SlideShare Kicks Ass, Picks Up $3M From Venrock & Friends (+ me!)

Congrats to Rashmi, Jon, Amit & team... SlideShare just raised $3M from Venrock :)

I can't begin to say how proud i am of the SlideShare team, and what an honor it is to be an advisor & small angel investor in their venture.   it's also a terrific product that i was fan of long before i became an advisor or investor.  but most of all, it's just been a real pleasure to get to know Rashmi & Jon as friends & fellow geeks over the past year (in fact i just got back from dinner with them in SF, and we had a blast :).

I first came across the company in fall 2006 by reading a SlideShare review on TechCrunch, and later started using it to host some of the early presentations on startup metrics i created last summer.  I became so enamored of the service that i wanted to meet the folks behind it, and lo & behold i discovered the company was right in my own backyard!  i had even met one of the founders a few times, and she was a regular at Dana Street Coffee in Mountain View, right around the corner from Mint, another startup i had been working with. (btw, Dana Street has great karma... it was a popular hangout back when i was at PayPal and we were briefly in Mt View in 2002-3.  Jim & James from HotorNot also used to hang out there before they moved to the city, as well as a bunch of the ex-PayPal engineering braintrust who went on to help create YouTube)

I really got to know SlideShare better when i ran the first Graphing Social Patterns 2007 conference last fall in San Jose, and used it to host / post most of the GSP slides.  I think it was soon after Charlene Li had posted her presentation on "Big Brands & Facebook", and got over 10,000 views in less than one week that i woke up and smelled more than just the Dana Street coffee!  At first i thought all those views were because Charlene was hosting the preso on her blog, or that Forrester was pointing to it, or other notable bloggers.  But the interesting thing i found out is that more than 80% of the total views came from the slideshare community, not from the widget embed (currently that presentation has over 35K views, with only 5-6K coming from the original embed). 

This was rather astonishing. SlideShare wasn't just a productivity tool.

SlideShare was a resource for driving traffic!

At that point, i got reeeeeeeeal interested.  I was a viewer, i was a publisher.  I was a conference organizer.  I was an evangelist.  I was a fan.  Then i became an advisor, to help them work on product & marketing startegy, and of course metrics.  Lastly i became an investor, because i really believed in the product, the customer need, and the team :)

Congrats again to the team... and i want to apologize profusely for the ugly mug they chose to use in their recent investor announcement presentation, posted below:

| View | Upload your own

While we're at it, here are the profile thumbnails on SlideShare, from Crunchbase and Tradevibes respectively:

CrunchBase Information

SlideShare

Information provided by CrunchBase

Comments

[Rashmi]

Thanks for agreeing to be our guinea pig for press release 2.0 :-> Its just the sort of crazy idea we come up, that you are up for.

And cool that you mentioned Dana Street. So many connections that are important to SlideShare began there. I am so glad I recognized you from SlideShare when I saw you there. I still haven't found a cafe I like as much in the city.

[Andrew Laffoon]

Dave,

Congrats to the Slideshare team on the financing, and kudos to you for being a part! I've been loving Slideshare myself lately, and your Startup Metrics for Pirates (AARRR) was the first presentation I ever saw on Slideshare. Of course, at this point everyone at Mixbook has read through that one several times. :)

Oh, and the presentation that Slideshare used to "announce" the funding is Hilarious!

Andrew

[Arun]

Dave,

We had great fun doing this preso! :) Your expressions are uber cool! (especially Slide 19)

Team SlideShare loves you!
Arun

[Amit Ranjan]

Dave,

You have really been an inspiration to us. Associating with you has already given us so many new ways at looking at the webapp and the community around it.

I'd hope you could come down to India some time in the near future. The team here could pick up invaluable tips from your experience.

And thanks for agreeing for the 'meet dave' slide deck. This was Rashmi's idea and we wanted to have sombody who really embodied the spirit behind the use case for slideshare. Frankly we could think of nobody better. We were hoping you'd not turn down the idea.

amit