Today we have an opportunity to learn from a truly Self-Made Man, and exponential entrepreneur, Naveen Jain.
In 1959, Naveen was born one one of the poorest areas of India, and yet he managed to make his way to college and secure an engineer degree.
By 1989 he’d found his way to the United States and a position at Microsoft.
In 1996 he quit in order to start his own company, called InfoSpace which provided content services such as phone directories, maps, and games that other websites could embed into their pages for a small fee.
By April of 2000, InfoSpace was valued at $31 Billion and Naveen’s network was an estimated $8 Billion.
When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, InfoSpace’s stock fell from $138 to just $1.56.
Since then he’s started several additional companies, including Moon Express with the intention of winning the Lunar X-Prize which was announced 10 years ago.
The contest offers a $20 Million prize which has been sponsored by Google to the first privately funded team to land a robot on the moon and successfully travels more than 500 meters.
Today, only five teams remain in the running, and Moon Express is among them.
One of the most fascinating points of discussion in today’s episode, is Naveen’s answer to why…
Why is it important to make it the moon, what resources can we find there that can’t be found on Earth, and what does a feasible business model look like that allows us to mine those resources in a profitable manner?
Next we dive into the progress that’s taking place in the bio-med industry, and why he recently started another company called Viome in order to genetically map the trillions of microorganisms in your body.
This is a topic that I’m very interested in personally, and I purchased the Viome kit the day I recorded this interview.
This is without a doubt one of the most fascinating and inspiring interviews we’ve ever had here on Self-Made Man. If you’re a technology geek or a visionary entrepreneur, you’re in for a real treat…
About the Instructor