Jay Chaudhry

Some Lesser Known Facts About Jay Chaudhry

• Jay Chaudhry is an Indian-American businessman who owns the cybersecurity firm Zscaler. In 2021, he made headlines after he was listed among the top ten richest Indians by Hurun Global Rich List 2021.

• Reportedly, Jay faced severe hardship while growing up as his village lacked basic amenities like drinking water and electricity. Lack of electricity forced him to study under a tree. In an interview, talking about the struggle he faced, he said,
  

  I used to walk nearly 4 km every day to attend my high school at Dhusara, the neighbouring village.”

• Jay was a bright student and even topped his preparatory classes under the Himachal Pradesh University.

• While he was pursuing electrical engineering at IIT Varanasi, Jay found out that his peers were considering to pursue their masters from the United States. He too started looking for colleges in the US and got a scholarship from the University of Cincinnati. Jay’s plane ticket was sponsored by the Tata Group, an Indian multinational conglomerate.

  

• Prior to starting his business ventures, Jay worked at various managerial positions for companies like NCR, IBM, Unisys, and IQ Software. He was influenced by the startups booming in Silicon Valley to start his own firm.

• In December 1996, Jay and his wife Jyoti, quit their jobs to start the security software firm SecureIT in Atlanta, risking their entire life savings; the company merged with Verisign (an American internet company) in 1998, and Jay became the vice president of Verisign. According to him, after the merger with Verisign, 70 out of the 80 employees of SecureIT became millionaires.

• His firm ‘CoreHarbor’ that was established in 2000 was acquired by AT&T in 2003. In 2000, Jay founded another messaging security firm CipherTrust, which was later acquired by McAfee in 2006. He acted as the Vice Chairman of Secure Computing (which was also acquired by McAfee) for one year in 2006. From 2002 to 2008, Jay acted as the CEO and Chairman of AirDefense, a company that was acquired by Motorola in 2008.

  

• Mr. Chaudhry founded Zscaler, a company that specialises in cloud security, in 2007 in San Jose, and he has been leading the company since then. The company went public in 2018, and his net worth skyrocketed.

  

• In 2020, when the world economy was suffering due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the share price of Zscaler saw a threefold increase, from 60 USD in March 2020 to 180 USD in March 2021. Mr. Chaudhry and his family own 45 per cent shares of  Zscaler (listed on the American stock market index Nasdaq), which is worth $28 billion as of 2021.

  

• Zscaler provides data security services to 400 of the Forbes Global 2000 companies. The company has more than 5000 customers from all over the world including leading tech companies like Microsoft, Siemens, CrowdStrike, and AWS.

• In 2021, Jay Chaudhary climbed the list of the top 10 richest Indians, standing at the 9th position. Mukesh Ambani topped the list. Jay is also ranked at the 85th position in the list of the richest people in the United States.

• In a media interaction with Business Standard, Jay said,
  

  My success so far has mainly been because I have very little attachment for money. My obsession is really to make sure that the internet and cloud are a safe place for everyone to do business.”

• Jay is a fitness enthusiast. He loves hiking and white-water rafting.

• In an interview, Jay has mentioned that he visits India every year. He tries to help the local community. He even arranges for mobile medical labs in his village to provide older residents with free blood tests and other checkups.