March 2, 2019:

He said,“For me, happiness is a state of mind,” he said. “And money has very little do with it.”

Decades before he joined the ranks of Silicon Valley’s super rich, Jay Chaudhry lived with his parents in a Himalayan village without running water.

The founder of Zscaler Inc. is now part of a growing wave of billionaires who have built cybersecurity businesses. Chaudhry, 60, & his family benefit from stakes in the San Jose-based firm worth almost $3.4 billion.

He along with six other cybersecurity software tycoons to emerge with 10-figure fortunes in the past year are worth about $10 billion combined, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, & together represent the latest wealth surge among the founders of internet-focused firms.

“I do look sometimes back &  say, ‘Whoa,’” Chaudhry said in a telephone interview last month. “My success so far has mainly been because I have very little attachment for money. My obsession is really to make sure that the internet & cloud are a safe place for everyone to do business."

Fueled by the rapid rise of cloud-based computing, companies are increasingly tethering more & more of their business to online networks. While this allows them to gather unprecedented levels of operational information, it also exposes their firms to more cyber threats.

Data protection laws & high-profile cyberattacks -- such as the world’s biggest airline data hack last year -- are equally forcing companies to reconsider their internet defenses. At the same time, Western governments have expressed concern that China’s intelligence services are snooping on foreign citizens through products sold by telecom giant Huawei Technologies Co.

Cybersecurity Wealth Surge

The sector has minted at least seven billionaires in the past 12 months. “The world runs on large-scale networks & data systems that are inherently complex & highly connected,” said Awais Rashid, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Bristol in England. “If we can’t protect them or be confident in their integrity, it leads to serious problems for society at large.

Trnka, 57, & Pasko, 63, started programming during the Cold War & helped resolve one of the world’s first computer viruses, which affected a Slovak nuclear power plant, according to a case study from Vienna University of Economics & Business. Hruby, 64, Chairman Pasko  & former Chief Executive Officer Trnka each own about 22 percent of ESET, according to Orbis, a database of company data published by Bureau van Dijk.

Their stakes are worth about $1 billion each, according to the Bloomberg index, putting ESET’s wealth creation in a similar league to U.S. tech titans Facebook Inc. & Twitter Inc.

“We’ve traveled quite a road from then until now,” Trnka said in a emailed statement, referring to his early days in the cybersecurity business. “I definitely do not feel like a billionaire.” Pasko said he agreed with Trnka’s statement, but declined further comment. Hruby declined to comment.

While ESET has extolled the benefits of remaining a closely held company, Chaudhry’s Zscaler made a splash on New York’s NASDAQ exchange in March when its shares popped 106 percent on the first day of trading. The stock has since climbed more than 50 percent, putting its market value at about $6 billion -- more than Bloomberg’s calculated enterprise value for ESET.

Zscaler shares climbed 22 percent to $60.57 in New York Friday after the firm reported second-quarter revenue of $74.3 million. That was a 65 percent increase from a year earlier & beat analysts’ estimates.

Chaudhry, who has masters degrees in business administration, industrial engineering & computer science from the University of Cincinnati & also studied at Harvard Business School, founded Zscaler more than a decade ago after setting up & selling four other cyber start ups.

Even with a billion-dollar fortune, Chaudhry says his life hasn’t changed significantly. He still visits the Himalayan village where he grew up every few years, & said rather than passing on wealth, his priority is to pass along the work ethic his farming parents instilled in him. “For me, happiness is a state of mind,” he said. “And money has very little do with it.” Source Link

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