Jay Chaudhry left his work send-off unknowingly partying with millionaires. It was the late 90’s and he’d just sold his startup SecureIT, which he co-founded with his wife Jyoti, to Verisign. Perhaps his employees threw an extra nice celebration or splurged on the decor, because when Chaudhry left, he did some math on the net worth of his attendees.
“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,” Chaudhry told CNBC’s Make It. “It was impressive,” he adds, explaining he didn’t really understand the financial windfall that selling his startup would have on his co-workers.
