Jay Chaudhry

Chaudhry was born in Panoh, a village in the Una district of Punjab (now Himachal Pradesh), India with a population of 800.^[4] The village did not have running water or electricity until he was a teenager.^[5] His parents, Bhagat and Surjeet Chaudhry, were small-scale farmers, and he was the youngest of three sons.^[6]

In an interview, Jay recalled that he used to walk nearly 4 km every day to attend high school in Dhusara, the neighboring village and, because there was no electricity, he often studied outside under a tree.^[7]

Following the completion of high school, he earned a bachelor's degree in electronics engineering from Indian Institute Of Technology, Banaras Hindu University.^[8]

In 1980, at age 22, he moved to the United States to attend the University of Cincinnati.^[9] His first time on a plane was his flight to the U.S. to attend the University of Cincinnati, where he received master's degrees in industrial engineering, computer engineering, and marketing.^[10][11]  

He also completed the executive management program at Harvard Business School.^[12][13]

Chaudhry started out working in engineering, sales, marketing and management at IBM, Unisys, and NCR.^[14] He went on to become the founder of five security software startups.^[15][16]  

In 1996, he and his wife Jyoti founded Internet security service SecureIT, using their life savings to do so.^[17] After SecureIT was acquired by Verisign in 1998, Chaudhry moved to San Francisco to lead Verisign’s security services division.^[18] He left Verisign in 1999.^[19]

In 2000, Chaudhry launched email security company CipherTrust. The idea for CipherTrust came from his work at SecureIT, where he became familiar with the types of security issues, vulnerabilities and attacks that were possible. The technology was built from scratch and was later acquired by Secure Computing Corporation in 2006 for $274 million.^{[20][21][22][23]}

In 2000, Chaudhry also launched CoreHarbor, a managed e-commerce platform. It was later acquired by USi/AT&T.^[24][25]

In 2002, Chaudhry launched wireless security company AirDefense, which operates as a provider of a wireless intrusion prevention system that monitors airwaves and traffic between laptops and WiFi access points. AirDefense was acquired by Motorola in 2008.^[26][27][28]  

Chaudhry founded Zscaler, a Zero Trust cloud security company, in 2007.^[29][30] He has said that his goal was to “build the Salesforce of cloud security,” inspired by Marc Benioff.^[31]

In an interview, Jay discusses why a modernized approach to cybersecurity is needed and the purpose behind the creation of Zscaler technology:

Firewall companies were invented about 30 years ago in the early nineties. They do security by building a moat around a castle – inside you're safe; outside, you're not safe. But in today's world, applications that used to sit inside the castle, inside the data center, are sitting in the cloud somewhere or SaaS applications. The users who used to sit inside the office are everywhere. So that architecture of firewalls is no longer relevant. We had to come up with a new architecture, it's called Zero Trust architecture that Zscaler pioneered. In this architecture, you don't really do traditional network security. You securely connect the right user to the right application by being a switchboard.^[32]

Zscaler's switchboard, known as the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, is the world’s largest security cloud which processes over 360B+ transactions and 500T+ signals daily. The company’s cybersecurity solutions use context such as a user’s location, their device’s security posture and the content being exchanged to determine whether it’s safe to grant access to an application. When applied as part of the Zero Trust Exchange platform, this system greatly reduces an organization’s attack surface and prevents lateral movement, thus ensuring greater cybersecurity protection.

Jay summed up Zscaler's business in a media interview, "Today, over 40% of Fortune 500 companies depend upon us. Zscaler handles over 300 billion requests through our cloud every day ... Google searches in a day add up to about eight or nine billion. When you communicate ... to the internet or SaaS applications or your apps in Google Cloud, Azure, AWS data center, they all go through us. We are the switchboard."^[33]

As a serial entrepreneur, Jay is often asked about his experiences, the lessons he’s learned and what advice he has for those who are just starting out.

On founding Zscaler:

“Here’s a lesson that other entrepreneurs should learn. If you really want to do well, put your own money in the game. The money from outside gets treated very differently than your own money. It sets the right culture. I really didn’t take any money. I put all the money in. I told my team, “We’re building lasting architecture, so don’t do any shortcuts. Build it right.”^[34]

On the secret to his success, Jay credits his humble beginnings:

“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.”^[35]

On having conviction and never giving up:

“I tell you what I learned at IBM was to take rejection nicely. I'm not sure it's nicely, but when IBM assigned me to handle GE (General Electric) as my account, I must have made hundreds of calls to talk, go and talk to one of those people who could buy my product. They would just hang up and say, “IBM products are not good for engineers. Go away.” So that was probably the roughest time in sales in my life. I persisted and finally I found the right people. I learned what needs to be done. And the way I passed through that process was, these people are missing out the opportunity to take advantage of a wonderful solution I have to sell them, but they'll, they'll be a smart person who will figure it out and talk to me.”^[36]

Jay is the recipient of three awards by Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University), Varanasi: Alumnus of the Year (2015), Alumnus of the Century in Making (2019), the Distinguished Alumnus/Alumna Awards (2021–22), and the American India Foundation’s Corporate Leadership Award (2022).^[37]

In 2018, Jay was selected as a finalist for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award program in Northern California.

Chaudhry and his wife, Jyoti, have three children and live in Reno, Nevada, U.S. Chaudhry is a vegetarian.^[38]

Jay loves to hike, white-water raft and go on “bonding walks” around his neighborhood with his family. Jay is a voracious reader and he particularly favors books on history, global politics and psychology.^[39]

Jay makes regular trips to Panoh, India, to help the community. In 2011, he arranged for a mobile medical lab to give older residents blood tests and other checkups.^[40]

In 2022, Jay gifted $1 million to his alma mater, IIT-BHU, to fund the school’s Entrepreneurship Center and its Software Innovation Center.^[41] That year, he also donated $3 million to the Bay Area Chapter of the American India Foundation (AIF), an organization committed to improving the lives of India’s underprivileged, to support COVID relief efforts.^[42]

In 2023, he donated $1 million to the Sankara Eye Foundation, an organization whose mission is to eradicate curable blindness in India.^[43]