Naveen Jain on Successful Entrepreneurship
A captivating feature about Intelius CEO Naveen Jain’s entrepreneurial style is his healthy attitude toward business, which, throughout his career, has made him one of the most esteemed and respected in the technology industry.
Regardless of whatever industry one chooses, it is always important for the would-be entrepreneur to be educated about the venture he intends to pursue. Before hitting a home run in the IT big leagues, the Seattle-based Naveen Jain attended the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (Roorkee), alma mater to some of the most powerful foreign-born CEOs in the U.S. today. After graduating with a B.S. in engineering, he elevated his technical training to include labor and business theories and obtained a master’s from XLRI Jamshedpur.
Concrete experience backs theory. In Jain’s case, he applied his technical background into the companies he worked for and used them as an avenue to develop technology out of his ideas. Although he worked for Burroughs Corporation for about a year, it was not until Microsoft hired him that he obtained a greater appreciation for information technology and became convinced of his own capabilities to succeed independently. At Microsoft, he became crucial in launching several flagship services, such as The Microsoft Network, Windows NT and MS-DOS. Microsoft’s OEM model became the basis for founding his first venture, Infospace.com, which was one of the top gainers in the dot com era. This was later followed by another successful company that he cofounded in 2003.
Entrepreneurship requires loving the business despite the reality of failure. In a ReDiFF interview, Naveen Jain outspokenly said: “Starting a company is like having sex. We should enjoy the process and not concentrate on the end goal.” Sure, Jain has had his inevitable share of ups and downs, but he has proven his mettle time and again, his most recent successful feat being Intelius, a leader in online information services.
