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.
By 2007, they were already wealthy entrepreneurs, and Chaudhry — who gets"bored" without something to work on — decided it was time to launch"one big company and put 200% focus on that," he says. 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.It started out with us saying,"Let's go get venture capital funding." I had no experience raising funds, and I realized soon that it wasn't that easy. This was , Atlanta was not a VC mecca and we kept hearing,"Hey, you don't have any experience.
Our only child at that time was going to a public school. There wasn't a lot of overhead. We said,"Let's take a chance." 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.
What's your best advice for someone who's thinking about quitting their job to start their own business?