Naveen Jain

Naveen Jain was born in 1959 to a Jain family. He grew up in New Delhi and in villages in Uttar Pradesh, India.

Jain moved to Roorkee, where in 1979 he earned an engineering degree from IIT Roorkee. He moved to the United States that same year. He looked up to business people who made their own fortune, especially Bill Gates.

Jain's first job out of college in 1983 was at Burroughs (now known as Unisys) in New Jersey as part of a business-exchange program. He moved to Silicon Valley for its warmer climate and worked for "a bunch of startups" before joining Microsoft in 1989. Jain worked on OS/2, then MS-DOS, Windows NT, and Windows 95. He was awarded three patents related to Windows 95 and became best known for his work as a program manager.

Jain joined the management team for The Microsoft Network (later MSN), prior to its launch. According to Red Herring, he became restless after eight years at the company and said he didn't feel a single person could make a difference at a large company like Microsoft. Naveen Jain was working on the launch of MSN, when Netscape Communications raised $2.2 billion in an initial public offering in 1995. NetScape's IPO was considered the start of the dot-com bubble, because it showed that Internet companies can have large IPOs without making a profit first. Naveen quit Microsoft to start InfoSpace that year, with the aim of having his own initial public offering as quickly as possible.

Jain married in 1988 and moved with his family to Seattle. He has three children including Ankur Jain.