SlideShare Secures $3M

by Michelle Lentz

I discovered SlideShare last year and while I don’t currently have any presentations out there, I really appreciate the service. I’ve used it extensively for research, gathering ideas from other presentations and going out of my way to search out the presentation authors online. That always leads to great conversations. I was thrilled to read via TechCrunch that SlideShare has now secured $3 Million from Venrock and some other others in its first major round of funding.

If you’re unfamiliar with SlideShare, it’s a simple, but great, model. I find it particularly relevant, as I work a lot with training and elearning. In the Training field, there’s a push to move everything to elearning, even though sometimes an instructor-led presentation is just fine. While I realize that a presentation “done wrong” can be boring and evil, a presentation created correctly can be fun. SlideShare believes that a presentation (PowerPoint, KeyNote, etc) really is enough. Using a typical Web 2.0 model, SlideShare is built on user-generated content. You can share your presentations the way you can share a YouTube video. There are built-in privacy controls – you can share your presentation completely, block printing, and other options.

Aside from Venrock, other investors and/or advisers include Mark Cuban, Guy Kawasaki, Jonathan Abrams, Yee Lee, and Dave McClure. SlideShare will be using the money to move to a larger office in San Francisco and to grow its team from 10 to 18 people.

The press release, found here, is in the form of a presentation – quite a humorous one at that

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