Naveen Jain had to face many hardships in his formative years, having grown up in small towns and villages where his scrupulously honest civil engineer father was posted while in public service. With his father being the only earning member, it was challenging to make ends meet on his meagre salary. Not only did the family struggle for basic amenities, Naveen and his siblings were forced to travel long distances to their school from the remote areas they lived in.

Aspiring for a better future, Naveen overcame all challenges and focused on his studies. He completed his engineering from IIT-Roorkee and management from XLRI, a top B-school of the country.

He worked in startup firms of Silicon Valley before becoming a manager in Microsoft Corporation. While at Microsoft, he realised that he had little scope of fulfilling his dream of uplifting the downtrodden and creating an impact on society. He decided to leave his job at Microsoft and, following the internet boom, launched his own venture, Infospace. This company worked on creating an email and telephone directory in addition to providing resourceful content to various websites and mobile phone manufacturers. The company adopted various co-branding strategies using which their features, content and icons were embedded in other websites, thus targeting a large audience. The company reached new heights and was acclaimed for its services by noteworthy organizations on the Wall Street. However, as a result of legal conflicts and the subsequent crash of the dot com bubble, Naveen was discharged from his duties as CEO. Once the court acquitted him of all charges, he went on to create Intelius, a firm that provides easily accessible information services, such as background checks, to the general public.

Determined as well as patient, Naveen created Moon Express, which plans to initiate commercial lunar robotic transportation and data services. The company’s objective is to mine rare natural resources from the moon and bring them to earth for their economic and social value. He later sold Intelius and its parent company Inome to private equity firm H.I.G. Capital in 2015. Naveen’s recent venture, Blue Dot identifies technical innovations at NASA and National Labs, and connects these with management teams to foster companies that have the potential of improving the lives of people.