Naveen Jain: His Life from Microsoft to Intelius
For over a decade now, Naveen Jain had many information industry players at his feet. The Indian-born serial techno-preneur is the originator of such brands as Intelius and InfoSpace. Before founding those businesses, Naveen Jain worked for seven years at Microsoft Corporation, under the venerable Bill Gates. Here he laid the groundwork for the firm’s online service, The Microsoft Network (later called MSN). He takes credit for a few of the company’s operating systems that emerged since his joining in 1989. He particularly owns patent rights to Windows NT and Windows 95. Furthermore, he helped conceive MS-DOS and OS/2. In the end, Naveen Jain became part of the company’s senior-level management team. He became a full-time entrepreneur upon his resignation in March 1996. He then incepted InfoSpace, the multi-billion dollar content provider once hailed as the “next Microsoft.” Nearly seven years later, he found himself creating a new company, this time focusing on information commerce. This new business is called Intelius. Like its predecessor, Intelius is based in Bellevue, Washington. Naveen Jain designed another slant for it though. He made Intellius a supplier of public-domain intelligence like addresses of individuals, their court records, and holdings. It later evolved to offer background and criminal checks of healthcare professionals, childcare providers, and house contractors; people locators; identity theft defenses; and employee screening solutions. Due to Intelius, Naveen Jain gained the approval of even more peers, starting with nominations in the annual Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards. Naveen Jain grew up in Uttar Pradesh, India. He graduated with a degree in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology at Roorkee in 1979. He got his MBA in 1982 from the Xavier Labour Relations Institute School of Management at Jamshedpur. In 1982, he immigrated to America and in the late 1980s, married Anu, with whom he has three children.