Naveen Jain, India-born Entrepreneur
Though Naveen Jain spent his childhood years in India, it was in America where he founded two companies, InfoSpace and Intelius, and became rich beyond anyone’s expectations.
Long before this however, Naveen Jain lived with his father in Uttar Pradesh, which was one of India’s most destitute states. He had the benefit of an education however, as he had studied at the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee to get an engineering degree, which he did. A post-graduate degree in personnel management from the Xavier Labour Relations Institute in Jamshedpur followed in 1982.
A business exchange grant however, provided the entrepreneur with the stepping stone he needed. It took Naveen Jain across the Atlantic and into the United States.
In time, he arrived in New Jersey, where he started accepting a series of jobs in the IT industry, the first of which was the Burroughs Corporation. Eventually job hunting displaced him to the American Northwest, where Microsoft Corporation employed him.
Defying race, he played the industrious employee at Bill Gates’ company. Eventually, the software giant entrusted Naveen Jain with work on its operating systems, namely Windows NT, Windows 95, MS-DOS, and OS/2. Naveen Jain capped his stay at Microsoft in 1996, but not before capturing a managerial spot at The Microsoft Network (MSN).
He ended a good career because he saw a better prospect in InfoSpace, his first business outing in the US. InfoSpace indeed bode well for Naveen Jain. For the last years of the millennium, it ranked among the most renowned web content suppliers, vaunting clients like NBC, Disney, and AOL.
By this time a multi-millionaire, Naveen Jain used his newfound wealth to start another company in 2003. Intelius was another hit, scooping the Best New Company Stevie Award in just three years. Two years more and it was already an Inc. 500 company with terrific spikes in revenue.
Naveen Jain is indeed a welcome addition to the burgeoning number of successful IT entrepreneurs in the U.S.
