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and put 200% focus on that," he says.That company was Zscaler, which aimed to help companies transition away from outdated firewalls and into the cloud era.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.
After talking back and forth, we asked each other,"What's the worst thing that can happen?" The company could shut down, we'd lose all of our savings.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 — a nice, typical middle class house at that time — and we didn't have any fancy cars or fancy payments.
The 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. 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.