CASE STUDY

Rashmi Sinha: Women Entrepreneur, SlideShare Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO)

Who is Rashmi Sinha?

 Rashmi Sinha is an Indian Women Entrepreneurs, businessperson, and CEO of San
Francisco based company SlideShare.
 She was listed #8 as the Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs list of Fortune magazine
in 2012. She was named one of the world’s Top 10 women influencers in Web 2.0 by
Fast Company.
 Rashmi is now based in San Francisco with Jonathan Boutelle, her husband. The
Economic Times listed her as one of 20 “most influential” global Indian women in
January 2015.
 Early life and Education:
 Rashmi was born in Lucknow, India, and grew up in Kolkata and Allahabad. She
completed her B.A and M.A in psychology from Allahabad University.
 She was grown up in India and earned a Ph.D. in cognitive neuropsychology at Brown
University. She took computer science courses with Andy van Dam.
 She had some exposure to the HCL way of thinking. She also took a course in
designing educational software.
 She went to the University of California, Berkeley for a postdoc. There she switched
her focus to human-computer interaction.
 Personal life:
 She married Software Engineer, Jonathan Boutelle. He is the co-founder and CTO of
SlideShare.
 They live in San Francisco. She was named one of the World’s Top 10 Women
Influencers in Web 2.0 by Fast Company in 2008.
 The SlideShare Story:
 She left academia at the University of California to start her own user-experience
consultancy and embarked on the journey of entrepreneurship.
 As she enjoyed practical problems more, she co-founded Uzanto, a user experience
consulting company.
 It worked on projects for companies like eBay, Blue Shield, AAA, etc. In 2005, her first
foray product with MindCanvas (a game-like software for customer research) was
released.
 Rashmi opened Slideshare’s Indian office in Delhi with 20 employees which were run
by Mr. Amit Ranjan, her mechanical engineer brother.
 SlideShare was live in early October of 2006. The startup software called Slideshare
connects people through rich content and patronized by celebrities.
 Slideshare hasn’t used any advertisements, It generated organic traffic by a search
engine like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It had 29 million unique visitors and 9 Million
presentations.
 She and her husband built SlideShare with the help of her older brother Amit Rajan.
SlideShare is a site for people to share presentations online in just six months.
 More than 9 million presentations were uploaded to SlideShare, helping professionals
connect through content. LinkedIn acquired SlideShare for over $100 million in 2012.
 Rashmi runs SlideShare as a unit of LinkedIn as a marketing, technology team, and
head of product.
 Management Philosophy:
 She writes about social software and entrepreneurship at her blog, Rashmisinha.com.
She involved in the HCL community.
 That was one of the founding members of the Information Architecture Society and co-
chairs the monthly BayCHI talk series.
Achievements:
• Listed in top 10 women influencers in Web 2.0 In 2008 by Fast Company
• Named in Fortune magazine’s most powerful businesswoman entrepreneurs list
• Listed in one of the 20 most influential global Indian women by The Economic Times
in January 2015.