news
SlideShare Co-Founder Amit Ranjan calls it quits
27 Jan 2015

SlideShare Co-Founder Amit Ranjan has reportedly quit the company.

In his personal blog Webyantra, Ranjan said, “I’m moving on from SlideShare. After an amazing nine year journey since its launch from New Delhi in 2006, I think now is the right time to pass on the baton and focus on the next stage of my professional life. My co-founders – Rashmi & Jon moved on a few months ago, so this marks the exit of the entire founding team.”

Founded in October 2006 by the trio, SlideShare was acquired by LinkedIn in May 2012. It allows users to easily upload and share presentations, infographics, documents, videos, PDFs, and webinars. SlideShare is reportedly among the top 120 most-visited websites in the world.

Ranjan also said that SlideShare is getting consolidated into its San Francisco office. He noted that the company is still in “great shape” and is now an integral part of LinkedIn. He also claimed that it witnessed the highest traffic numbers ever in November 2014.

Here is the official exit note posted by Ranjan on his blog:

Titled: The next chapter after SlideShare

All these nine years – there’s never been a dull day at work. Building a consumer internet platform that millions of professionals across the world use in their daily working lives has been a truly humbling experience. This wouldn’t have been possible without the support of SlideShare’s vibrant community.

SlideShare is in great shape. Its now an integral part of LinkedIn, has capable leadership and the team is completely killing it. Nov’14 saw the highest traffic numbers ever, and it is poised to break into the world’s top 100 websites. To a founder, this gives confidence that SlideShare is progressing steadily on its mission of empowering the world’s professionals through knowledge.

The LinkedIn experience was insightful… it has helped me connect the dots. I’ve always felt that it takes a combination of art and science to build a world class product. Startups are best at the art of creating something from nothing, but it takes a rigorous scientific approach to make the product high quality and scale it. Thats what LinkedIn taught me.

Looking back at the journey, there are things we got right and some others where we could have done better. I’ll share my key learnings in subsequent posts. Having built a company with the word “share” in its name, there’s one learning that stands tall over everything else – If you acquire some knowledge, don’t keep it to yourself. Share with others so they can benefit from it and improve on it… the ecosystem grows and some of that karma will flow back to you. To borrow a phrase – the real power of knowledge is the power to give it away.

I’ll take this opportunity to thank the super talented SlideShare team spread across two offices – San Francisco & New Delhi. There are changes going forward – SlideShare is getting consolidated into the San Francisco office. Not what the founders would have done, but LinkedIn is a large organization with its own structure and priorities – its best for SlideShare to fit into LinkedIn in a way that ensures its long term success.

Goodbye SlideShare! I’ll always be your most ardent evangelist… just that I’m no longer part of the team that’s building you.

What’s next for me – some plans are work-in-progress… will share when the appropriate time comes:) Stay tuned.


Comments

Your comment will be published after moderation.
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd><p>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Image CAPTCHA
Enter the characters shown in the image.
Connect
Sign in using Facebook