Jay Chaudhry says he's never really cared about money. Ironically, the mindset helped him become a billionaire.

"Personally, I don't have a lot of attachment to money. I never had money in my early childhood, so there was never a notion that I must buy A and B and C," says Chaudhry, who grew up in a farming village in rural India.

Chaudhry, the 65-year-old founder and CEO of cloud security giant Zscaler, has an estimated net worth of more than $11 billion. His mindset helped him become an entrepreneur in the first place, he says: In 1997, he and his wife Jyoti quit their jobs and sank their life-savings — roughly $500,000 — into a cybersecurity startup called SecureIT.

They saw an opportunity to get a foothold in a nascent industry during the early internet boom. They were undeterred by the prospect of losing their savings because their "pretty simple" lifestyle didn't involve a lot of spending, Chaudhry says — and they were confident they could land new jobs if SecureIT failed.

"That's probably my family influence," Chaudhry says. "I'm not sure exactly what did it, but that upbringing never changed. Some people get money [and] need to buy five houses and boats and planes and all of this kind of stuff. That's a headache to me."

The couple worked together to get the companies off the ground: Jay served as CEO while Jyoti oversaw the finance, systems and human resources departments in the early stages.

Less than two years after launching SecureIT, they sold it for roughly $70 million in stock. They used some of that money to bootstrap several more businesses and eventually put about $50 million into launching Zscaler in 2007, says Chaudhry.

The company went public in 2018 and is currently valued at roughly $29 billion.

The value of putting in 'your own money'

Chaudhry's attitude towards wealth helped him make smarter, long term business decisions, he says.

"I've seen in [Silicon] Valley, people raise a lot of money. Then they go and get very fancy buildings and mahogany desks and all that nonsense," he says. "I think if you put in your own money, you deal with it very differently. It's a good thing to do that."

Owning 100% of your company early on allows you to control your own business decisions, which Chaudhry recommends. "It took us a few years to really start getting traction in the market, and VCs can write you off and move on" when they don't immediately see a financial return, he notes.

Chaudhry did seek outside investment five years after launching Zscaler. Eventually he raised more than $148 million in total funding ahead of its IPO. But outside investors still only owned about 16% of the company before it went public, Chaudhry notes. That afforded him enough control to remain the chief decision-maker.

A founder retaining more control can benefit employees, too: It frees up more equity in the company that can be shared with workers to give them a greater stake in the business' success, says Chaudhry. That, he adds, is "good, because those employees make the difference — they are here working day and night."

Entrepreneurs often debate the pros and cons of bootstrapping a business versus seeking outside funding, especially early on.

Raising capital can help fund faster growth, and experienced VC investors can offer guidance and mentorship. But, as billionaire Mark Cuban argues, outside investors can often take control away from founders and then use that leverage to pressure them to prioritize short-term growth over long-term stability.

The "biggest mistake" new founders can make, Cuban has said, is when they believe they have to raise outside funding in order to grow a business. "Once you raise money, that's not an accomplishment, that's an obligation," he told Ryan Seacrest in a 2019 interview, "because "now you're reporting to whoever you raised money from."

A money mindset that encourages big risks

Zscaler's business model represented a "much higher risk" than his previous businesses, Chaudhry says.

Part of that gamble was the $50 million financial investment. Though it represented just a "fraction" of his net worth, he says, it was 50 times the median amount startups typically spend on seed funding, according to nonprofit Angel Resource Institute. It was 100 times what Chaudhry put into his first startup, he notes.

The cloud security business wasn't yet a fully mature market at the time, Chaudhry says. Still, he felt willing to take a risk because he believed in the company's ability to "make a difference" in an ever-changing world of cybersecurity, he says. He bet — correctly — that companies would need to move on from outdated firewalls, and adopt more modern security measures.

His mindset about wealth contributed, too. "No attachment [to money] is literally being able to make a bet and say: 'Let's spend [and] do this venture,'" he says.

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