Why Wall Street would be happy to work with Naveen Jain again
Naveen Jain, InfoSpace's sole founder (and don't you forget it), is back in business and angling for another IPO with Bellevue, Wash.-based Intelius. The consumer-information broker's business practices are pretty scammy according to details unearthed by TechCrunch's Michael Arrington — and the unsavory parts of its business are the only ones growing appreciably. But where Arrington goes wrong is in thinking that news of the racket will dissuade investment bankers and traders from doing business with Jain.
Those insiders made lots and lots of money, and you won't be seeing any mea culpas from them like disgraced analyst-turned-Web publisher Henry Blodget's. It was your average American investor on the outside who took the hit on their retirement nest egg when InfoSpace went belly-up — not those who profited from flipping shares back and forth along the way.