Where Social Networks Meet Self Expression
Max Levchin is a Silicon Valley anomaly, a Web entrepreneur who survived – indeed thrived – in spite of the dot-com meltdown. Levchin’s first company was PayPal, sold five years ago to eBay for a staggering $1.5 billion and only months after a successful IPO.
At the tender age of 29, Levchin was a restless multimillionaire looking for an encore. In 2005 he came back with Slide, a personal media service that gives Web users the tools to tell stories combining their own photos, videos and “digital bling” like sparkles or floating hearts. Today, Slide reaches 50 million viewers every day on every corner of the Web.
Today, PC users can create and then download their own video clips onto the Web. But it is a process both complicated and costly for most. (As a result, only a small percentage of YouTube’s videos are original.) Or, they arrange digital photos into a simple slide show. Slide gives users simple tools with which to enhance their personal photos and videos. The result is a narrative far richer than that of the typical slide show. Consider how famed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns evoked the Civil War with a pastiche of old photographs and as well as the spoken word. Among the slide shows is a mother’s tribute to her terminally ill daughter. “It’s a profound responsibility. We’re caretakers of priceless content,” Levchin says.
Slide debuted a year ago. Today, Slide is popular all over the world and is available in many different languages, including simplified and traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Spanish and German. About 50 million people view hundreds of millions of shows daily. By comparison, the highest rated episode of TV’s biggest hit, American Idol, attracted a mere 28.6 million viewers. Advertisers already are keenly interested: Levchin predicts Slide will be profitable next year. Slide is considering other revenue streams such as sponsorships and electronic commerce.
Last November, the Mayfield Fund led a funding round that included Khosla Ventures as well as early Slide investors such as BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund. Mayfield managing director Allen Morgan now sits on Slide’s board.
Morgan is a 25-year veteran of Silicon Valley and a man known for the breadth and depth of his rolodex. His network has served him well as he moved from law to venture capital nine years ago. While still a lawyer, Morgan represented Reid Hoffman, the founder of social networking site LinkedIn and a PayPal board member. Hoffman made the introduction and a relationship was forged.
Morgan manages Mayfield’s consumer practice; Morgan and the firm have placed large bets on search, social networking, Internet media, and personal communications technologies. Slide sits at the intersection of two mega-trends: the use of the Web to build, extend and sustain social networks; and the further democratization of media. (Indeed, Levchin maintains social networking will be an important platform for a generation of Web software and services.)
