Net Gamblings

Naveen Jain worked at Microsoft Corporation from 1989 to 1996. As a senior executive, he was instrumental in the conception of The Microsoft Network. He was also one of the marketers behind the Windows NT forerunner. Naveen Jain spent his childhood years in India as he was born in the Uttar Pradesh region in 1959. The son of a civil engineer in public works, Naveen Jain grew up to study engineering, graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1979. After that, he secured a Master’s in Personnel Management and Industrial Relations from the XLRI Jamshedpur School of Business and Human Resources. Through a business exchange program, he was able to immigrate to the US in 1982, after which he briefly worked in New Jersey. Upon his resignation from Microsoft in March 1996, Naveen Jain lost no time founding his own company, InfoSpace. He began trading the company publicly in December 1998, sparking a short-lived era of good fortune. That era, the so-called dot-com boom of the 1990s, made InfoSpace one of its biggest ever beneficiaries. At its peak, InfoSpace was well worth over $31 billion. Investments flowed to the company from such names as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and real estate broker Bev Hess, while websites like AOL, Microsoft Network, Lycos, Netscape, Go Network used InfoSpace’s services. Backed by a group of IT executives, Naveen Jain started another company in January 2003. Called Intelius, Naveen Jain’s new business maintains a large database of records from the public domain, providing clients with useful personal information of people. Intelius can then provide data for tracking down long-lost friends, verifying a house contractor’s reputation, screening job applicants with dubious backgrounds, and such. Intelius won the 2006 American Business Award for Best New Company. For his resplendent work as Intellius President and Chief Executive Officer, Naveen Jain earned Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2006. He is also the recipient of the Albert Einstein Technology Medal. In 2000, Forbes Magazine claimed Naveen Jain’s net worth as $8 billion.