Tag Archives: acquisition

The next chapter after SlideShare

Some news to share – 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.

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 as a reward. 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.

MeraSnap acquired by Hewlett Packard’s Snapfish…

mera1.jpgMeraSnap, the online photo printing & delivery service has been acquired for an undisclosed amount by Snapfish, the Indian arm of the global printing service from Hewlett Packard. As per this report in ContentSutra, the raison d’etre for the acquisition is the 100K users that MeraSnap has acquired over the last couple of years. MeraSnap was profiled on Webyantra in Sep2006. Its founders are the promoters of Knowledgeworkz, a Bangalore based information management consulting company. Congrats to them for pulling through this deal.

Snapfish has 200K users (as the report indicates), so that’s a straight 50% jump in the customer base for the company. That’s bang for the buck straightaway (notwithstanding how you define the users- accounts, active users, paying users, repeat users et al) In fact this is a customer acquisition and not a company acquisition, hence the MeraSnap team is not joining SnapFish. Interestingly enough the ContentSutra article seems to suggest that Snapfish had sniffed around other Indian players in this segment as well, and felt that Merasnap’s user base was larger than that of the other players (iTasveer, eYaadein, 123shots, Picsquare, RangeelaPhotos etc) in terms of repeat usage.

M&A activity in the Indian Web2.0 space has been few and far between. The other cases that come to mind are Bixee’s acquisition by IBIBO & Desimartini’s acquisition by HT Media. None of these examples are posters for Web2.0 M&A activity in terms of the size of the deal or its overall influence. The latter in fact was the subject of intense joking speculation as to the underlying motive. However one can’t question the logic behind these acquisitions from the viewpoint of the acquirers. I am sure they best know their business and are fully in control of what they are doing. The reasons may differ from case to case- sometimes the entire company may be getting acquired lock, stock & barrel; sometimes the real reason for the acquisition may be getting hold of the technology or just the user/customer base; at other times acquiring key personnel may be the biggest takeaway for the acquirer.