‘India has evolved and become a much bigger market for us’

Jensen Huang said in an interview that if he knew in advance the pain he had to go through to build Nvidia, he wouldn’t do it again. Having founded and sold four start-ups before you founded Zscaler, you must have had your share of pain as well?

Start-ups always come with challenges. But you start one because you want to challenge the status quo. I was fortunate because all my start-ups worked. When I talk to many of the founders who have failed start-ups, they say they still had fun and learning. It’s a wonderful experience.

But if you do it for money, to get rich quick, you would be disappointed. If you have the passion for solving some problem, then that’s fun. Climbing some of the highest peaks is tough, but many really want to take on those challenges.

If you look at it as ‘oh man, it’s so hard, I am making so many sacrifices’ then it’s not worth doing and you should get out of it. So, a lot of it is ‘state of mind’.

Was there ever a moment where you thought I shouldn’t have got into it?

There were moments from time to time. Absolutely. You look at a glass as half full or half empty. When I was doing sales for Zscaler early on, there were lots of challenges for me.
First, I met people who were managing firewalls, and they would literally say, ‘hey if I bought your service, what would I do.’ Then I realised I was talking to the wrong people and that I needed to talk to senior-level management — the c-suite, head of IT security.

So, when I spoke with 10 of them, six would say, ‘you are crazy, security should never be in the cloud’. Three would say, ‘it’s a great idea, but not for me, at least not now’. And one would say, ‘what a wonderful idea, let’s work together on this’. It felt great to get that one customer. The rejection by those other nine is forgotten.

I started Zscaler in the midst of the great recession. I was trying to do something very disruptive. It was a big risk. I wanted the freedom to do what I believed in, rather than VCs telling me what to do. So I funded it myself. In such cases, a recession is good time to start and it also gave me good time to start a product. In 18 months or so, we were ready to hit the market, and the economy was opening up by then. You must look at the other end of the tunnel once you are inside.

What are the core values needed for an entrepreneur to become successful?

Don’t start to get rich quick. It will take longer than you think. Two, do it in any area where you have a core competency. During the dotcom days, I had invested in 40 start-ups as an angel investor, using the money I had made from selling my start-up. You wouldn’t believe it, but 37 of them got wiped out! So many were starting websites with no core competency.

Passion and convictions come when you get closer to something. The more you learn, the more you understand the situation, the better conviction you have.

Three, it’s all about the team. All of us have only 24 hours in a day. The core founding team is extremely important. If that team is weak, you flunk. I was fortunate I had very brilliant engineers who built our products.

You had a humble background with limited means; you had to trek a long distance to school in your village in Haryana…

(Laughs)… it never felt tough. I enjoyed it. That was the way of life back then. My wife and I had no attachment for money. If we had been attracted to money, we wouldn’t have taken the risks. In my view, happiness has nothing to do with money. It’s all a state of mind. The richest people have so many problems in life.

You pioneered the concept of shifting cybersecurity to the cloud. How did you think of it 17-18 years ago, when cloud as a concept was still very nascent?

The old notion in cybersecurity was that you go to the office, connect to the network and then move around, discover all applications and servers. This was called castle-and-moat security. When someone from outside comes in, they are checked; but if they are coming in by impersonating someone else, then they have access to everything inside.

Our Zero Trust concept says, ‘don’t trust anyone coming inside your building’. It can be understood this way — If I come to see you at your headquarters, I am stopped at the reception, they check my ID, give me a badge, and then will escort me to meeting room 2. Once the meeting is over, they escort me out. No one is trusted. The minimum required trust is given to go to a specific place and then you are out. In doing this, all ransomware attacks essentially disappear.

It’s a different approach of doing things. When I started Zscaler, the thought process was, ‘if applications are everywhere, users are everywhere, where are you going to build these trusted moats and networks’. Let’s not build better firewalls, let’s turn this institution on its head.

I had been using Salesforce and NetSuite since 2001 for my start-up companies. In 2001, each of them was under $10 million in annual sales… I was a big fan of how easily you could set up Salesforce and NetSuite, and hence was convinced that cybersecurity, too, had to shift to the cloud.

Today, in the era of AI, how is Zscaler adapting?

We believe that AI should be fought with AI. At Zscaler we have the solutions for emerging threats. But enterprises suffer from inertia and are slow in adapting to change, while hackers have no such inertia. So, the biggest message I have for enterprises is — step up and start acting on AI security faster.

How important is India as a market for you?

India has evolved and become a much bigger market. We have a big presence in India today. Almost 38 per cent of our 7,500-odd employees are in India. My focus from early days was, if a given function can be done in India, then it should be done in India.

The marketing and sales team apart, to cater to the India business, a big part of our engineering, quality assurance and testing, and cloud support function out of India. Also, 80 per cent of our finance team is in India. We have expanded into multiple cities. Chandigarh is the largest centre for us.

In fact, we opened our Bengaluru office before we opened our Silicon Valley office. In the past 5-6 years we have been seeing Indian customers getting sophisticated and savvy about cybersecurity.

Six years ago, India was probably the 13th country for Zscaler in terms of sales. Now it has become the fifth largest. The only countries ahead are the US, the UK, Germany and Japan. Today there is competition between my sales teams in India and Japan for the number four ranking.

You went to study in the US on a scholarship from JRD Tata. If you hadn’t got that, where would you be today? Also, your reflections on meeting JRD?

I would have probably been an engineering lead in one of the Indian companies. I had almost given up… I am sitting in a small village with no banks and no loans! The one thing that helped me was that I kept searching and trying to figure out what I could do to fund my flight tickets and spent hours and days in the library. And then I stumbled across this scholarship by accident. Perseverance helped.

So, after I applied, I went to Bombay, where I had a three- to four-minute interview with JRD Tata. He had all the files and asked 2-3 simple questions and said, ‘Go! Good Luck!’

So, I got a loan scholarship — a one-way ticket and $200 in cash. And we are where we are today, thanks to that.