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To: Bill Harmond who wrote (144549)	8/2/2002 1:13:47 AM
From: H James Morris	Respond to of 164684

Bill, still got INSP, the owner of Silicon Investor in your " big pick" porfolio? Naveen Jain, chairman and chief executive officer of InfoSpace, is on his way out. The Bellevue provider of Internet and wireless services announced yesterday it has hired executive-search firm Korn/Ferry International to find a new chairman and CEO. Jain, the company's founder, said he will remain on the board and that the hiring time frame was "completely open-ended." Asked whether he had been pushed out, he said, "No, absolutely not." "The last two years we have been heads-down trying to stabilize the company," Jain said. "Now that we have our head above waters, (it) is a good time to find some other talented person to add to management bandwidth." The news came at the end of the same month the once high-flying company learned it could be removed from the Nasdaq Stock Market after its stock had traded below $1 for more than 30 days. InfoSpace has until Oct. 4 to revive the price, which was 45 cents yesterday. Last week, it said it will hold a shareholder vote Sept. 12 to approve a 1-for-10 reverse stock split to bring the price above the $1 mark. The charismatic Jain has sold 7.3 million shares of InfoSpace — for a total of $398.2 million — since the company went public in 1998, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents. Since February, he has sold 2 million shares, a rate of about 25,000 shares every other day. Jain said that in the past two years he has acquired more shares than he has sold, and that he has never sold at the peak price. The stock hit its high of $130.53 a share in March 2000. "This is a company I funded myself. I don't know how many people would be able to tell you that," Jain said. As of May, records show, he had 60.7 million shares under his name, or 19.6 percent of the company. This isn't the first time the company will get a new chief executive. In 1999, InfoSpace hired Arun Sarin, a former chief executive of the U.S./Asia Pacific region for what was then Vodafone Airtouch, now Verizon Wireless. The investment community cheered Sarin's arrival, but Sarin kept commuting from his Bay Area home. Observers say he didn't fit with the InfoSpace culture, which needed a hands-on leader. Sarin declined to comment. "What we learned from past mistakes is to absolutely positively make sure this person moves to Bellevue," Jain said. "Our goal is to really look for somebody who is still very hungry who really wants to make a mark." Sarin resigned 10 months into the job after overseeing InfoSpace's largest and most ill-fated acquisition — a $5.2 billion merger with Seattle-based Go2Net. The seat at the top nearly changed hands again at Sarin's departure. According to people involved, the InfoSpace board asked Go2Net Chief Executive Russell Horowitz to become CEO of the merged company. But after Jain began recruiting employees and threatened to start a rival company with some of Go2Net's intellectual property, Horowitz declined the position, and Jain once again became chief executive. Jain denies there was a conflict or that he threatened to start another company. Since then, InfoSpace has overhauled its senior management and struggled to rebuild an Internet business that had been fueled by online advertising before that market nose-dived. While the company has made strides in its online merchant-services business, its wireless business has failed to take off. "We have not only thrived in this tough economic environment, we're showing sequential growth," Jain said. "I'm slightly disappointed that wireless-data adoption has not met our expectations or anybody's expectation ... but in merchant and wireline we have done very, very well." seattletimes.nwsource.com