Naveen moment

Years ago I read the story of Naveen Jain at InfoSpace. An interesting tale of that time.

This is the sequence I found remarkable from January 2001. On January 10 Jain left InfoSpace. Then this

... word spread that Jain was looking at office space in the same Bellevue building to start his own wireless company. His business concept involved micropayment technology — using a cellphone, for instance, to order and pay for a latte at Starbucks and having it ready when the customer walked in the door.

...

The board decided it had no choice but to ask Jain to return and run InfoSpace as chairman and CEO

I wonder what it would have been like to be an InfoSpace employee at that time. Jain leaves, ok, absorb that. Then, because he has some incredible idea that is so potent they have to bring him back.

So that's what a Naveen moment is. You're going about your business and then some incredible, unbelievable thing comes along and it's true.

It doesn't have to just be business or personnel type stuff. Back at SupportSoft one time there was an issue our server was not processing Inform messages from certain devices. It turns out that the DSL modem was emitting malformed XML, failing to escape an ampersand & character that had been typed into a text field during the config for the sales demo. That of course crashed the XML library we used to parse the Inform.

So we told the vendor what the problem was. Then the Naveen moment: we were asked if we could put in a workaround on our side! How can an XML parser be expected to parse something that isn't XML. Yet after some grumbling we did figure out a workaround. We put a preprocessor in front of the XML library to find the specific issue of unescaped ampersand. sheesh.

You don't want to be at a company that has too many Naveen moments.