How billionaire CEO Jay Chaudhry made his employees millionaires

“I went home that evening and looked at the table with all the [stock] options they had and I multiplied it by the stock price of VeriSign. That’s when I realized that the math was 70 or 80 millionaires with stock options,” Chaudhry said CNBCWe do it“It was impressive,” he adds, explaining that he didn’t really understand what an unexpected financial blessing the sale of his startup can be for his colleagues.

Chaudhry, 65, is now CEO of cloud security company Zscaler and billionaireBut he had used up all his joint savings together with his wife after they began SecureIT, Chaudhry said CNBCHe said this move and independence from outside investors had enabled them to provide employees in the corporate more equity.

When he sold his company in 1998, Chaudhry wasn’t the just one who walked away with a full wallet. Verisign’s stock price rose sharply within the years that followed, and greater than 70 of its 80 employees became “millionaires on paper.”

In the identical vein, entrepreneur Mark Cuban recently tweeted that almost all of his sales resulted in bonuses for his employees. By selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo, Cuban became a billionaire and “300 out of 330 employees became millionaires.”

“This is the right thing to do. No company is built alone,” Cuban said Assets.

Chaudhry has the same mentality. He said CNBC The share distribution is “good because these employees make the difference – they [were] Work day and night.”

But long-term financial success was not a given. VeriSign Shares plummeted through the dot-com disaster before eventually recovering, leaving employees with roughly value depending on whether or not they got out at a foul time.

During the boom, nevertheless, there was a palpable excitement throughout the office. “People in the company went crazy because they had never imagined so much money,” he said CNBCand said that many employees were buying latest houses or cars or taking day without work from work. “They could do whatever they wanted.”