With a net worth of US$16.9 billion (as of October 2020), Chaudhry was included in the 2020 Forbes 400 list of richest people in America, ranked 85th in the list. He was among 7 Indian-Americans on this list. But he would now like to turn to philanthropy and make education accessible to all.
Entrepreneur Jay Chadhary has recently been voted as the richest Indian American in the United States. He is the CEO and founder of Zscaler, a cloud security company.
With a net worth of US$16.9 billion (as of October 2020), Chaudhry was included in the 2020 Forbes 400 list of richest people in America, ranked 85th in the list. He was among 7 Indian-Americans on this list.
He and his family own 42 per cent of the Nasdaq-listed Zscaler, founded in 2008 and which went public in 2018.
But now Chaudhary prefers not to talk about his wealth or his achievements as an entrepreneur. He is now trying to keep a low profile as he has shifts his focus towards philanthropy and in making education accessible to all.
Chaudhry is an accomplished entrepreneur with over 25 years of security industry expertise, including engineering, sales, marketing and management experience with leading enterprises, such as IBM, NCR and Unisys.
In 1997, Chaudhry founded SecureIT (acquired by Verisign) and CipherTrust (acquired by Secure Computing Corporation) He also founded AirDefense (acquired by Motorola) and CoreHarbor (acquired byAT&T
His first company, which he founded In 1996, was the first pure-play Internet security service, before it was acquired by VeriSign in 1998. His work in the IT security sector has made him a trusted advisor for many enterprise CIOs and CISOs.
Chaudhry has been honored twice as an Ernst & Young “Entrepreneur of the Year (Southeast USA)” and “Entrepreneur of the Year (Silicon Valley)”.
His other accolades include InformationWeek’s “Innovator & In
fluencer”, SC Magazine’s “Market Entrepreneur”, and two awards from IIT BHU Varanasi as “Alumnus of the Year” and “Alumnus of the Century in Making”.
The entrepreneur pointed out that 25 years ago Indians in the US were seen only as good engineers who could write software.
But now “there are many more successful companies in Silicon Valley with Indian founders and the perception that they can’t be successful CEOs has completely changed,” he said.Chaudhary moved to the US in 1980. He earned his MBA and his MS in Computer Engineering and Industrial Engineering from the University of Cincinnati and his BTech in Electronics Engineering from IIT BHU Varanasi. Chaudhry has also completed the Executive Management Programme from Harvard Business School.
Born in Panoh (1958), a village in Una district of the state of Himachal Pradesh, India, Chaudhary’s parents were small scale farmers.
He is married to Jyoti, they have three children, and live in Reno, Nevada, US.
************************************************************************
Readers