Jay Chaudhry grew up in a village in the Himalayas, and Zscaler was the fifth company he started. The first four had all been sold. By 2018, office workers were spread across laptops, phones, and coffee shops, yet most companies still guarded their networks with hardware firewalls in a server room. Zscaler ran the checks in its own data centers around the world. When it filed to go public, it was the first big tech IPO of the year.

Moving the Wall

Chaudhry founded Zscaler with K. Kailash. The idea was to stop routing traffic back to headquarters for inspection. Instead, every user connected to the nearest Zscaler data center, which scanned for threats and enforced company rules before passing traffic on. The pitch fit a world where email, files, and sales tools were moving to the cloud too. Customers paid a subscription per user. They had no boxes to buy, ship, or patch.

Double on Day One

Zscaler priced 12 million shares at $16 each on March 15, 2018, above its expected range, and raised about $192 million. On Nasdaq the next day the stock opened at $27.50 and more than doubled. It closed with a market value near $4 billion. Remote work during the pandemic made its model the norm. Zscaler still trades on Nasdaq as ZS, with Chaudhry as CEO.

Cover: Milarepa on Mount Kailash, Tibet. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a Himalayan peak above the clouds.