Jay Chaudhry: Betting on yourself and building a $40B+ Zero Trust giant in Zscaler

About this episode

Jay Chaudhry shares his journey of building Zscaler and insights on cybersecurity and entrepreneurship.

In this episode of Inside the Network, we sit down with Jay Chaudhry, founder and CEO of Zscaler, one of the most valuable cybersecurity companies in the world with a market cap of over $40 billion and $3 billion in ARR. Jay’s journey is unlike any other. Raised in a remote Indian village with no electricity, no running water, and a two-and-a-half-mile walk to school, he went on to build five companies and pioneer the modern Zero Trust cloud security model. Zscaler, his most iconic company, was launched in 2007 with $50 million of his own capital and no VC investment - a bold bet in the middle of a market downturn, at a time when few believed enterprise security could move to the cloud. This episode is packed with powerful lessons from a founder who’s played the long game. Jay talks about the mindset he carried from his early years farming with oxen, how working alongside his wife Jyoti gave him unmatched focus and alignment, and why startups should be “a foot wide and 20 feet deep.” He explains how Zscaler rewrote not just the playbook for go-to-market in security, but also the TCP/IP stack, and the early challenges of selling Zero Trust well before the term even existed. He…

People in this episode

Guest: Jay Chaudhry

Topics covered

• cybersecurity
• entrepreneurship
• Zero Trust
• business strategy
• founder journey

Keywords

• Zscaler
• Jay Chaudhry
• Zero Trust
• cybersecurity
• entrepreneurship
• business strategy
• founder lessons

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Zscaler

Products: Zero Trust

Places: India, remote Indian village

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