Naveen Jain's Entrepreneurial Evolution

A discussion about Naveen Jain's controversial business history and transformation into a motivational figure.

"Naveen Jain was the CEO of InfoSpace during the dotcom boom. Before InfoSpace crashed in the dotcom crash, he had sold a bunch of his stock and ended up doing great while all his employees lost everything when the company went under. There's a long report about it in the old Seattle Times, though it's pretty hard to Google now because I think he's scrubbed it.

He then started another controversial company called Intelius, which sold for over $100 million. It was a service for people to look up criminal records and conduct background searches online. If you Google 'Intelius scam' or 'Intelius shady,' you'll see it operated similar to those free credit report services. They'd have you type your name for a report, but there'd be this tiny checkbox agreeing to pay $19.99 for the rest of your life. They made their money by aggregating public records, making them searchable, and having this hard-to-see subscription at the end.

Now he's rebranded himself as this inspirational Tony Robbins-type figure, but his path to becoming a billionaire involved these controversial businesses."