In an old interview with Rediff On the NeT, Naveen Jain expressed a sense of relief over resigning in 1996 from Microsoft Corporation, where he had worked for the last seven years. He said, “One gets tired of making billions for Bill and we think why not make billions for ourselves.” As it turned out, his emancipation was worth it — and he really earned billions. Resignation freed Naveen Jain into founding one of the most lucrative Internet startups ever to operate in the 1990s. At its best, InfoSpace gave Naveen Jain tremendous riches, his Microsoft salary many times over. Forbes Magazine went as far as naming him one of the richest billionaires in the United States. However, that was the 90s. The latter part of the decade was nearly synonymous with the dot-com stock fad, which made many small Internet players Forbes-ranking personas. At one point, InfoSpace reported a worth of approximately $31 billion. InfoSpace’s business model is hardly revolutionary in today’s standards — it just provided content like telephone numbers, addresses, maps, horoscopes, weather forecasts, and instant messengers to celebrated web properties like AOL, MSN, Netscape, Lycos, CNET, and NBC. At that time though, this configuration was enough to attract investors like Bill Gates’ fellow Microsoft founder, Paul Allen. As with all stock frenzies, the bubble had to burst. This did not faze Naveen Jain though; he quickly bounced back in 2003 with a new company, Intelius. Unlike its predecessor, Intelius zeroed in on information commerce, leading the way in background checks, criminal checks, people searches, reverse phone lookups, employment screenings, and identity theft prevention. Naveen Jain still owes a lot to his former employer. The online entrepreneur gained a lot of insight on Microsoft’s OEM, which he eventually used for his business ventures. He also has extensive experience on operating systems, having managed the programs for OS/2 and MS-DOS back at Microsoft. From Microsoft also, Naveen Jain acquired patent rights to Windows NT and Windows 95.

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