Sometimes the simplest ideas are best. While a number of startups are working to bring the whole process of creating presentations online, SlideShare recognizes that many people are mostly satisfied with PowerPoint or Keynote. They just want an easy way to share their traditional presentation files with others.
The company, which launched in 2006 and later added audio synchronization, took the YouTube strategy of creating a place where people could upload, share, and embed their media. And now they’ve raised a $3 million from Venrock and a handful of notable angel investors in its first major round of funding, which should help them pursue that strategy further (i.e. build as massive user base as possible). Oh, and fight off future denial of service attacks and increase capacity.
Individual investors include Dave McClure, Ariel Poler, Mark Cuban, Jonathan Abrams, Hal Varian, Yee Lee, and Saul Klein. Many of them actually came to know SlideShare as normal customers and only decided to invest once realizing how handy it was. David Siminoff will also join SlideShare’s board.
SlideShare is using some of the money to relocate from Mountain View to San Francisco, where they’ll have a larger office. It will also grow its team from about 10 people to 18, mostly with local hires even though the bulk of its development occurs in India.
Of course, we’ve been given a press release in the form of an embeddable slideshow, inserted below. Way to go on the blatant self-promotion, Dave.
Its a great product/team and they built a really active community, plus its the best place to find really cool conference presentations. Congrats!
Well done! Long live slideshare [:)]
Like you said, the simple ideas are the best. It looks simple and works.
It looks like their PantherCDN is failing though. On their home page under Active Users, 4 our the 15 thumbnails are broken. Not a big deal, just annoying to get bad rep for inefficiency of one of your (cheap) providers.
I’m not sure I’m comfortable with yet another site leveraging Flash as the “standard.” I’m not sure I have the answer (Silverlight sure isn’t it), but in general, too much of the web relies on Flash – almost all embedded videos, multimedia, web-pages, etc… Just airing my concerns, am I alone?
Congrats guys! great to see a company out of India (&SF) thrive.
congrats on funding news
…but how do they make money on this? it is not going to be consumer play like youtube, infact how many ppl make presentations every day? and even if they make have time to upload to the portal…
Congratulations Rashmi, Jon and team. It’s impressive how many people I know who have recently asked me offline if I’ve tried slideshare. You’ve got some great word of mouth buzz going. Keep it up.
With Google Docs embedded presentations update in real-time as you change your content.
Does this do that?
This is great news, I love slideshare!
Great going! We love you slideshare!
@Steve Ridder
Yes Steve, sorry to say but you’re amongst the extreme minority who are still unable to realize the potential of Flash. Flash has come a long way from those “Flash-4-skip-intro” days.
And with the recent announcement of Flash formats goings totally open source, relying on Flash technology is even more smarter, productive and makes whole lot of efficient sense.
With the ability to produce SWFs not just from Adobe’s product but from any other tool, its an awesome advantage. We might very soon be just writing PHP, Python or Ruby and the SWFs are just part of the rendering that we do. I can see way good things coming out by relying on Flash for their appropriate usage for the right purpose (without abusing it).
I love slideshare too and wish them well. It would be even better if it played video embedded in the Powerpoints.
Congrats Rashmi, Jon and Amit. Great going.
Congrats to the SlideShare team! We just added this feed to Plaxo Pulse, and it rocks!
venrock means only one thing.. loser
Brilliant! Congrats to Rashmi and the team.
what’s their beef with .com?
Congrats to SlideShare, certainly one of the best web 2.0 service and the modest round proves that they’re on the right track.
Blogged about it here http://technozzle.com/?p=137
#17…You are so right. Only the naive or the dumb would pitch Venrock.
The list of investors makes me shudder:
1. Hal Varian – an economist? I love my economists but seriously, they are terrible investors. Stick to writing books Hal.
2. Dave McClure – a fanboy with bad grammar and the ugliest web site known to man kind? Enough said.
3. Mark Cuban – we all wish we were him but luck doesn’t teach you business.
At least they have Venrock which has been mostly venerable save the investment in PodTech.
I wish them well. Being an expat they’re service is a (albiet poor) substitute for not being able to attend conferences and roundtable discussions in many far off places.
@dave
http://slideshare.com redirects to slideshare.net
I work withe education people and whenever I show them slideshare, they love it. The best part is that the slides can be embedded inside learning management platforms like blackboard. Congrats to the team.
most awesome congrats to SlideShare, and cheers to their continued success
as a SlideShare user, presenter, publisher, embedder, conference organizer, advisor, angel investor, friend & fellow geek, and most of all SlideShare FANATIC, i am a passionate evangelist for their service.
USE IT! It Rocks.
(ps – i love investing in tools i use, developed by people i like to hang out with. that’s a triple whammy
>>…Way to go on the blatant self-promotion, Dave.
(wink!)
not that i mind one bit, but i will state for the record that using me as the grinning fool in that presentation was THEIR idea, not mine… however, it’s true it took me all of about 2 seconds to agree & then dive right in
- dmc
Congratulations Rashmi, Jon and the rest of the team! From the guys at Phuser.
@4 Google Docs embedded presentations are not flash (and work on iPhone)
@12 Google Docs presentations do that.
Aside from the YouTube aspect, what doe this site have to offer?
Congrats to the team! I use their service multiple times a day, really love it. So simple and useful.
Congratulations Rashmi and team. The idea is really simple and cool, also I see the real business case here.
Also it was great to see someone from my college NIT Jaipur (me ECE 99)built this and achieved this kind of success.
Good luck
Cheers,
Vijay – Founder LimeAll (http://www.LimeAll.com)
Congrats Rashmi!
Congrats Rashmi and her team
Great job.
I loved what pluggd.in called these guys, “youtube of power point”
How true
SlideShare? They should call this thing “PornShare”. Half of the presentations on the site are chicks taking their clothes off. Not that I’m complaining of course
.
SlideShare looks great.
I think an audio component could add a lot.
Is that part of the plan?
@33 You can create “slidecasts” that add an audio track:
http://www.slid...lidecasting-101
BTW, congratulations to the SlideShare folks!
Great news! At what valuation?
There is another free presentation hosting service called SlideBoom that is superior to Slideshare. SlideBoom supports animations, transtions, audio and has many other exciting features. Here a couple of comparisons between SlideBoom and Slideshare:
http://presenta...s.blogspot.com/
http://www.fred...-services-2993/