CNET spoke with former InfoSpace CEO Naveen Jain by phone after the company’s conference call, at the height of the dot-com stock mania in 1999. InfoSpace, then mainly a provider of content solutions for websites and portals, was showing high gross margins annually.
InfoSpace’s revenue stream had been focused on advertising, the heftiest part of which came from its consumer services. In the interview, Naveen Jain expressed his intention of diverting the company’s focus to transaction revenues. Much of it would be sourced from its fledgling merchant services, which it considered as its fastest growing outfit after wireless services.
During this time, Wall Street analysts were ecstatic about the company bringing the Internet to wireless and non-PC devices. For a time, InfoSpace was touted as “the new Microsoft.” In the article, Naveen Jain boasted of InfoSpace readying its brand of instant messaging.
Naveen Jain clarified in the article that he wasn’t trying to pit InfoSpace against established portals like Yahoo! He emphasized that InfoSpace was simply developing the technology and software and application services necessary for visitor retention on clients’ sites. All these, Jain said, was part of a growing “library of technology” the company was leveraging.
Typical services included giving clients personal homepages, Web-based e-mail, or as simple as calendars and address books. Back then, four heavily visited websites — AOL, Microsoft Network, Lycos, Netscape, Go Network — used InfoSpace technology.
Now InfoSpace has morphed into a provider of “metasearch” services to many American distribution partners. Basically InfoSpace builds new search technology, whose results it combines with those from Google, Yahoo!, and Ask.com, among other search engines. The services are marketed under the websites Dogpile, WebCrawler, MetaCrawler, and WebFetch.
Naveen Jain founded InfoSpace in March 1996 in Bellevue, Washington, where it has since been based. The company went public and debuted at Wall Street in December 1998. Today it maintains branches in the United Kingdom and India.
In its heyday, InfoSpace was among the biggest known Internet businesses, estimated to be worth over $31 billion. Investors ranged from retired Nebraskan real estate broker Bev Hess to Microsoft Corporation’s co-founder Paul Allen. To this day, InfoSpace is credited as one of the companies that benefited the most from the dot-com boom.
Naveen Jain was Chief Executive Officer of the company from 1996 until his resignation in 2002. From 1996 to 2002, he also served as the company’s Chairman of the Board. Jain was also InfoSpace’s Chief Strategy Officer from 2000 until 2001.
Years earlier, Jain carved a name for himself as senior executive at Microsoft Corporation, between 1989 and 1996. There, he was pivotal in launching The Microsoft Network, the company’s online service and was likewise responsible for marketing the company’s prototype of Windows NT.
After leaving InfoSpace, Naveen Jain and a group of IT executives came up with Intelius in January 2003. Ever since then, he has overseen the company in the capacity of President and Chief Executive Officer.
By exhaustively searching records in the public domain, Intelius furnishes clients, without endangering anyone’s privacy, with personal information of individuals. Intelius can be used to track down people and screen prospective employees with criminal backgrounds. It won the 2006 American Business Award for Best New Company.
Born in 1959 in Uttar Pradesh, India, Naveen graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (Roorkee) with a degree in engineering in 1979. From the XLRI Jamshedpur School of Business and Human Resources, he later earned his master’s in Personnel Management and Industrial Relations. He immigrated to the US in 1982 through a business exchange program, after which he worked in New Jersey for one year.
Naveen Jain won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2006 and the Albert Einstein Technology Medal. Red Herring proclaimed him as one of 1997’s top 20 entrepreneurs.
He is married to Anu Jain, a businesswoman. A former owner of the Seattle Sonics, Jain, at one point, was estimated to be worth $8 billion. He cited Bill Gates as a role model.
Related Articles or Websites about Naveen Jain:
- Read about Naveen Jain and his move from Microsoft to Infospace.
- Naveen Jain’s company Intelius was named in May 2006 as a finalist in the categories of Best New Company and Best New Product in the American Business Awards.
- Read about Naveen Jain and his experiences at InfoSpace.