This tech entrepreneur turned almost 90% of his first company’s workers into millionaires

Jay Chaudhry, the 65-year-old Indian American CEO of cybersecurity firm Zscaler, recalled how he helped turn his former employees into millionaires after selling his first company, SecureIT, to VeriSign in an all-stock deal worth $70 million in 1998. Chaudhry and his wife, Jyoti, started the company using their life savings of approximately $500,000.

Instant millionaires: Chaudhry told CNBC Make It that over 70 out of his 80 employees became millionaires “on paper” when VeriSign’s stock soared by over 2,300% between 1998 and February 2000, reaching a high of $253 per share. “People were going crazy in the company, because they had never thought of so much money. A lot of them were buying new houses. They were buying new cars. I know one guy, he took six months off, rented a [mobile home] and went around the country. They could do what they wanted to do,” he said.
What happened next: Although the share value dropped to just under $4 in 2002, the employees’ patience seemingly paid off when VeriSign’s stock rose again to $254 in January 2021. Chaudhry, who moved from India to the U.S. in 1980 to pursue engineering, told CNBC Make It that he is unaware of when his employees cashed in their shares. “I went home that night and looked at the spreadsheet of all the [stock] options they had, and I multiplied by the stock price of VeriSign. That’s when I realized that the math was about 70 or 80 millionaires, with stock options. It was impressive,” he said.

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