From India to Silicon Valley: The Jay Chaudhry & Zscaler Story
Before Zscaler was a $32B cloud security giant, it was just 10 engineers—half in Bangalore, half in a borrowed U.S. office.
As founder and CEO of Zscaler, Jay Chaudhry bet $50M of his own money on one radical idea: secure the internet in the cloud.
Born in a Himalayan village with no electricity, he built Zscaler into one of the world’s top cybersecurity giants.
In this episode, Jay breaks down why 50% of the Fortune 500 trusts Zscaler, why he still interviews candidates, and how he’s incubating the company’s next big AI bet.
Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
00:42 Introduction
01:21 His fifth company
04:26 Entrepreneurs’ existential fear
10:53 Customer engagement and new innovations
12:46 No private jets, no business class
19:34 “I never used money”
23:38 Born and raised in India
26:17 Hiring legends
30:35 Walking on water
35:09 “Dolphining”
39:55 Areas of weakness
42:11 Passionate even on the weekends
44:56 Work during roller coasters
47:35 The weight of the world is on your shoulders
49:21 Leveraging AI
56:20 Outro
Mentioned in this episode: Elon Musk, Microsoft, Bill Gates, BlackBerry, Steve Ballmer, Satya Nadella, Hewlett-Packard (HP), IBM, John Fellows Akers, Steve Jobs, NeXT, Inc., Linux, Cisco, United Airlines, San Francisco International Airport, Sundar Pichai, Ravi Mhatre, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Six Flags, AI (artificial intelligence), security
Links:
Connect with Jay
LinkedIn
Connect with Joubin
X
LinkedIn
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
EP 128: Jay Chaudhry (CEO, Zscaler) On Picking The Best Markets, Risking Everything, & Scaling to $30B
Jay Chaudhry is the definition of a self-starter. Born in the Himalayas with no running water or electricity until high school, Jay has now scaled Zscaler to a $30B public company. He and his wife went all in many times over—betting their life savings and quitting their jobs to launch their first venture, Secure IT, which became a huge success. Jay then parlayed that into building multiple more self-funded, successful cybersecurity companies before founding Zscaler.
In this episode, Jay shares his playbook for building disruptive companies, how he picks a market, and insights on using AI to combat modern breaches—plus his perspectives on life, family, and money.
Executive Producer: Rashad Assir
Producer: Leah Clapper
Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky
Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA
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About the Show
Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member.
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#197 CEO, Chairman & Founder Zscaler, Jay Chaudhry: No Attachment
Guest: Jay Chaudhry, CEO, chairman, and founder of Zscaler
Much of the media coverage of Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry is quick to identify him as the wealthiest Indian-American person, with a net worth of $10.8 billion. But to hear Jay himself tell it, that number has never been very important to him: “My family had no money,” he says of his childhood in India. “I had no attachment for money. There was no feeling of ‘I must buy this, buy this.’ ... And it hasn’t changed a bit.” Perhaps surprisingly, he says not caring about money is one of the big reasons for his financial success: With no attachment to money, “I could take risks.”
In this episode, Jay and Joubin discuss startup “gambling,” Jay’s wife Jyoti, scarcity and risk, wasting time, “bonding walks,” family vacations, self-confidence and self-criticism, gardening, seven-minute aerobics, Marc Andreessen and Netscape, and IBM.
Chapters:
(01:54) - Selling SecureIT to Verisign
(06:49) - Jay’s humble beginnings
(09:12) - The worst way to describe him
(11:42) - Working harder than ever
(14:15) - Authenticity and selflessness
(16:36) - Family time
(18:53) - Happy childhood
(21:33) - Setting an example
(24:48) - Customer meetings
(27:30) - Conviction and execution
(31:07) - Do your best
(33:16) - Turning off your brain
(38:23) - Getting experience
(40:17) - Who Zscaler is hiring
(41:12) - What “grit” means to Jay
Links:
Connect with Jay
LinkedIn
Connect with Joubin
Twitter
LinkedIn
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm
#108 COO Zscaler, Dali Rajic: If You’re Not Always Learning, You’ll Get Wiped Out
Before Zscaler’s Dali Rajic arrived at his current company, he helped grow AppDynamics from $7 million in annual recurring revenue to nearly $1 billion — and for his next move, he knew he had to do something even bigger. That’s why he was excited to transition to Zscaler’s COO in February after more than two years as its CRO: “It was a job worth taking because it stretched me and it made me uncomfortable.”
In this episode, Dali and Joubin discuss the state of tech M&A, the meaning of wealth and comfort, the value of hard work, being perceived as intense, going into business instead of science, inspiring your kids, bucketing how your spend your time, integrity and self-awareness, how to recognize your teammates’ contributions, injecting tension, cutting through the noise, demanding excellence of yourself, celebrating the moment, and allowing yourself to unwind.
In this episode, we cover:
Adobe’s $20 billion acquisition of Figma, compared to Cisco’s 2017 acquisition of AppDynamics (01:18)
What AppDynamics could have become if it hadn’t sold (08:17)
Remembering your roots when you get a life-changing amount of money (12:26)
Growing up in Germany, and why Dali came to the US when he was 16 (18:56)
Living to work and finding fulfillment (23:16)
The old-school sales style vs. the new generation’s (26:10)
The unusual way Dali got hired at AppDynamics, and how he thinks about the arc of his career (30:15)
Asking for the things you want and prioritizing your responsibilities (35:59)
Hiring mistakes and what traits Dali looks for in candidates (45:36)
How to turn big wins into learning moments (50:28)
The benefits of making people “uncomfortable” in their jobs (55:23)
Maximizing yield for individuals vs. organizations (01:01:39)
Why Dali schedules his time off as strictly as his time on (01:08:35)
Links:
Connect with DaliLinkedIn
Connect with JoubinTwitter
LinkedIn
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm
