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That company was Zscaler, which aimed to help companies transition away from outdated firewalls and into the cloud era.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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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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Sarah and Jamie McCauley are landlords, YouTubers, Walmart pallet flippers, eBay resellers and Amazon product reviewers — and those are just their active streams of income.

The McCauleys make their money by researching what makes side hustles profitable, testing them and teaching others how to do the same on YouTube. The Grand Rapids, Michigan-based couple earned nearly $140,000 from eight streams of income last year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

They’re particularly good at two types of gigs, they say: anything involving real estate and their YouTube channel itself, where they share their side hustle exploits with at least 146,000 subscribers.

“If you’re looking to just make some extra money on the side, maybe pay off a credit card debt or pay for a vacation, I think that is doable for nearly everybody,” says Jamie.

DON’T MISS: The ultimate guide to earning passive income online

The McCauleys are part of a side hustle revolution, a growing number of Americans who supplement income with multiple jobs. More U.S adults — about 39%, according to Bankrate — have side hustles today than ever before, whether out of necessity, precaution or a desire to increase their earning power.

Ease of starting is at an all-time high: Platforms like Amazon, Airbnb and Fiverr offer instant access to paying customers. But with competition also rising, it’s hard to build a side hustle that regularly brings in revenue.

Make It spoke with a selection of Americans with successful side hustles to learn how they built their businesses, and used them to fund a wide variety of financial goals. Every respondent highlighted four common traits that helped drive their success:

No matter what you sell, you need people willing to buy it. Jenny Woo says her side hustle is successful for a simple reason: She researches her audiences intensely, and tailors her products specifically to them.

Woo is an adjunct lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, a freelance business consultant and the teacher of an online course about emotional intelligence. Her one-woman side hustle, called Mind Brain Emotion, sells 12 different emotional intelligence-themed card games.

It brought in $1.71 million on Amazon last year, according to documents reviewed by Make It.

Woo’s first deck of cards, “52 Essential Conversations,” was tailored toward parents who — like her — wanted to connect with their kids and build their emotional intelligence skills. She joined parenting Facebook groups and observed users’ posting, commenting and liking habits, she says.

After selling $10,000 worth of the game in a 2018 Kickstarter campaign, Woo kept researching. She conducted a survey of her consumers, and learned that “overwhelmed” teachers looking to support children’s social and emotional development made up a significant portion of her audience, she says.

Her second deck, “52 Essential Relationship Skills,” was built for those teachers. It didn’t sell as well as her first deck, but it taught Woo that she could broaden, and combine, her audiences.

Woo applied that lesson to her third game, “52 Coping Skills.” She started with her own experiences working with college students during the Covid-19 pandemic and combined it with her continued research on teachers and parents, she says.

It’s now Mind Brain Emotion’s top-selling game, says Woo.

Woo sells on Amazon, which has a broad reach, to collectively rope in Mind Brain Emotion’s hyper-specific audiences. Tim Riegel’s products have a more singular customer base, so he sells on Etsy, a marketplace known largely for homemade and handmade goods.

Riegel, a full-time general manager at a sheltered workshop, makes firepits from recycled tank ends in Lamar, Missouri, and sells them under the name Mozark Fire Pits. His average product weighs 225 pounds, and sells for $950.

Mozark Fire Pits brought in approximately $202,000 on Etsy last year, according to documents reviewed by Make It. Riegel maintains a 40% profit margin, he says.

Riegel chose Etsy over platforms like Amazon, Wayfair and Overstock because it felt more user-friendly, and a better fit for his personalized products, he says. He also sells on Facebook Marketplace, which costs him more in advertising — but less in shipping costs for customers within a 200-mile radius, he adds.

That kind of platform analysis is valuable, no matter what kind of side hustle you run.

If you sell a service, instead of a good, you might consider platforms like Fiverr and Upwork — popular among photo editors, marketing writers and voiceover artists — or Taskrabbit, known for labor-intensive side hustles like cleaning or repair work.

Or, opt out of those platforms entirely. If your gig is something that many other people also do, try finding marketplaces with more narrow niches like Contently, Skyword or ServiceScape, recommends side hustle expert Kathy Kristof.

“One of the problems I see with a lot of freelancers is that they go to the best-known online platforms … and those platforms are so saturated with people who have been there for, often, decades,” says Kristof, whose blog SideHusl has reviewed more than 500 different side gigs.

No matter your platform, you’ll need to stand out. A good listing can help: clear and concise, written for your intended audience, free of typos, with high-quality graphics and some search engine optimization (SEO).

Becky Powell, a kindergarten teacher based in Beaverton, Oregon, has a side hustle selling worksheets for other educators on an online platform called Teachers Pay Teachers. Many of her worksheets focus on her personal specialty, teaching children sight-reading skills.

Her side hustle didn’t take off until she embraced SEO. When she uploaded her first worksheets, she titled them, “Creating sight words with pattern blocks.” Sales slowly trickled in.

Her husband Jerome, who has a business background, suggested a simpler title, like “Hands-on sight words.” The sight-reading worksheets quickly became her bestselling products, Powell says.

Powell’s store brought in $125,500 in 2022 revenue, according to documents reviewed by Make It. Her husband also sells worksheets on the platform, and they’ve used their combined earnings to fund vacations and pay down their mortgage and student loans, Powell says.

“You have to have passion and knowledge,” she says. “You also have to have a business sense [and understand] SEO.”

Once you gain enough customers, work to turn your sales into positive reviews, so you appear higher in platforms’ search results, Kristof advises. Customer service, prompt shipping and quality control can usually earn you a good online reputation.

The McCauleys have a rule for their ever-changing collection of side hustles: “You either have to be one of the first to get there, or your approach has to be very unique and different to be successful,” Sarah says.

But being first or unique doesn’t guarantee long-term success. In 2020, the couple was early to a side hustle trend: pallet flipping. At local warehouses, they’d buy pallets of returned goods from Amazon, Walmart or Target. They’d unbox the pallets, discover their contents and resell the items for a hopeful profit.

From December 2020 to December 2022, the McCauleys made about $19,500 in pallet-flipping profits, they estimate. Their most popular unboxing YouTube video got 5.4 million viewers, translating to an additional $30,000 in advertising revenue, says Jamie.

Last year, more Americans hopped on the pallet-flipping trend. Pallet prices rose, resale values dropped and a slew of unboxing videos diluted the McCauleys’ viewership. “The pallets became not really worth our time … from the standpoint of time over money,” says Sarah.

Four years ago, the McCauleys would’ve simply moved onto their next side hustle. Now, they’re feeling the strain of constantly building new gigs from scratch, and starting to reorganize their income streams into a smaller number of longer-term projects.

Instead of flipping their current home renovation project in Northern Michigan for a profit, for example — something they’ve done multiple times — they’ll keep it as their own vacation house and part-time Airbnb rental, they say.

“We always knew [side hustling] was going to have an expiration date,” says Jamie. “It’s a young person’s game, to always be looking for what’s next.”

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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 Jen Barnett and Brett Andrews started seriously thinking of leaving the U.S., they had a few parameters for their new home.

The couple from Birmingham, Alabama, wanted to live in a place not too far from the beach, that had a strong middle class, where politics leaned progressive, and maybe most importantly, where people enjoyed a high quality of life for a lower cost of living.

“We say we have red state money — we don’t have blue state money,” Barnett, 52, tells CNBC Make It.

They did well for themselves in corporate America, with Barnett working in marketing and Andrews in software programming, earning them a joint household income of roughly $200,000. They owned their 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom house and had enough disposable income to go on vacations, though they weren’t quite “constant jet-setter types,” Barnett says.

The two got serious about leaving the country in 2020 when they transitioned to remote work.

In 2022, they visited Merida, the capital city of the Yucatan state in Mexico, and fell in love.

Merida checked off all the boxes: a 30-minute drive from the coast, friendly people, progressive politics like legal abortion and same-sex marriage, and, at least according to online estimates, a cost-of-living that was at least 30% cheaper than Alabama, Barnett says.

The couple moved to Merida in April 2024 and now run their own travel company, Expatsi. They pay themselves a combined salary of $3,000 per month, “which is close to the average salary in Merida and covers our needs,” Barnett says.

Here’s how some of the costs stack up between Alabama and Mexico.

Going out to restaurants and entertainment options are more affordable in Merida than in Birmingham, Barnett says.

“Unless it is extremely high end, dining out is incredibly affordable,” she says. The two recently split a nice dinner at an Indian restaurant for $45 including tip.

In the U.S., though inflation has eased from recent highs, many Americans still report seeing higher restaurant prices than in recent years.

The cost of dining out reminds Barnett of “Birmingham, but before the pandemic.” Plus there are “infinite options for affordable, delicious street food.”

Another cheaper item: An outing to the movies. A ticket to the movie theater “with reclining leather seats and all that” costs around $4 or $5, Barnett says.

Grooming and other personal services are also much cheaper, she adds. A trip to her new local salon could cost $30 for a set of eyelashes, $50 for a manicure and pedicure, and $100 for a haircut and color appointment.

A recent round of Botox cost her $150.

Health care in general is affordable in Mexico at roughly 60% lower than prices in the U.S., according to OECD data.

“Let’s say you have a cold, and you go to the pharmacy,” Barnett says. “You could see a provider there for $2 and get a prescription on the spot.”

While going out to eat is pretty affordable, Barnett says her grocery shopping trips are a little more expensive than back in the U.S.

That often comes down to the exchange rate, she adds.

Her Costco runs are a good example: “Costco items are pegged to an exchange rate of 20 pesos to the dollar,” and priced at a static rate, Barnett says. When the U.S. dollar becomes weaker in relation to the Mexican peso, things cost more. On one recent trip, the grocer’s famous $1.50 hot dog worked out to be closer to $2 because of the exchange rage.

Plus, “some items are also imported at a premium,” Barnett says.

With time, she’s gotten better at sourcing from local stores, like a butcher shop and delivery service for fish.

“If there was a store like Aldi here for reliably low prices on things like cheeses and pantry staples, I think I’d be below my U.S. spend,” Barnett says. “As it is, I’m still working on it and probably spending about 10% to 20% more.”

In Alabama, the couple’s mortgage on their house was roughly $1,200 a month, including insurance and taxes.

In Merida, the couple rents a 2-bedroom, 2½-bathroom hacienda for 25,000 pesos, or less than $1,400, per month.

Despite the slightly higher cost, Barnett says their housing, which is in a “high-end” neighborhood and is equipped with “top-of-the-line appliances,” is a higher quality than what they had before.

Plus, their home’s solar panels help lower their electricity bills, especially during the summer when the AC is constantly running.

“That can save us $300 a month right there,” Barnett says.

Conversions from Mexican pesos to USD were done using the OANDA conversion rate of 1 peso to 0.05 USD on July 10, 2024. All amounts are rounded to the nearest dollar.

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