Jay Chaudhry grew up in a small Himalayan village, came to the U.S. for graduate school, and started four companies.
Chaudhry then put his life savings into a fifth venture, Zscaler, which is set to start trading on Friday on the Nasdaq.
A bumped-up 12 million shares of the cloud cybersecurity firm’s initial public offering were priced late Thursday at $16 each, above the estimated range. It’s the first so-called tech unicorn, with a valuation of over $1 billion, to go public this year.
The Zscaler CEO and co-founder spoke on CNBC about what he said sets his company apart from traditional cybersecurity firms for global customers such as Siemens and General Electric.
“In the old world of security, they would have to buy and deploy security boxes in every office,” Chaudhry said.
“In our world, they simply point cloud-bound traffic to Zscaler,” he continued. “So your traffic hits Zscaler as a security checkpost, inspection happens, you go where you need to go. We make sure that nothing bad comes in [and] nothing good and confidential leaks out.”
Zscaler is certainly in a competitive industry, with the likes of Palo Alto Networks, FireEye, Cisco Systems and Symantec.
“The world has changed. People are mobile. Applications are sitting in the cloud. So we had to build security in the cloud,” Chaudhry said.
“The new security can be put in place for employees so they go to the cloud, they [use the] internet safely,” he said.
