Successful people are not just gifted. They work hard, and then succeed on purpose. One shining example of this quote is Jay Chaudhary, the richest Indian-American of 2021.

Early Life and education

Born in 1958 to small scale farmers in Panoh, Himachal Pradesh, Jay Chaudhry was the youngest among three brothers. Having faced severe hardships, like lack of electricity or even running water in his village then, he used to walk 4 kms to attend school. Being academically bright, he topped his school, and then went on to graduate from BHU, Varanasi. On securing a scholarship from the University of Cincinnati, he went on to complete his Master’s in Computer Engineering and Industrial Engineering as well as MBA degrees from the same university.

Career

Before becoming a serial entrepreneur, Jay Chaudhry worked for many companies at managerial positions like NCR, IBM, Unisys and IQ Software. But always the one to dream big, he and wife Jyoti, quit their jobs in 1996 to start a security software firm SecureIT. When this company merged with Verisign, 70 out of 80 employees of SecureIT became millionaires.

Next, he established two companies-CoreHarbor and email security gateway platform CipherTrust in 2000. CoreHarbor was acquired by AT&T and the latter was acquired by McAfee. He then found AirDefense, a wireless security pioneer which was then acquired by Motorola.

ZScaler

Then came Zscaler, a company that specializes in cloud security in 2007. The company provides data security services to 400 of the Forbes Global 2000 companies like Microsoft, AWS and Siemens. This company got listed on NASDAQ in 2018 and has since then, Chaudhry’s net worth has skyrocketed. Last year, during the pandemic, there was an increase in demand for cyber security services, giving Zscaler a tremendous business boost.

This eventually led to Jay Chaudhry’s being valued at $16.3 billion thereby making him, the tenth richest Indian in the world and the richest Indian in United States. As on today, his real time net worth is $19.8 billion according to Forbes.His family, owns 42% of Zscaler. A true gentleman at heart, he doesn’t like talking much about his personal wealth and was once quoted saying, that his success is mainly due to little attachment with money. He prefers to discuss about his endeavors in making education easily available to the masses.

From studying under a tree, to becoming the 45th richest man in United States, Jay Chaudhry’s life hasn’t been any short of a roller coaster. But he did everything in his might that he could, and never gave up on his dream. After all, dreams don’t work, unless you do.