: the idea that wealth comes most reliably to people who are trying to do something else.
The fairy tale had a rough 2026. Generative AI, which had looked like a tailwind for every software company, started to look like a threat to all of them. Investors worried that the subscription software business itself might be eaten by models that could write software on request, and the sell-off acquired the inevitable name: the SaaSpocalypse. Zscaler's shares fell by more than half in a year. By the time of Zenith Live '26 in Vienna, the market capitalization was around $24 billion.
Chaudhry went on offense. "Zscaler was made for this moment," he said in his keynote. The next day a BusinessLine reporter who sat across from him found himself thinking of the film Unstoppable, in which a welder who has just stopped a runaway train says he was simply in his comfort zone. Chaudhry looked like a man in his comfort zone.
The argument was the one he had been making since 2007, applied to a new attacker. That spring Anthropic had given select security vendors access to a vulnerability-discovery model called Claude Mythos, through an initiative it called Project Glasswing. OpenAI ran a parallel program for its GPT-5.4-Cyber model. Zscaler was one of only two pure-play security companies to join both. Chaudhry was unambiguous about what the technology meant. The model was "very powerful," and models available to attackers, whether nation-state systems or open-source weights without the same controls, "aren't too far behind." Vulnerability counts could rise twentyfold. "We all need to be paranoid," he told CRN, "and do [the right] things about it." He praised Dario Amodei for "taking the high ground." And he turned the threat back on his old competitors: "To keep [relying] on these firewalls, to create segments and rules, will be almost impossible."
At Davos in 2025 he had already said AI could find in seconds the vulnerabilities that once took weeks to uncover. His conclusion did not change. If finding a way in becomes nearly free, the only defense that scales is having no exposed door to find. Reachable, breachable. The company kept buying capabilities to extend the switchboard: Avalor, an Israeli AI data-security startup, for $310 million in March 2024; the managed detection firm Red Canary, announced May 17, 2025; the browser-security company SquareX in February 2026. The man who once ran four companies at once was now running acquisition after acquisition into one.
He was sixty-seven. People ask him about retirement and he answers as if the question were slightly foreign. "What would I do if I don't work?" He would rather be in the mountains than on a beach. The mountains, at least, are a kind of work.
The Road Back to Panoh
The loan that got him to Cincinnati came with a condition. Pay it back so someone else can use it. Nothing in his public life since reads like ostentatious charity. Much of it reads like repayment.
He returns to Panoh regularly. In 2011 he arranged for a mobile medical lab to come to the village and give the older residents blood tests and checkups. In 2022 he gave $1 million to IIT-BHU to establish an Entrepreneurship Center and a Software Innovation Center. "My hope," he said, "is that the Entrepreneurship Center will afford students with big dreams and aspirations the same opportunities I was fortunate enough to experience." The same year he gave $3 million to the Bay Area chapter of the American India Foundation for COVID relief. In 2023 he gave $1 million to the Sankara Eye Foundation, which works to end curable blindness in India. The causes are tests, schools, and sight, which is to say diagnosis, education, and the ability to see clearly. They are his own concerns turned outward.
He goes back to Varanasi too. On February 8, 2021, at 10:50 a.m. India time, which was 9:20 the previous evening in California, he spoke by video to the graduates of IIT-BHU's ninth convocation. In December 2024 he gave the address in person at Banaras Hindu University's 104th convocation in Swatantrata Bhawan, as 14,072 degrees were conferred. He noticed that more of the gold medals had gone to women and said India needed to recognize the power of women. His message was the one he always gives, in the plain style he always uses. "Don't chase money, chase making a difference." And: "Adversity makes you figure things out, what to do and how to do." In January 2026 he joined IIT-BHU's entrepreneurship summit online and told the students to learn artificial intelligence. "Lots of people wish to do things," he said, "but very few have burning desire to pursue it."
He predicts that security will become a utility, as unremarkable and necessary as electricity and water, the two things his village waited until his teens to get.
The checking he built into the internet has spread back into the places he came from, in small ways. Several hundred of the largest companies in the world now ask every connection who it is and where it is going. In July 2025, after a BBC interview in Prague, he posted on LinkedIn about his journey from a small Himalayan village to Silicon Valley, and about Zscaler's mission "to make the world safer by securing every user, on any device, from any location." The comments filled up as such comments do: partners, consultants, a stranger asking whether he had ever managed to work from home three days a week. Among them, between the congratulations, was one line from someone who had not gone anywhere. It gave a name, a village, a post office, and a district, in the order a letter carrier would need them:
I Manish lath v p o panoh una
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows are principles drawn from Chaudhry's career across five companies and four decades. They are not his slogans, though some borrow his words. They are patterns visible in the decisions themselves: how he paid for things, who he sold to, when he refused to sell, and what he chose to dismantle. Several go against current Silicon Valley practice. That is part of why they are worth studying.
The principles
- 1.Pay for the first bet yourself, so the equity can flow downhill.
- 2.Partner with your brake, not your echo.
- 3.Keep the founder in the sales seat.
- 4.Find the buyer who isn't being replaced.
- 5.Bet on the mega shift customers aren't asking for.
- 6.Go a foot wide and twenty feet deep.
- 7.Treat early exits as tuition for the one company you keep.
- 8.Take outside capital only once it can't write you off.
- 9.Retire your own product category before someone else does.
- 10.Make one of every two agreeable executives redundant.
- 11.In a panic, restate the thesis. Don't invent a new one.
- 12.Repay the loan by relending it.
Z
Five Companies, One Argument
Read in sequence, Chaudhry's companies trace a decade of building perimeters, followed by a career spent dismantling them.
1996–97
Jay and Jyoti Chaudhry quit their jobs and stake roughly $500,000 in SecureIT, a firewall and internet security services firm.
1998
VeriSign acquires SecureIT for about $70 million in stock; roughly 70 of 80 employees become paper millionaires.
2000
Founds CipherTrust (email security gateway) and CoreHarbor (managed e-commerce).
2002
Founds AirDefense, a wireless intrusion prevention system.
2006
Secure Computing acquires CipherTrust for $274 million.
2007
Founds SafeChannel, later Zscaler, with IIT-BHU classmate K. Kailash, funded with about $50 million of the couple's own money.
2008
Zscaler platform launches; Motorola acquires AirDefense.
2012
First outside round: $38 million.
2015
$100 million round led by TPG.
2018
IPO on March 16 at $16; closes first day at $33.
2021
Joins the Nasdaq-100 on December 17.
2026
Shares fall more than 50% in the "SaaSpocalypse"; Chaudhry declares Zscaler "made for this moment."
Principle 1
Pay for the first bet yourself, so the equity can flow downhill
The usual explanation for self-funding is control: no investors, no board to overrule you. Chaudhry values that. "Owning 100% of your company early on," as CNBC summarized his view, lets you make your own decisions. But the SecureIT story shows a second effect that gets less attention. With no preferred shareholders standing in line, equity can go to the people actually doing the work. He has said the independence from external investors is what let the couple give more equity to employees, and the outcome of about seventy millionaires among eighty staff followed from the cap table, not from generosity alone.
The discipline extends past ownership. "I think if you put in your own money, you deal with it very differently," he says. Founders spending their own savings do not buy mahogany desks. The constraint shapes the culture before anyone writes down a values statement. SecureIT's frugality and its broad distribution of equity came from the same decision.
There is a selection effect in it as well. Self-funding forced the Chaudhrys to answer a question most venture-backed founders never face: would we bet everything we have on this? Atlanta's VCs effectively told them to prove it to themselves first. They did.
Tactic: Before raising a priced round, model how much additional employee equity your own capital would free up, and treat that number as one of the things outside money will cost you.
Principle 2
Partner with your brake, not your echo
Founding-team advice usually stresses complementary skills: technical plus commercial. Chaudhry's partnership with Jyoti includes that (she ran finance, HR, and operations, he ran sales and product), but what he emphasizes is temperament. He calls himself "ready to jump off the cliff." Of his wife: "She can pull me back." The pairing is not two visionaries. It is an accelerator and a brake that trust each other completely.
This is why his slightly old-fashioned advice, "get your spouse involved as a partner," deserves more than a smile. The underlying point is not about marriage. It is that the person whose job is to say no must have standing the founder cannot dismiss. A co-founder who owns half the downside, in this case literally half the household savings, has that standing. A hired COO usually does not.
The same thinking appears in his choice of Kailash for Zscaler: a classmate from 1980 whose character he had known for decades before any money was involved. Chaudhry picks partners the way JRD Tata picked loan recipients, by judging long-term reliability, not short-term brilliance.
Tactic: Identify the one person in your company with both the standing and the willingness to stop you, and if no such person exists, recruit or empower one before the next major bet.
Principle 3
Keep the founder in the sales seat
Chaudhry trained as an electronics engineer and chose to become a salesman. At IBM, NCR, and Unisys he moved from technical roles into sales and marketing, deliberately, after concluding that a great product was only half of a business. Thirty years later the conviction is stronger: "Quite often, entrepreneurs think that if the technology is great, then it will speak for itself, but that's not true. The #1 sales person in any company needs to be the founder."
He holds himself to it in measurable terms, spending at least a third of his time with customers while running a company with thousands of employees. That is not ceremonial. Founders who sell keep hearing directly how buyers object, which is how he found out in Zscaler's early years that he was pitching the wrong people.
The deeper point is that in a category-creating company, the sales conversation is where the product thesis gets tested. A founder who hands that conversation to a VP of sales too early loses the most accurate feedback the market provides.
Tactic: Put a fixed share of your calendar, a third if you can, into direct customer meetings, and do not let that share shrink as the company grows.
Principle 4
Find the buyer who isn't being replaced
Zscaler's early sales problem was close to a parable. Chaudhry, selling a service that made firewalls unnecessary, kept meeting the people who managed firewalls. Their response was honest: "hey if I bought your service, what would I do." No one buys their own obsolescence. "Then I realised I was talking to the wrong people," he said, "and that I needed to talk to senior-level management."
The general rule: in any displacement sale, the person operating the incumbent system has a stake in it. The buyer for a replacement architecture is whoever owns the outcome the old system was meant to deliver, meaning the CIO, the CFO, or the board, not whoever owns the system itself. Zscaler's later investment in board-level education, including a book by board member Andy Brown and Helmuth Ludwig titled Cybersecurity: Seven Steps for Boards of Directors, extends the same logic: keep moving the conversation up the organization until you reach someone whose job does not depend on the status quo.
Tactic: For every target account, write down who would lose budget, headcount, or status if you win, and make sure that person is not your champion.
Principle 5
Bet on the mega shift customers aren't asking for
"Your customers are often looking to solve incremental problems," Chaudhry told the TiEcon audience in 2024, "so they won't be asking for a transformational change; therefore, you need to drive with your conviction and your gut." It is a striking line from someone who otherwise talks constantly about customer obsession. The two positions fit together. Listen to customers about their pain. Don't listen to them about the cure.
Both of his decisive bets were placed before the demand showed up. SecureIT launched when "maybe less than 5%" of the Fortune 500 had firewalls. Zscaler launched in 2007, before "zero trust" was an industry term and during a financial crisis, on the premise that applications and users would leave the corporate network. "It's the mega shifts that create new market leaders," he says. Incremental improvements produce acquisitions, which, as his first four companies show, can be a perfectly good outcome but a different one.
The skill is not prediction in general. It is reading which secondary effect of an obvious trend nobody is pricing. Everyone in 1996 saw the internet. Fewer saw that every connection was also an exposure.
Tactic: For the most hyped trend in your market, list the problems it creates rather than solves, and test whether any of them is large enough to build a company on.
Principle 6
Go a foot wide and twenty feet deep
Chaudhry's image for startup focus, "a foot wide and 20 feet deep," is agricultural in spirit: it describes a well, not a field. His early companies followed it literally. Each one dug into a single perimeter: the network firewall, the email gateway, the wireless airwaves. None tried to be a platform.
Depth at Zscaler meant re-engineering at the protocol level, rewriting the TCP/IP stack to make inline cloud security fast enough to tolerate. That kind of investment is only possible when the scope is narrow. Breadth came later, through acquisitions such as Avalor, Red Canary, and SquareX, once the core well was producing.
The platform era makes this principle unfashionable, since every pitch deck now promises a suite. Chaudhry's record suggests the suite is something you earn after the wedge has gone deep enough to support weight.
Tactic: Describe your product's scope in one sentence without the word "and"; if you can't, cut until you can.
Principle 7
Treat early exits as tuition for the one company you keep
Four acquisitions in about a decade could be read as a career of flipping companies. Chaudhry reads it differently. The early companies financed and taught the one he meant to keep. By 2007 he had both the $50 million to self-fund Zscaler and an intimate knowledge of every perimeter it would replace, because he had built three of them.
He is clear about the psychological trap that serial selling creates. "Don't build a company to get rich quick as you'll be desperate to sell it," he said at TiEcon. "If your mindset is to always sell your company, you might not be able to make the right business decisions." With Zscaler he deliberately reversed his own pattern: "one big company and put 200% focus on that," and, per Bloomberg, turned down takeover offers before the IPO.
J
The Exit Ledger
Each early company guarded a different edge. The fifth was built to make edges unnecessary.
| Company | What it guarded | Outcome | Phase |
|---|---|---|---|
| SecureIT | The network edge (firewalls) | VeriSign, ~$70M stock, 1998 | Perimeter |
| CipherTrust | The mail edge (email gateway) | Secure Computing, $274M, 2006 | Perimeter |
| CoreHarbor | Managed e-commerce | USi / AT&T | Adjacent |
| AirDefense | The airwave edge (wireless intrusion) | Motorola, 2008 | Perimeter |
| Zscaler | Every connection, verified individually | IPO 2018; independent | Post-perimeter |
Tactic: If you have exited before, write down explicitly what the next company must do that the last one could not, and refuse any acquisition offer that would cut that thing short.
Principle 8
Take outside capital only once it can't write you off
Zscaler raised no outside money for five years. The first round, $38 million in August 2012, came after the founders had carried the company through the 2008 crisis and the slow years of selling a category without a name. Chaudhry has explained why: "It took us a few years to really start getting traction in the market, and VCs can write you off and move on."
The insight concerns timing, not avoiding capital. Venture investors are poorly suited to the period when a category-creating company has the product but not the demand, because their portfolio logic tells them to move on. Founders who can fund that stretch themselves keep the company alive until it reaches the point where capital speeds it up instead of judging it. TPG's $100 million in 2015 and the IPO-ready CFO hire in 2017 came only after the thesis had begun to prove itself.
Very few founders have $50 million of their own. The principle scales down anyway: whatever runway you control directly is the only runway that can't be pulled during the trough.
Tactic: Estimate how long your category will take to be understood by buyers, and arrange financing (personal, customer-funded, or debt) that covers at least that long without depending on investor sentiment.
Principle 9
Retire your own product category before someone else does
Chaudhry spent a decade building firewalls and their relatives. He then spent nearly two decades arguing that firewalls should go the way of mainframes, and accusing the vendors who still sell them of having "hijacked" the vocabulary of what replaces them. Some would call that inconsistent. It is better read as a willingness to follow the evidence even when the evidence indicts your own past work. "I saw the number of attacks grow every year. I saw the budget for IT security grow every year," he said. If spending and breaches rise together, the spending is buying the wrong thing.
The strategic benefit of naming an enemy architecture instead of an enemy company ("castle and moat," not a specific competitor) is that it makes every incumbent's installed base a prospect. Zscaler does not have to win a feature comparison against a firewall vendor. It argues that the comparison belongs to the past.
Tactic: Write the strongest case that your own core product will be obsolete in ten years, and if the case holds up, start building the replacement yourself.
Principle 10
Make one of every two agreeable executives redundant
"If you have two strong people who agree with you all the time, one of them is redundant." Chaudhry offers the line as a hiring rule, and it reflects a broader habit of building a leadership team that will push back on him. He says he deliberately brings "fresh talent" into the executive team to broaden his own perspective, and he is unsentimental about turnover: "As your company grows, it's natural for leaders to evolve and some will move on."
His builder-versus-operator distinction sits underneath this. Early on he wants builders, people comfortable with "tons of passion and hardly any process." At scale he needs operators. The rare people who can do both are valuable because they reduce how often the team has to be replaced. A founder who knows which kind he is hiring for can be candid about when a person's job has outgrown them.
Tactic: At your next leadership review, identify where two executives reliably echo each other's positions, and redirect one of them toward a domain where their disagreement would be useful.
Principle 11
In a panic, restate the thesis. Don't invent a new one
When AI-driven fears about software knocked more than half off Zscaler's stock in 2026, Chaudhry did not announce a pivot. He stood up in Vienna and said: "Zscaler was made for this moment." The claim was not new. It was the 2007 thesis applied to a new threat. If AI makes finding vulnerabilities nearly free, then exposed attack surfaces become indefensible, and the architecture that hides applications behind a verifying switchboard becomes more necessary, not less.
This works only if the original thesis was structural rather than tied to a particular situation. Zscaler's premise, that trust should be established per connection and not per network location, does not depend on which technology is driving the change. Remote work in 2020 and AI-enabled attackers in 2026 were different storms against the same building. In each case Chaudhry's communication strategy was to point at the foundation.
He pairs the conviction with frankness about the danger: "We all need to be paranoid." Founders who downplay a threat to calm the market lose credibility when it arrives. Founders who say plainly that the threat is real and their architecture answers it gain credibility.
Tactic: When your market turns against you, write a one-paragraph statement explaining why the disruption confirms your original thesis, and if you can't write it honestly, that tells you something important.
Principle 12
Repay the loan by relending it
The Tata scholarship that bought Chaudhry's first plane ticket was a loan meant to be repaid so it could fund another student. His philanthropy follows the same design: $1 million to build an Entrepreneurship Center at IIT-BHU, explicitly so students "with big dreams and aspirations" could have "the same opportunities I was fortunate enough to experience"; a mobile medical lab sent to Panoh; gifts for eye care and COVID relief in India. These are not monuments. They are ways to move the next person further down the road.
The principle applies inside companies too. The SecureIT equity distribution was a version of it, with the founders' gains spread widely to the people who made them. So is the habit of returning to convocations and alumni networks, where a founder's time can multiply opportunity more than money does.
What separates this from routine corporate giving is specificity. Chaudhry gives to the narrow institutions that actually changed his trajectory: the school, the village, the mechanism of access. Gratitude that is accurate about its sources tends to be generous in the right places.
Tactic: Name the three specific institutions or people who most changed your trajectory, and design one recurring contribution, financial or not, that does for someone else exactly what each did for you.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Jay Chaudhry, to CNBC Make It, 2024I think if you put in your own money, you deal with it very differently. It's a good thing to do that.
— Jay Chaudhry, TiEcon 2024 keynote lessonsYour customers are often looking to solve incremental problems so they won't be asking for a transformational change; therefore, you need to drive with your conviction and your gut.
— Jay Chaudhry, to CNBC Make It, 2024You really give it [your] all, and then whatever happens happens, is how we've always done it. And it has worked. If it doesn't quite work, that's OK too. You did your best.
— Jay Chaudhry, 2019My success so far has mainly been because I have very little attachment to money. My obsession is really to make sure that the internet and cloud are a safe place for everyone to do business.
— Jay Chaudhry, to BusinessLine, 2025Human beings do exceptionally well when they look at a problem as a challenge.
Maxims
- Fund the first bet with your own money. Without investors ahead of them, employees can own more of the outcome.
- Marry the brake. The most valuable partner is the one with the standing to pull you back from the cliff.
- The founder is the first salesperson. Spend at least a third of your time with customers, at any size.
- Sell above the person you replace. Nobody signs the purchase order for their own obsolescence.
- Customers describe pain, not cures. Listen to their problems and trust your own judgment on the transformation.
- Dig a well, not a field. A foot wide and twenty feet deep beats a mile wide and an inch deep.
- Early exits are tuition. Sell the small companies so you never have to sell the one that matters.
- Raise capital after the trough. Take outside money only once it can no longer write you off.
- Indict your own past. If spending and breaches rise together, the product you built is buying the wrong thing.
- Pass the loan on. Repay what lifted you by putting the next person on the same road.
