Naveen Jain
speaker
886 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 6 Jul
Naveen Jain’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The way credit card company makes money is when you put money, they charge you two and a half percent to the merchant. That's how they make money. But dad, you are the one who told me, what if that's not true? What if we can actually convince them that they don't have to make money on that way? And I said, uncle, you're right. Why don't you go to give it a shot?
And he literally started this company based on the thought that what if you don't have to charge on a rent? And MasterCard said, you know what? There are $700 billion in the country that I spend on a rent and we get zero. So we're not going to lose anything. And we're going to completely waive the credit card fees for that. And we will charge the money for everything else, but not for it.
So that allowed him to rethink that just because that's how it is doesn't mean that's how it needs to be. The second part, really, Ilana, and then I'm going to stop here, would be, you know, our kids were very, very young when I created my first company, Infospace. The company went on to become a $40 billion company. And our kids were under 10 years old.
And the three kids under 10 years old, most parents would say at that time, oh my God, I've had success now. I'm going to spend time with my young children. Imagine what would have happened if I did that. And if I say, I'm going to spend time with my young children. And most people say, you know, such a great dad who is now quitting everything and spending time with the children.
Now imagine what the children see. Children see when they go to school that dad is sitting on the sofa watching CNBC. They come back from school, dad is at home watching CNBC. And dad tells now, go to your room, work hard. Hard work is what it takes. And they're thinking, I want to grow up just like my dad, sitting on the sofa, watching on CNBC. Instead, this dad starts a second company.
He starts a third company because dad says money doesn't matter. It's about solving the problems that matter. Dad says, now we're going to go build a company to go to the moon. And kids say, dad, you're crazy. Nobody has ever done that. It's never going to happen. Let me show you, son, how to do that, right? Dad is now turning 60. Dad wants to start a healthcare company.
And literally, we had a family meeting. All the kids are now grown up and said, Dad, you had amazing success. You know the health care. You're going to get bloodied. You're never going to make it. Rise into sunset. You are high. You got plenty legacy. Why do you want to destroy your legacy? This is not something you want to do. And what is this microbiome thing you talk about?
Nobody's going to give you poop. Nobody's going to know the microbiome. I don't know where you learned these microbiome thing. You should stop this stuff. And I'm thinking, oh boy, looks like to me, I haven't taught you anything yet. So let me show you one more time how this is done. And my point is, children don't do what you tell them to do. Children do what they see you do.
So think about that for a second. Many, many people who are parents, their dad is working at Microsoft or Amazon, nothing wrong with these companies. They're working as a mid-level manager or an executive in these companies. And they're saying, why are their kids are not becoming entrepreneurs? I want my kid to be an entrepreneur.
And there was a guy who worked for me and said, you know, Naveen, why is it that your kids are all becoming entrepreneur? My kids refuse to be an entrepreneur. And I said, ask yourself, when you were working on these large companies, you went home, you bitched about your boss, and then you went back to work the next day. What is it? Kids learn. Kids learn.
I'm going to get a job where I'm going to hate my boss. I'm going to come home, bitch about my boss and go back to work because that's how my dad did it. So the point is, if you want your kids to be an entrepreneur, you have to show them what to do and to do it yourself. They learn from you doing it, not from you telling them to do it. So when the kids were young, I wouldn't read them the story.
The daily ritual was, I would say, Ankur, tell me a story about a monkey and an ocean and a palm tree. Your job is to connect the things that are seemingly not connected. And he will now tell me a story. Now I say, dad, now you tell me a story about this, this, and this.
And the idea we were creating was showing them that everything that looks disconnected can actually be connected together if you think in a different abstract way. When my youngest was applying for Stanford, he said, dad, I have nothing common, everything I've done. I've done the neuroscience here, I've done the genetics here, I've done this.
How am I going to explain to college application that these things somehow are connected? And I said, go back to what we did when we were telling a story. I said, you talk about how you were intellectually curious and your curiosity drove you to do these things. And the common thread is the curiosity, not what you did.
And that's literally what he wrote in the college essay, that my intellectual curiosity did not let me focus on just one thing because I wanted to understand everything before I decide what is it that I want to do with my life.
I completely agree with you. Imagination is the only boundary. The only thing that limits us to what we can do is our imagination. If we can imagine it, we can achieve it.
I was going to say, you're going to probably ask me, what would I change? You know, interesting thing is, first of all, you never, ever want to change anything about your past. And here's why. If you love just the way you are, if you changed anything in your past, you will become a completely different person. Everything that happened is what made you who you are.
Fall in love with who you are today. Because the day you fall in love with yourself is the day the world will fall in love with you, right? To answer your question, what would I tell myself if I was young, is never let anyone tell you that what you're doing is simply a crazy idea and you should stop doing it. The more people think it's a crazy idea, that's the idea worth pursuing.
So dream so big that people think it's crazy and never, ever be afraid to fail because you only fail when you give up. And one of the lessons I learned from, this is from my daughter, by the way, when she started Abbey, and by the way, anyone who's listening to this, you should go check out abbey.com. This is one of the best women's health company. When she was starting Abbey,
I said, sweetie, how is the company doing? How is your venture coming along? And she looks at me, said, dad, how little you know about entrepreneurship? And I said, wow, tell me why. And she says, dad, my job is simply to be experimenting. I am simply experimenting to see what might work until I figure that out. There is no company yet.
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