Naveen Jain’s Ascension in the Information Industry
Naveen Jain was born in September 1959 in India, to a family whose name takes after Jainism, a faith that upholds honesty and righteousness. With hard work and crystalline business acumen, Naveen Jain was able to immigrate to the United States. Miles away, Naveen Jain’s fortunes unsurprisingly blossomed. Within seven years, he landed a job at Microsoft Corporation, the company helmed by his idol, Bill Gates. For Naveen Jain, it was a far cry from life in India. Back in his native country, he lived in one of its more illiterate and poverty-stricken states, Uttar Pradesh. There, life was hard. A business exchange program took him out of the country in 1982. Earlier, young Naveen graduated from prestigious schools like the Xavier Labour Relations Institute and the Indian Institute of Technology. Naveen was following in the footsteps of his father, who worked in the city public works department as a civil engineer. His ambition insatiable, Naveen Jain gave up his high-ranking position at Microsoft — which gave facilitated the launch of the Microsoft Network — for his own business. As it turns out, his own business was touted as the “new Microsoft.” InfoSpace, as it was called, attracted even Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to invest in it. Profiting from the 1990s dot-com stock bubble, InfoSpace escalated to a worth of more than $31 billion, essentially making it the largest online business in the American Northwest. A worthy successor to the company appeared in January 2003. From just across InfoSpace’s head office in Bellevue, Washington, Naveen Jain founded Intelius. By gathering information from all over the country, including court records, liens, and property titles, Intellius can conduct background checks on anyone with whom one does business. It can search long-lost people and protect against Internet fraud. But its goal of making people secure, makes it bigger than some give it credit for.
