This story is part of CNBC Make It’s The Moment series, where highly successful people reveal the critical moment that changed the trajectory of their lives and careers, discussing what drove them to make the leap into the unknown.

Jay Chaudhry never thought he’d run a business, amass a fortune or help popularize an entire industry. Not growing up in rural India, not upon moving to the U.S. in 1980 to study engineering and marketing, not even after landing jobs at tech giants IBM and Unisys.

“I have no background of entrepreneurship in my family of small-scale farmers. So if you asked me, ‘Did I ever think about becoming an entrepreneur in my childhood [or] early years of my career?’ Not really,” Chaudhry, the billionaire founder and CEO of cloud security company Zscaler, tells CNBC Make It.

It took Silicon Valley’s dot-com boom — the wild success stories of tech startups like Netscape — to get Chaudhry thinking in 1996, “Why shouldn’t I start a company?” He made the rash decision to quit his job as an executive at Atlanta-based tech company IQ Software, and his wife Jyoti quit her job as a systems analyst at telecommunications giant BellSouth.

Together, they plunged their life savings — roughly $500,000 — into SecureIT, a cybersecurity software startup they co-founded in 1997. At the time, “maybe less than 5% of Fortune 500 companies had firewalls,” Chaudhry says. “Within 18 months, we had deployed firewalls in about 50% of [the] Fortune 500.”

His timing was perfect: In 1998, Chaudhry sold SecureIT to VeriSign in an all-stock deal worth nearly $70 million. Over the ensuing decade, the husband-and-wife duo founded two more cybersecurity companies and an e-commerce business, each of which got acquired.

By 2007, they were already wealthy entrepreneurs, and Chaudhry — who gets “bored” without something to work on — decided it was time to launch “one big company and put 200% focus on that,” he says.

That company was Zscaler, which aimed to help companies transition away from outdated firewalls and into the cloud era. The couple invested $50 million of their own money, says Chaudhry. Today, it brings in $1.6 billion in annual revenue and has a market value of roughly $30 billion.

Chaudhry’s own net worth is estimated at $11.5 billion by Forbes.

Here, Chaudhry talks about putting his family’s savings on the line to follow his gut, how his upbringing influenced his relationship with money and the advice he’d give someone who wants to quit their job to start a business.

CNBC Make It: What prompted you to stake your entire life’s savings on a startup idea — in an industry that didn’t really exist yet?

Chaudhry: This thing happened because I love to read and I love technology.

In 1996, Netscape had just launched and gone public, and I was fascinated by it. I said, “If [Netscape co-founder] Marc Andreessen could start a company — he was a young guy [right] out of college — why shouldn’t I start a company?”

My wife and I talked a few times, and the more we thought about it, the more conviction we got around it: [Netscape’s web browser] is the way to access information, and it should become popular. But if every company is connected to the internet, that means there will be security risks.

That was my simple thinking. There was no IDC or Gartner study about the market size. It was largely based on what the gut told us.

A gut feeling is one thing. Betting every dollar to your name is another.

It started out with us saying, “Let’s go get venture capital funding.” I had no experience raising funds, and I realized soon that it wasn’t that easy. This was [1996], Atlanta was not a VC mecca and we kept hearing, “Hey, you don’t have any experience.”

We were disappointed, but our conviction was building, which led to me saying, “Why don’t we put our life-savings on the line?”

I didn’t know anything. So, I really didn’t know how big the risk was. I couldn’t quantify it.

How did you make peace with that risk?

After talking back and forth, we asked each other, “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” The company could shut down, we’d lose all of our savings.

The next question was, “Can we find jobs?” There was lots of confidence that we could.

I never had money in my early childhood, so there was never a notion that I must buy A and B and C. Our lifestyle was pretty simple. Our house in Alpharetta, Georgia, was $200,000 — a nice, typical middle-class house at that time — and we didn’t have any fancy cars or fancy payments.

Our only child at that time was going to a public school. There wasn’t a lot of overhead. We said, “Let’s take a chance.”

When a bet pays off, does that success make you more confident to take on bigger risks? Were any of your other ventures as risky as that first one?

The [financial] risk of SecureIT was, like, 1,000 times more than the risk of Zscaler. The amount I invested in Zscaler was a small fraction of my net worth.

But Zscaler was much harder. I put more money in it than all the others combined. I took bigger bets. I hired people more quickly to solve some very hard problems. I wanted to do something big, something lasting.

We were trying to solve a problem that was futuristic. Will it be successful or not? Will the market take off or not? That was all unknown.

So if you asked me the chances of success of Zscaler, there was a much higher risk. Because, with SecureIT, it was fairly obvious that as you connect to the internet, you need firewalls.

What’s your best advice for someone who’s thinking about quitting their job to start their own business?

First, build conviction by learning more about what you want to do. Don’t just do some of the cursory work.

Second, start by putting in your own money. That actually is part of testing your conviction. If you really have conviction, you’ll take a chance on yourself. That also means you’ve done some serious homework, you’re ready, you’re committed.

You can also make decisions the way you want to make decisions. If Zscaler was largely owned by VCs, they probably could have shut it down. It took us a few years to really start getting traction in the market, and VCs can write you off and move on. They say, “It’s one of my 20 investments.”

When you put in your own money, this is the only business you have.

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People in their 30s may be a long way off from their retirement savings goals, but they have plenty of time to get on track.

On average, Americans say they’ll need around $1.46 million saved up to retire comfortably, according to Northwestern Mutual’s “2024 Planning and Progress” study. And for millennials, the majority of whom are in their 30s, that number is a little over $1.6 million.

However, many in their 30s have much less than that saved.

The median 401(k) balance for people in their 30s is around $22,100 as of the first quarter of 2024, per the latest data from Fidelity Investments, one of the country’s largest 401(k) providers.

Here’s how much Americans have in their 401(k)s by age, according to Fidelity.

To be fair, many Americans are stretching their funds to cover a number of expenses which may impact their ability to save more for retirement.

Over a third of people cite the rising cost of living as an obstacle to reaching their retirement goals, per Fidelity Investments’ “2024 State of Retirement Planning.” And nearly 30% say that paying off credit card debt and unexpected expenses are barriers.

If you’re in your 30s and worried about your retirement savings, the good news is that you have time to get on track.

First off, rather than solely focusing on your account balance, which can be impacted by factors such as market volatility — and which will ostensibly grow at a compounding rate over time — take a look at your savings rate. That’s the percentage of your pre-tax annual income that you set aside for retirement each year.

Fidelity recommends a savings rate of 15% which includes your employer’s match, if offered. However, you may need to increase that savings rate if you’re just starting in your late 30s, compared to your earlier years, says Anne Lester, a retirement expert and author of “Your Best Financial Life: Save Smart Now for the Future You Want.”

“If you’re starting at 39, you’ll need to save a bit more aggressively than if you were starting at 32 or earlier,” she tells CNBC Make It.

To that point, if you’ve got nothing saved for retirement, Fidelity recommends a savings rate of 18% if you’re starting at age 30 and 23% if you’re beginning at age 35.

One way to reach that suggested savings rate is through auto-escalation, which allows you to set your retirement contributions to automatically increase by a certain percentage each year. For instance, you could automatically increase your savings rate by 2 or 3 percentage points each year until you reach your target rate.

Another way you can give your retirement savings a boost is by mentally preparing yourself to set aside a portion of any financial windfalls you may receive in the future such as raises or tax refunds, Lester says.

“Those raises and refunds are one way you can relatively painlessly start saving for retirement because you’re not giving anything up you already have,” she says.

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Prices for everyday items continue to rise across the country, but in some places it’s worse than in others — especially for residents in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Although the national year-over-year inflation rate has dropped to 3%, it has hovered around 5% in Dallas-Fort Worth in 2024, according to a new WalletHub report.

That’s second only to Honolulu among a selection of 23 major U.S. metro areas, and higher than other cities known for a relatively high cost of living, including New York City and Los Angeles. Inflation in Dallas-Fort Worth has also risen steadily by 1% over the past two months — making it the nation’s worst city for inflation, according to the study.

The relatively high inflation rate can be attributed to a “significant housing shortage, along with restrictive government policies that limit new construction,” which has caused housing prices in Dallas-Fort Worth to soar, says WalletHub analyst Cassandra Happe.

Other factors include “substantial increases in energy prices″ including electric bills and persistent inflation in key areas like medical care and transportation services. Rising medical care costs have been linked to hospital consolidation in recent years, while transportation costs are largely related to the effects of urban sprawl, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Aside from Dallas-Fort Worth, Honolulu is the only other city in the study with year-over-year inflation that’s 5% or higher.

Below are WalletHub’s rankings of metro areas with the worst inflation, from worst to best. The rankings are based on an index that’s weighted equally between year-over-year inflation and inflation over the past two months as of June 2024. 

• Two-month change: 1.00%
• One-year change: 5.00%

• Two-month change: 0.70%
• One-year change: 5.20%

• Two-month change: 1.10%
• One-year change: 4.20%

• Two-month change: 1.00%
• One-year change: 3.40%

• Two-month change: 0.60%
• One-year change: 4.00%

• Two-month change: 0.60%
• One-year change: 4.00%

• Two-month change: 0.80%
• One-year change: 3.40%

• Two-month change: 0.80%
• One-year change: 3.30%

• Two-month change: 0.40%
• One-year change: 3.80%

• Two-month change: 0.50%
• One-year change: 3.20%

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When Mark Cuban sells a business, he always sets aside some of the proceeds for one specific purpose: divvying it up among the company’s employees.

“In every business I’ve sold I’ve paid out bonuses to every employee that was there more than a year,” Cuban posted Tuesday on social media platform X. The bigger the acquisition, the larger the payout: 300 of Broadcast.com’s 330 employees became millionaires when the audio streaming service sold to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock in 1999, Cuban wrote.

Cuban started the practice after selling his first company, a software firm called MicroSolutions, for $6 million to CompuServe in 1990. He took 20% of the total sale price, he tells CNBC Make It, and paid it out to 80 employees — which would equate to $15,000 per staffer, if distributed equally.

Cuban did something similar upon selling his majority stakes in HDNet, now known as AXS TV, in 2019 and the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks last year, he wrote in his post. “And only HDNet had any layoffs right after the sale,” he added.

Cuban’s co-founding and sale of MicroSolutions marked his first big entrepreneurial success and a triumph over setback: He nearly went broke after his secretary stole roughly $82,000 from the company.

“It was f—ed up,” Cuban told Barstool Sports’ “Pardon My Take” podcast in 2020. It also presented a silver lining, he added: “It made us get our s— together.”

The business bounced back, and Cuban sold MicroSolutions five years later, making him a millionaire. “You have to hustle the most when you think it’s the darkest,” he said.

In 1995, Cuban invested in and took operational control of AudioNet, the streaming platform that eventually became Broadcast.com. The business idea was met with skepticism at a time when the internet was still fledgling, he told CBS’s “Sunday Morning” last year.

“There was nobody doing it. Nobody,” Cuban said. “People thought I was an idiot.”

Upon selling Broadcast.com, Cuban received a large portion of Yahoo stock, which was considered highly valuable at the time. But instead of holding onto it, he quickly cashed out. He was happy with the money he’d earned and suspected the stock market was overpriced, he told GQ in 2022.

Months later, the dot-com bubble burst and Yahoo’s share price sank. “It taught me a hell of a lesson: When you just chase dollars, it never works out well,” Cuban said.

Last year, Cuban sold a majority stake in the Mavericks to the Adelson and Dumont families, who run Las Vegas Sands Corporation, in a deal reportedly valuing the franchise at roughly $3.5 billion. He retained a 27% ownership stake and control of basketball operations, the Associated Press reported at the time.

The deal ended Cuban’s longtime status as an NBA majority owner. In 2000, the newly minted billionaire purchased his initial stake in the team for $285 million — without negotiating or trying to push the price down by even a penny.

“It was all about fun,” Cuban told “The Draymond Green Show” podcast, in an April episode. “That was like a dream … I didn’t even negotiate, I was just like, ‘Yes, whatever.’”

Cuban’s current net worth is $5.4 billion, according to Forbes.

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You don’t need a bachelor’s degree or a stacked resume to land a six-figure job. 

Even as some businesses scale back hiring — pointing to high inflation and a rapid increase in interest rates, among other challenges — there’s one high-paying role that’s “always” in demand, according to one IBM executive: project manager.

“Businesses always need project managers, not just in tech but also in retail, marketing and a dozen other industries,” says Lydia Logan, IBM’s vice president of global education and workforce development. “It’s a core role that touches on so many different functions within a business: project managers can work with the finance, tech, legal departments, you name it.” 

The role of “project manager” is exactly what it sounds like: a person who is responsible for planning, organizing and managing the completion of a project, ensuring it is completed on time and within budget. 

Such projects can range from constructing a new building to running a marketing campaign.

Businesses across all industries are recruiting project managers to keep up with the rapid advancement of different technologies and adapt to lingering disruptions from the pandemic, Logan adds. 

To help meet these challenges, the Project Management Institute anticipates that employers will need at least 25 million people in project management roles by 2030 — which means about two million people will need to enter the field every year just to keep up with demand. 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the number of project management jobs will grow 6% in the next decade — faster than the average for occupations overall.

Most project management jobs require at least a high school diploma or GED, as well as the completion of a certification course or training.

Several schools including the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell University offer online project management certificate programs, as do companies like Google and IBM. Some of these courses are free, while others charge an enrollment fee.

Project managers should be comfortable problem solving, delegating tasks and leading a team, juggling disparate components like scheduling, budgeting and payroll.

In this role, you’ll also be working closely with people in other departments, so it’s important to be adaptable and be able to effectively communicate a project’s goals and each team member’s role in accomplishing them, Logan explains.

Making sure these skills — as well as any certifications —are front and center on your resume is the “most important” step you can take to land a role in project management, she adds.

Project managers are in demand across all industries, but there’s a particularly urgent need in financial services, health care and technology, the Project Management Institute reports. 

Companies like IBM, Amazon and JP Morgan Chase & Co. are among the top companies hiring for project managers, according to recent research from Glassdoor.

In tandem with rising demand for these professionals, the median salary for project managers in the U.S. is $102,682 per year, ZipRecruiter reports, up from about $87,000 a decade ago.

There are also dozens of remote project management jobs on the market, some of which pay upwards of $200,000 a year.

Ultimately, “Project management is a solid field with a lot of growth opportunities,” says Logan. “It’s great for people who are curious, collaborative and excited to lead a team.”

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