SlideShare success an inspiration for Indian developers

The SlideShare engine, which helps users upload presentations online and embed these on blog, websites, intranets and social media, was mostly developed by the company’s Indian developers. The company that was recently acquired by online professional networking company LinkedIn for a handsome $119 million (about Rs 640 crore) has majority of its developers and designers in New Delhi.

The person behind the successful business venture, which she co-founded with her husband Jonathan Boutelle and brother Amit Ranjan, however, is not a techie, going by her academic qualifications. Rashmi Sinha, who was born and educated in Allahabad before going for a PhD at Brown University, studied psychology.

"What Rashmi and Amit have achieved is truly commendable. They'll be an inspiration to many entrepreneurs in India. Our software product ecosystem is becoming strongly by the day," says Sharad Sharma, chairman of Nasscom Product Forum and the former chief executive of Yahoo! India R&D centre.

While Ranjan heads the company’s office in New Delhi, the core technology development work is being taken care of by Kapil Mohan, technical architect who has been working with the company since its inception.

Before SlideShare, Rashmi also co-founded two other ventures including Uzanto, a web consulting company and MindCanvas a gaming product company.

“When I was at Brown University, it felt too isolated, too ivory tower. When I discovered the Web, and how you could build for it and constantly iterate, it seemed a far more exciting prospect than sitting in a lab doing made-up experiments on people,” she had written in one of her blogposts.

In her latest blogpost, while disclosing SlideShare was being acquired by LinkedIn, Rashmi has stated she would continue to lead SlideShare and her team would continue to do what they had been doing.