Naveen Jain’s Thousand-Mile Journey toward Success
Naveen Jain is the chief executive officer of Intelius, Inc., an online information broker based in Bellevue, Washington that offers background checks, pre-employment screening packages, verification services and people searches.
Like the growing number (1 in 4) of foreign-born CEOs and founders of successful startups in the country, he started his journey thousands of miles away in India. Naveen Jain obtained his undergraduate degree in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (Roorkee), and his M.B.A. from St. Xavier’s School of Management.
Convinced of his place in the high technology industry in the United States, he left his native country and spent a productive seven-year career working for Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, Washington. There, he held various positions, leading the marketing efforts for Windows NT and developing MSN, Microsoft’s online service. After acquiring considerable amount of financial freedom, he invested his money to build a startup Internet company called InfoSpace in March 1996. Full of innovative ideas, Jain envisioned integrating information culled from telephone directories, white and yellow pages, email addresses and other content to the Internet and selling them to Web properties. His stint at InfoSpace earned him the reputation of a brilliant innovator-entrepreneur, receiving the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, Red Herring’s Top 20 Entrepreneurs of the Year, and the Albert Einstein Technology Medal. In 2000, Forbes Magazine adjudged him one of America’s Richest 400, where his value was at $2.2 billion.
In January 2003, the tireless Naveen Jain co-founded Intelius, envisioning the integration of information and technology to supply intelligence services to consumers and businesses online. Intellius offers an assortment of products and services from background checks, verification services, people searches, and pre-employment screening technology to ensure safety and peace of mind for its broad clientele. At present, Intelius dominates the field of information security, owning 50% of the people search market share, with over 1 million logged visitors to its site each day.
Written on June 17th, 2009 with
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