When Jay Chaudhry sold his first company for $70 million, he focused less on his own riches, he says — and more on how the deal could turn dozens of his employees into millionaires.founder and CEO of Zscaler, a cloud cybersecurity firm valued at roughly $28 billion, as of Wednesday afternoon.
Jay and Jyoti Chaudhry pose with Jay Johnson, the former vice president of sales at SecureIT, at a 1999 party celebrating Chaudhry upon his departure from VeriSign.Chaudhry recalls advice from Jim Bidzos, VeriSign's then-chairman, on what to do with his shares: Sell some of the stock little by little "on a regular basis." The strategy helped Chaudhry reap some benefits of VeriSign's soaring stock before the market cratered, he says.
"I went home that night and looked at the spreadsheet of all the options they had, and I multiplied by the stock price of VeriSign. That's when I realized that the math was about 70 or 80 millionaires, with stock options," Chaudhry says. "It was impressive.": He and his wife had a "nice, typical middle-class house at that time, and we didn't have any fancy cars or fancy payments," he told Make It last week.