A Star Is Born

May 11th, 2009 by Administrator

Industry experts first took notice of Naveen Jain when he founded online directory and web content provider InfoSpace in 1996. He had just left a high-ranking position at Microsoft back then.

Within a year after founding InfoSpace, Naveen Jain was getting acclaim from several respectable sources, one of them being Red Herring magazine, which included him in its 1997 Top Entrepreneurs list. The publication even went so far as to say that he is “smarter than Bill [Gates].” In fact, the magazine put him alongside Jeff Bezos and Rupert Murdoch. Information Week, for their part, predicted Naveen Jain would be one of “Six People Who Will Change the Internet,” by helping realize the hitherto science-fiction of wireless Internet.

Of course, Naveen Jain’s success extends beyond citations on magazines. For him, it was largely remunerative; InfoSpace was one of the wildly successful beneficiaries of the 1990s dot-com stock boom. In this era, the company made Naveen Jain one of America’s richest men, as per Forbes 400 rankings.

The Indian-born entrepreneur continued his reputation of coming up with innovative ideas with a second company. In 2006, he secured a nomination to the prestigious Entrepreneur of the Year Award of Ernst & Young awards, eight years after he was nominated for Emerging Entrepreneur.

Ernst & Young nominated him Entrepreneur of the Year for founding and leading the second company, which is called Intelius. Using a database of publicly available personal information, Intellius sells intelligences pertaining to people’s whereabouts, criminal liabilities, and similar data.

Intelius itself is widely acclaimed. The company has a Stevie, very well an “Oscar” for entrepreneurship, for Best New Company from the American Business Awards. Inc. Magazine has already included it in its ranking of America’s “500 Fastest-Growing Private Companies.” In the Deloitte & Touche Technology Fast 500, the company is a certified “Rising Star.” Plus, Intelius is one of the fastest-growing private companies in its region, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal.