Rashmi Sinha and Jonathan Boutelle (SlideShare) - Sharing a Measure of Success

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Business, Life Lessons, Creativity, Startups, Strategy, Thought Leadership, Education, Stanford University, Leadership, Challenges, Journey, Culture, Etl, Innovation, Founders, Stanford, Entrepreneurship

4.5 • 740 Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2010

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jonathan Boutelle and Rashmi Sinha, founders of the presentation-sharing site SlideShare, describe the entrepreneurial process as a series of pivots. Boutelle explains it's not just a jump, but an evolving growth of stages that leads to an idea that can start a business. From there, Sinha says that focused execution keeps the vision moving forward. By continually measuring the activity, they both believe that entrepreneurs can better recognize the growth stages of their company.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.
0:10.3	You can find podcasts and videos of these lectures online at eChorner.standford.edu.
0:18.4	Today we have a very special day. We have two guests who will be interviewed by Steve Blank.
0:23.6	We have Rashmi Sinha and John Boutel, who are the co-founders of SlideShare.
0:28.6	This is a business media site for sharing presentations.
0:32.6	Rashmi is the CEO and John is the CTO.
0:35.6	And Steve is going to get to the heart of what it means to be partners and running this
0:41.3	business and especially as a merry couple.
0:44.3	Thanks, Steve.
0:45.3	Thanks, Tina.
0:46.3	So the first question at Rashmi and John, for the two people out there who don't know what
0:52.3	slide share does, maybe you could just give us a brief description of the product and the service and website.
0:58.0	Sure.
1:00.0	So SlideChair, the core idea of SlideShare was that it would be the YouTube of PowerPoint.
1:07.0	And that was the three-word description that we wrote when we were making up the PowerPoint
1:12.6	of the product.
1:14.6	And we shied away from using that description when we were pitching it to Mike Larrington
1:20.6	and to journalists and people like that.
1:22.6	But it turned out that actually being able to describe what you do in a very short, crisp way,
1:26.6	even if you refer to other sites that already exist, is a perfectly fine, healthy, good way to communicate.
1:34.2	So the YouTube of PowerPoint pretty much sums up what we are.
1:38.2	Now obviously we handle way more documents than PowerPoint now.
	...

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