Ritu Jha-
Jay Chaudhry, founder of Zscaler, a global cloud security company, advocates a never-exit policy for all entrepreneurs. Chaudhry was the opening keynote speaker of the three-day long TiEcon 2024 that started May 1 at the Santa Clara Convention centre in California.
“When you’re having fun why stop? Selling the company and going to the beach somewhere and getting bored there? No, I think a sense of accomplishment is more critical; human beings are driven by a feeling like they’ve done something to make a difference. That’s what drives me,” Chaudhry told indica when asked about his secret sauce for success.
Chaudhry’s apparent dislike for exiting enterprises may be rooted in the fact that he set-up four companies before exiting. “The first one I built and sold it quickly. Everything went so well that I was wondering, is it a fluke or can I really build a company systematically? That led me to build another three companies. But in 2007, sitting there having sold four companies, I had no interest in building one more and selling. I wanted to do something big, something lasting,” he said in his address.
Speaking about the first time he used AI, he told indica: “We started using AI about seven, eight years ago when we bought a small startup. There’s a little bit too much hype around AI right now. It’s going to go through a hype cycle. Then it will calm down a little bit. Then it’s going to come back up. It’ll be part of every company. In 1997, they would say, I’m starting an Internet company. Today, if someone said that, it would sound silly. Now, people say, I’m starting an AI company. In five, seven years, AI will be part of every company.”
When indica asked about the government regulations on AI, he said, “Regulations are needed but they shouldn’t go overboard. When the regulations go overboard, they stop innovation. But, if you don’t have any regulations, it becomes a bad thing. If regulations become too much, it will not be good because every other company and every other country won’t do the same. America will be at a disadvantage if there’s too much regulation,” he added.
Chaudhry said he owes much to TiE as he began his address to hundreds of attendees in the grand hall at TiECon 2024 by thanking the organization. “Thank you TiE. Today’s topic is about disrupting legacy technology to build lasting companies. The first company I started, Zscaler, was an internet security services company. It was a new idea at that time. Zscaler proved to be a disruptive idea. I was fortunate that I built and sold four companies. But in 2007 I realized that I had no interest in doing one more and selling. I wanted to do something big, something lasting. And I said what could be the big thing in the next 20 years?
I’ve been using Salesforce and NetSuite since 2001 in all my startups and I was a big fan of SaaS to keep companies. And then we decided to build a salesforce of security. Security that happened in the cloud,” he said at TiECon 2024. “Today we’re a public company. The last time TiE invited me to give a keynote was in 2018. We had just gone public at that time, $16 a share. Today we’re sitting at just shy of $180 with about a $30 billion market cap. And a lot of inspiration has come from TiE.”
He also spoke about the evolution that technology changes that happen like Black Swans and the need to stay on top of them. “Technology incrementally improves all the time. It’s expected to but every 15-20 years there is disruptive technology that changes the way things were done before. And that’s the kind of stuff that needs to be done when you want to make significant progress.”
“With the recent acquisition of a company called Avalor, which gives us a very exciting data fabric where we can pull in all the logs from all kinds of sources without creating one more data lake out there, we can build applications on top of it. Whether it’s generative AI or predictive AI, the combination of the two can help us to do a number of things. Imagine if we could predict a breach. Breaches don’t happen in minutes, they often take days, weeks or even months. If you can use these AI ML models to figure out and create an attack graph, we should be able to predict who is likely to get breached because we are picking up a number of leading indicators and we can do some very exciting stuff to help our customers,” Chaudhry added.
Taking about his origin story, Chaudhry took a walk down memory lane. “Born and raised in a tiny village in the foothills of the Himalayas in northern India, sometimes I wonder if my life is real or I’m simply dreaming. We got electricity after I finished my 8th grade. We got running water after I finished my 10th grade. But for whatever reason, I loved to study. I was a great student. My parents were small-scale farmers and they taught me all the honesty, integrity, and hard work. With good grades, I got into IIT (BHU) which played an important role in my life. Thanks to India, IITs had no tuition fee at that time. Otherwise, I couldn’t have gone to school. And thanks to the Tatas they had a Tata loan scholarship to buy a plane ticket. I wouldn’t have made it to the US without a plane ticket. Went to school in Cincinnati, got my Master’s, and worked for small startups in Cincinnati doing software development just like most Indians did at that time.”
“By accident, I moved into the business world and then joined IBM. From there I moved do the internet for marketing. I found that I had a flair for marketing and messaging and from there I went to Unisys where I was BPO sales and marketing for the software product group. Then I moved to Atlanta where my startup journey started.”
