{"id":6182,"date":"2024-07-17T15:23:11","date_gmt":"2024-07-17T15:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/2024\/07\/17\/65-year-old-quit-his-job-and-emptied-his-life-savings-to-start-a-business-now-hes-worth-11-billion\/"},"modified":"2024-07-17T15:23:11","modified_gmt":"2024-07-17T15:23:11","slug":"65-year-old-quit-his-job-and-emptied-his-life-savings-to-start-a-business-now-hes-worth-11-billion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/2024\/07\/17\/65-year-old-quit-his-job-and-emptied-his-life-savings-to-start-a-business-now-hes-worth-11-billion\/","title":{"rendered":"65-year-old quit his job and emptied his life savings to start a business \u2014 now he\u2019s worth $11 billion"},"content":{"rendered":"

This story is part of\u00a0<\/em>CNBC Make It\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0The Moment series, where highly successful people reveal the critical moment that changed the trajectory of their lives and careers, discussing what drove them to make the leap into the unknown.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jay Chaudhry\u00a0never thought he\u2019d run a business, amass a fortune or\u00a0<\/strong>help popularize an entire industry. Not growing up in rural India, not upon moving to the U.S. in 1980 to study engineering and marketing, not even after landing jobs at tech giants IBM and Unisys.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

\u201cI have no background of entrepreneurship in my family of small-scale farmers. So if you asked me, \u2018Did I ever think about becoming an entrepreneur in my childhood [or] early years of my career?\u2019 Not really,\u201d Chaudhry, the billionaire founder and CEO of cloud security company\u00a0Zscaler, tells CNBC Make It.<\/p>\n

It took Silicon Valley\u2019s dot-com boom \u2014 the wild success stories of tech startups like Netscape \u2014 to get Chaudhry thinking in 1996, \u201cWhy shouldn\u2019t I start a company?\u201d He made the rash decision to quit his job as an executive at Atlanta-based tech company IQ Software, and his wife Jyoti quit her job as a systems analyst at telecommunications giant BellSouth.<\/p>\n

Together, they plunged their life savings \u2014 roughly $500,000 \u2014 into SecureIT, a cybersecurity software startup they co-founded in 1997. At the time, \u201cmaybe less than 5% of Fortune 500 companies had firewalls,\u201d Chaudhry says. \u201cWithin 18 months, we had deployed firewalls in about 50% of [the] Fortune 500.\u201d<\/p>\n

His timing was perfect: In 1998, Chaudhry sold SecureIT to VeriSign in an all-stock deal worth\u00a0nearly $70 million.\u00a0Over the ensuing decade, the husband-and-wife duo founded two more cybersecurity companies and an e-commerce business, each of which got acquired.<\/p>\n

By 2007, they were already wealthy entrepreneurs, and Chaudhry \u2014 who gets \u201cbored\u201d without something to work on \u2014 decided it was time to launch \u201cone big company and put 200% focus on that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

That company was Zscaler, which aimed to help companies transition away from outdated firewalls and into the cloud era. The couple invested $50 million of their own money, says Chaudhry. Today, it brings in\u00a0$1.6 billion\u00a0in annual revenue and has a market value of roughly $30 billion.<\/p>\n

Chaudhry\u2019s own net worth is estimated at\u00a0$11.5 billion\u00a0by Forbes.<\/p>\n

Here, Chaudhry talks about putting his family\u2019s savings on the line to follow his gut, how his upbringing influenced his relationship with money and the advice he\u2019d give someone who wants to quit their job to start a business.<\/p>\n

CNBC Make It: What prompted you to stake your entire life\u2019s savings on a startup idea \u2014<\/strong>\u00a0in an industry that didn\u2019t really exist yet?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chaudhry: This thing happened because I love to read and I love technology.<\/p>\n

In 1996, Netscape had just launched and gone public, and I was fascinated by it. I said, \u201cIf [Netscape co-founder]\u00a0Marc Andreessen\u00a0could start a company \u2014 he was a young guy [right] out of college \u2014 why shouldn\u2019t I start a company?\u201d<\/p>\n

My wife and I talked a few times, and the more we thought about it, the more conviction we got around it: [Netscape\u2019s web browser] is the way to access information, and it should become popular. But if every company is connected to the internet, that means there will be security risks.<\/p>\n

That was my simple thinking. There was no IDC or Gartner study about the market size. It was largely based on what the gut told us.<\/p>\n

A gut feeling is one thing. Betting every dollar to your name is another.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It started out with us saying, \u201cLet\u2019s go get venture capital funding.\u201d I had no experience raising funds, and I realized soon that it wasn\u2019t that easy. This was [1996], Atlanta was not a VC mecca and we kept hearing, \u201cHey, you don\u2019t have any experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

We were disappointed, but our conviction was building, which led to me saying, \u201cWhy don\u2019t we put our life-savings on the line?\u201d<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t know anything. So, I really didn\u2019t know how big the risk was. I couldn\u2019t quantify it.<\/p>\n

How did you make peace with that risk?<\/strong><\/p>\n

After talking back and forth, we asked each other, \u201cWhat\u2019s the worst thing that can happen?\u201d The company could shut down, we\u2019d lose all of our savings.<\/p>\n

The next question was, \u201cCan we find jobs?\u201d There was lots of confidence that we could.<\/p>\n

I never had money in my early childhood, so there was never a notion that I must buy A and B and C. Our lifestyle was pretty simple. Our house in Alpharetta, Georgia, was $200,000 \u2014 a nice, typical middle-class house at that time \u2014 and we didn\u2019t have any fancy cars or fancy payments.<\/p>\n

Our only child at that time was going to a public school. There wasn\u2019t a lot of overhead. We said, \u201cLet\u2019s take a chance.\u201d<\/p>\n

When a bet pays off, does that success make you more confident to take on bigger risks? Were any of your other ventures as risky as that first one?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The [financial] risk of SecureIT was, like, 1,000 times more than the risk of Zscaler. The amount I invested in Zscaler was a small fraction of my net worth.<\/p>\n

But Zscaler was much harder. I put more money in it than all the others combined. I took bigger bets. I hired people more quickly to solve some very hard problems. I wanted to do something big, something lasting.<\/p>\n

We were trying to solve a problem that was futuristic. Will it be successful or not? Will the market take off or not? That was all unknown.<\/p>\n

So if you asked me the chances of success of Zscaler, there was a much higher risk. Because, with SecureIT, it was fairly obvious that as you connect to the internet, you need firewalls.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s your best advice for someone who\u2019s thinking about quitting their job to start their own business?<\/strong><\/p>\n

First, build conviction by learning more about what you want to do. Don\u2019t just do some of the cursory work.<\/p>\n

Second, start by putting in your own money. That actually is part of testing your conviction. If you really have conviction, you\u2019ll take a chance on yourself. That also means you\u2019ve done some serious homework, you\u2019re ready, you\u2019re committed.<\/p>\n

You can also make decisions the way you want to make decisions. If Zscaler was largely owned by VCs, they probably could have shut it down. It took us a few years to really start getting traction in the market, and VCs can write you off and move on. They say, \u201cIt\u2019s one of my 20 investments.\u201d<\/p>\n

When you put in your own money, this is the only business you have.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This story is part of\u00a0CNBC Make It\u2019s\u00a0The Moment series, where highly successful people reveal the critical moment that changed the trajectory of their lives and careers, discussing what drove them to make the leap into the unknown. Jay Chaudhry\u00a0never thought he\u2019d run a business, amass a fortune or\u00a0help popularize an entire industry. Not growing up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6183,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}