Meet Jay Chaudhry, an Indian-American turned entrepreneur at the age of 65, who is now worth $11 billion

Indian-American entrepreneur Jay Chaudhry never imagined himself as a business tycoon, much less a billionaire or an industry pioneer.

“I don’t have any entrepreneurial background in my family of small farmers. So if you ask me, ‘Did I ever think about being an entrepreneur when I was a kid (or) when I was starting my career?’ Not really,” said Chaudhry, founder and CEO of cloud security company Zscaler. CNBC.

Although he noted: “If Marc Andreessen (Netscape co-founder) could start a company — he was a young guy (just out of college) — why shouldn’t I start a company?”

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Who is Jay Chaudhry?

Growing up in rural India and later moving to the United States in 1980 to study engineering and marketing, he didn’t see his future in entrepreneurship, even after landing positions at tech giants IBM and Unisys.

Chaudhry began considering entrepreneurship during the City by the Bay boom in 1996. Motivated by the success stories around him, he decided to leave his executive position at IQ Software in Atlanta. “Let’s go get some venture capital funding,” he said.

His wife, Jyoti, left her job as a systems analyst at BellSouth to join him in his business. Together, they invested their savings of about $500,000 in their first cybersecurity startup, SecureIT, in 1997.

“At the time, less than 5 percent of the Fortune 500 had firewalls,” Chaudhry recalls. “Within 18 months, we had firewalls deployed in about 50 percent of the Fortune 500.” In 1998, SecureIT was acquired by VeriSign in an all-stock deal valued at nearly $70 million.

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How Zscaler Became a Cloud Security Giant

Over the next decade, Chaudhrys founded two more cybersecurity companies and an e-commerce business, both of which were acquired. By 2007, they were already successful entrepreneurs, but the Indian-American tycoon decided to start “a big company and focus 200 percent on that.”

That new company was Zscaler, a company designed to help businesses move from traditional firewalls to cloud-based security solutions.

“We were trying to solve a futuristic problem. Would it succeed or not? Would the market take off or not? All of that was unknown,” he said, sitting down with CNBC does this.

With a personal investment of $50 million, the couple launched Zscaler. Today, the company generates $1.6 billion in annual revenue and has a market capitalization of approximately $30 billion.

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Chaudhry’s personal net worth is estimated at $11.5 billion according to Forbes.