Long before Jay Chaudhry became the billionaire founder and CEO of cybersecurity company Zscaler, he was a boy from Panoh, a small village in the foothills of the Himalayas, where electricity and running water were not part of everyday life.

Born to small-scale farmers Bhagat and Surjeet Chaudhry in the late 1950s, Chaudhry grew up in a community of fewer than 1,000 people. Families largely depended on themselves, with villagers even growing cotton and making their own clothes.

For Chaudhry, education became the route out of those limitations. He would walk nearly four kilometres from his home to a school in the neighbouring village, sometimes studying under a tree to escape the heat.

Decades later, that same boy would become one of the most prominent Indian-American entrepreneurs in the US technology industry. Forbes currently puts his net worth at $9.3 billion, while Zscaler has a market capitalisation of about $26.6 billion based on the figures provided.

But Chaudhry’s journey to that point was not built around a single breakthrough. It moved through education, sales, corporate jobs, failed attempts to raise capital and several high-risk entrepreneurial bets.

A village education that changed his direction

Chaudhry has previously described the transition from his village to university as a bigger change than his eventual move from India to the United States.

His early schooling was modest. His high school, located several villages away, had only around three bookcases of books. Instead of seeing that as a limitation, Chaudhry used his summer vacations to read as much as he could.

His academic performance eventually helped him secure admission to IIT (BHU) Varanasi, where he studied electrical engineering.

His connection with education also remained tied to his hometown. Years after leaving Panoh, Chaudhry helped initiate the construction of a school building in the village so that children would no longer have to travel several kilometres for their education.

When English became an obstacle

Getting into IIT did not suddenly make everything easy.

Chaudhry had come from a background where English was not widely spoken, and he found himself surrounded by students who had received convent-school education. His pronunciation became a source of teasing among some classmates.

Instead of allowing the language barrier to hold him back, he found an unconventional solution.

A classmate who was struggling with mathematics and science needed help with his studies. Chaudhry offered to teach him, while the classmate helped Chaudhry improve his English pronunciation.

The arrangement was simple, but it reflected something that would become important later in his career: Chaudhry was willing to learn whatever he needed to move forward.

His years at IIT also exposed him to students from across India and made him increasingly curious about opportunities abroad. The possibility of pursuing higher education in the United States soon became part of his plans.

The three-minute JRD Tata interview

After IIT, Chaudhry secured a research assistantship and a scholarship opportunity to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Cincinnati. But there was still a major problem: his family did not have the money to finance his move.

His situation changed after he applied for a Tata loan scholarship, which offered only 25 awards each year.

That application led to an interview with JRD Tata. Chaudhry later recalled that the interaction lasted only about three minutes.

It was brief, but consequential.

Tata wished him good luck and encouraged him to do well. The scholarship helped Chaudhry obtain his one-way ticket to the United States and supported some of his early expenses there.

For someone who had once wondered whether he would ever sit inside an aeroplane, the journey represented a dramatic shift.

From writing software to discovering sales

In Cincinnati, Chaudhry pursued a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering. He also worked during the summer at a small startup, where he was involved in software development.

The experience eventually pushed him towards management and customer-facing work.

After completing his engineering degree, he returned to school in the evenings and earned another master’s degree in industrial engineering management. He later completed an MBA through the University of Cincinnati’s part-time evening programme.

His most important career discovery, however, came unexpectedly.

At the startup where he had worked, a sales engineer once called in sick. Since Chaudhry had written the software himself, his boss asked him to handle the product demonstration.

He had never spoken to a customer in that capacity before.

The demonstration went well, and Chaudhry realised that he enjoyed explaining the product and interacting with customers more than spending the entire day writing code.

That experience helped redirect his career towards sales and marketing. He subsequently worked with companies including Unisys, NCR and IBM. He has described IBM as an important training ground for his sales career.

Leaving secure jobs to build a company

Corporate success, however, did not satisfy Chaudhry’s ambition to build something of his own.

He had spent years discussing the possibility of starting a company, but understood that taking a major financial risk could become more difficult with time.

Eventually, his wife Jyoti pushed him to make a decision.

In 1997, Chaudhry left his well-paying technology career to establish cybersecurity company SecureIT. Jyoti also left her job at BellSouth and took responsibility for finance and operations.

After failing to attract venture capital in Atlanta because of Chaudhry’s lack of previous entrepreneurial experience, the couple invested their own life savings of $500,000.

It was a major gamble.

The company developed a firewall that was deployed by nearly half of the Fortune 500 within about a year and a half. In 1998, Chaudhry sold SecureIT to VeriSign.

The deal produced an unusual outcome for its employees. According to Chaudhry’s later account, more than 70 of the company’s 80 employees became millionaires on paper within roughly two years as VeriSign’s stock price rose sharply.

The success gave Chaudhry a foundation for several more ventures, including CoreHarbor, CipherTrust and AirDefense.

Those businesses eventually led him towards the company that would define his career.

Building Zscaler around cloud security

Chaudhry founded Zscaler in 2007 with a different vision for cybersecurity.

At the time, he had observed companies working on cloud-based email security and saw an opportunity to build a broader cloud-native security platform.

Zscaler’s approach centred on delivering security and access controls through the cloud rather than relying on traditional firewalls and VPNs.

The company built its security architecture around the Zero Trust principle, which requires users, devices and connections to be continuously verified before access is granted.

The idea was still relatively new when Chaudhry began building Zscaler, but it became central to the company’s identity.

For Chaudhry, the motivation was not simply financial. He has repeatedly said that money was not his primary obsession and that his larger focus was making the internet and cloud safer for businesses.

From startup founder to billionaire

Zscaler eventually became a publicly traded company, making its Nasdaq debut in 2018.

Its growth accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic as businesses moved towards work-from-home arrangements and cybersecurity became increasingly important.

The figures attached to Chaudhry’s wealth have changed over the years. A 2021 Hurun Global Rich List figure cited his net worth at $13 billion after a sharp increase the previous year. Forbes now puts his fortune at $9.3 billion.

His family owns around 35% of Zscaler, according to Forbes.

The company has also grown substantially. It recently reported annual recurring revenue of $3.77 billion, representing 25% year-over-year growth. Its fourth-quarter revenue also rose 25%.

Zscaler now counts more than 11,000 customers and processes more than 750 billion transactions daily, according to the figures provided. The company is also used by thousands of businesses, including a significant share of the Fortune 500 and Forbes Global 2000.

A return to the village that shaped him

Despite spending decades in the United States, Chaudhry’s connection with his birthplace remained strong.

When he returned to India years after leaving, he visited his former high school. Students asked him to compare life in India and America, including whether people in one country were happier than those in the other.

Chaudhry acknowledged the enormous difference in wealth between the average American and the average Indian, but did not consider money a reliable measure of happiness.

That belief runs through much of how he talks about his own success.

His parents eventually moved to the United States and lived there for decades, helping him raise his three children. Both died in their 90s several years ago.

His mother even learned to read and write after moving to America, but Chaudhry continued to remember the simplicity of the village where his parents had spent much of their lives.

The lessons that stayed after the billions

Chaudhry’s transformation from a village student to a billionaire technology entrepreneur is striking not simply because of the money involved, but because of how far removed his present circumstances are from his childhood.

The boy who once walked four kilometres to school and studied beneath a tree eventually travelled to the United States with a one-way ticket and limited money.

Years later, he would build and sell multiple technology companies before creating Zscaler, a cybersecurity business now worth billions of dollars.

Yet Chaudhry continues to point back to the same principles he learned from his parents: honesty, integrity and hard work.

For him, the distance between Panoh and Silicon Valley was not erased by wealth. It became the story behind it.

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