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Technology Stocks : InfoSpace.com -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KeepItSimple who wrote (16)	12/6/1998 3:16:00 AM
From: Goldbug Guru	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3070

SMARTER THAN BILL Naveen Jain on Naveen Jain. By Andrew P. Madden The Red Herring magazine July 1997 Bill Gates, head of the largest software company in the world, has a rival. His name is Naveen Jain, and if you ask him, he'll tell you: Naveen is smarter than Bill. The oddest (and perhaps most endearing) trait of Mr. Jain, a fireball of energy and salesman extraordinaire, is his tendency to refer to himself in the third person. It is as if he, too, were merely a spectator to his own ascension. "There was once an article in InfoWorld comparing Bill Gates and Naveen, and do you know who was the smarter one? Imagine that--it was Naveen!" he erupts in a fit of laughter. (The article, written by Nicholas Petreley on July 17, 1995, does in fact exist.) Cold reception Mr. Jain left New Delhi, India, in 1979 to sow his oats in the nascent U.S. high-technology market. He first worked for Burrows (now Unisys) in New Jersey but found the discrepancy between balmy New Delhi summers and frigid New Jersey winters unbearable. The young man headed west to the warmer climes of the Bay Area and "worked for a bunch of startups trying to make millions of dollars," he recalls. It wasn't until he joined Microsoft in 1989 that Mr. Jain began to enjoy a level of income commensurate with his earlier expectations. In Redmond, Mr. Jain made his name as a program manager. "My job was to define what a product should do from a consumer point of view and what it is that Microsoft wanted the program to be," he says. In this position, Mr. Jain was both programmer and marketer: he had to blend the esoteric visions of software coders with the demands of the market. He started out on OS/2 and then worked on all of Microsoft's greatest hits, including MS-Dos, Windows NT, and Windows 95 (for which he holds three patents). Mr. Jain then shifted to the development of the Microsoft Network, the company's proprietary online service, but he had grown restless during his eight-year stint in Redmond. "When you're working for Bill, you never know how good you really are. One person cannot make a difference at Microsoft," he reflects. "At some point, you've got to go stand on your own two feet." To satisfy these entrepreneurial urges, Mr. Jain left Microsoft in April 1996 to found InfoSpace, an Internet directory service. In some respects, he says, it was like leaving home for the first time, "like a teenager going to his father and saying, 'Dad, I can do it on my own.'" Space invader And would Dad be proud? Probably. Mr. Jain has managed to strafe the Internet with his directory services. Instead of attracting eyeballs to the company's own site, his strategy has been one of massive co-branding. The InfoSpace icon inconspicuously appears on countless content sites like Lycos, Excite, and Playboy, and on wireless devices like pagers and cellular phones from AT&T. Mr. Jain does not impose his business plan on partners; rather, InfoSpace derives revenues by taking a modest percentage of the licensing, subscription, or advertising sales of its partners. According to him, InfoSpace has been profitable for the last six months. All of this has been accomplished, says Mr. Jain, by the proverbial bootstrap method. "We do not like venture capitalists making money from our sweat," he declares. In Mr. Jain's opinion, VCs often force companies in the wrong direction. "Always do what's right for the customer. Always do what the market demands," he says. "The only way to do this is to control your own destiny." And does Naveen think that Naveen will create more companies? In a rare first-person moment, Mr. Jain responds: "Absolutely. I'm still young; I think I can start at least five or six more. I've got millions of ideas."