Naveen Jain is a crook. You know, the head of Infospace.
I can tell you from personal experience that he does not pay his bills or honor his
contracts. Three years ago he was just a little startup without big financial backers, and
he licensed a program called "Anysearch" from a company I ran, PrivNet. (which was
also a little startup)
Well, he signed the contract, accepted delivery of the code, and paid us our fee. Then
he wanted another version with different features, and he wanted the legal right to
redistribute modified versions of that code (he was planning to sell it to various search
engines).
So we wrote the software for him, gave him the license to sell the product to other
search engines, and awaited payment. (a very sizeable sum for us, I might add)
We waited. We called. He was never "in" his office. His secretary would always say he
was out, no matter what time we would call. A few times, just for fun, we would call
and identify ourselves as reporters or advertisers looking to do business with him- in
every case we were instantly patched through and the second he would hear our voice
he would hang up the phone. Call back 1 second later and suddenly he is "not in the
office".
We had signed contracts with this guy, the PRESIDENT of infospace, and he refused to
pay. We were a very small software company, and needed the money. We knew it
would be tough to sue him, but we were going to gather together the cash to do it. We
had signed contracts from him that he was blatantly breaking and profiting from.
But then, before we could do it, our company was bought out by Pretty Good Privacy,
and they deemed a lawsuit wasn't worth it and never pursued him. Since I no longer
owned the company, I couldn't sue him on my own.
However, I will do my best to let the world know what a thief this guy is. If anyone
would like more information about our dealings with him, feel free to private message
me. I'll even mail out free of charge to any media source that would be interested in
reading our email with Naveen as well as copies of contracts that he signed and broke,
and bills that he refused to pay. I'd even offer copies of recorded telephone
conversations we had with him, but of course since I live in North Carolina I would
never have done something like that without informing the second party of the
conversation first. (or didn't you remember reading that disclaimer in my .sig file,
Naveen, oh about 3 years ago?) |
