Naveen Jain’s Red Herring Accolades
Red Herring Magazine selected Naveen Jain in 1997 among that year’s top entrepreneurs. The ranking places Naveen Jain in the league of such names as Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos, Ray Dolby, Bill Gross, Gordon Campbell, Jerry Kaplan, Mark Hoffman, and Kim Polese. Naveen Jain was only starting to make waves that year, having founded InfoSpace in March 1996. Other newcomers joining Naveen Jain on Red Herring’s list are Cypress Semiconductor founder Lowell Turriff, Affymetrix founder Alejandro Zaffaroni, and Multitude founder Ned Lerner. Magdalena Yesil was included in the list too, and so were names like Seth Goldstein, David Pool, Rob Glaser, Brian Dougherty, Jonathan Nelson, Henry Samueli and Henry Nicholas. Most remarkably, Red Herring profiled Naveen Jain with the heading “Smarter Than Bill,” alluding to his former boss Bill Gates. Before founding InfoSpace, Naveen Jain had worked at Microsoft Corporation from 1989 until his resignation in 1996. He helped Gates launch MSN and worked with the MS-DOS team. Now Naveen Jain is a long way from his 1990s prime. He now heads Intelius in Bellevue, Washington as chief executive officer. Intelius provides over a hundred services in intelligence and identity theft protection including but not limited to people searching, background checking, reverse phone lookup, and neighborhood reviews. While it won’t clinch Naveen Jain any Red Herring citation soon, Intelius has held its own with an American Business Award for Best New Company in 2006. Meanwhile, Intelius’ founder landed a nomination for Ernst and Young’s prestigious Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2006. Red Herring Magazine primarily tackles technology news, trends, and issues. Introduced in 1993, the magazine has reached a peak circulation of 100,000, a growth fanned by the dot com stock frenzy at the turn of the millennium. When the stock bubble burst, the magazine inevitably stopped operating as well. Alex Vieux, a French businessman, bought and revived the company in 2004. The magazine is based in Belmont, California.
