Buzz on Slide.com
Sunday, January 7th, 2007Slide.com was create by Max Levchin, co-founder and former CTO of PayPal. It was launch in August 30,2005.
It wins “Mashable 2006 Social Networking Award” in widgets category in December 24, 2006 .
November 15, 2006,Slide,Inc announced it has received additional financing. Led by Mayfield Fund, the round also includes investments from Khosla Ventures and previous investors, including BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund.
Founders Fund was not disclosed by the company. But Techcrunch wrote on it.
But we’re hearing it was in the $20 million range, with a post money valuation between $60 and $80 million.
That’s a…wonderful…valuation for a company that is pre-revenue, although the company will argue that the adoption of Slide by MySpacers eager to show off their photos to their friends is YouTube-like. Still, that’s a lot of money for a company in deep competition with Photobucket, RockYou, FilmLoop and others.
You know the power of Techcrunch.com, then there is many comments.
Dick said:
slide is a widget. how can a widget be valued 80 mill??????
if myspace decides to ban 3rd party widgets and come out with their own line of widgets (which they can make for a few mill at the most), then slide is done.
how can you have a business valued at 80 mill based on that scenario?
Paul Freet said:
Forgetting for a minute what a company like this could possibly do with $20M, what it tells me is that the VCs seem to think that Slide could sell for $500M. VCs don’t normally invest unless there is a potential 10x payoff.
Besides, Slide is a product, not a company. Either there is some huge money to be made the next couple of years on stuff like this, or we’ve entered 1999 all over again. Frankly, I don’t like seeing this amount of money being spent for me-to products with no discernible business model. That kind of money could fund 10 to 20 companies like ours.
Another thought on the subject: a typical VC fund is $100M or more. If you want a few partners and a few MBAs doing due dilligence, you need that size fund so the 3% mgmt fee covers your costs. You only make 15 to 20 investments out of a fund, so an average investment is $5M. Then you hate to be the only VC in a deal, so you get two others to participate, now you’re talking a $15M investment.
The problem is that most companies in this space that TechCrunch covers only need $500K to at most $2M. VCs, by how they are setup, just can’t make such small investments. The system clearly has broken down.
jeremy liew said:
I led Lightspeed Venture Partner’s invesment in Rockyou, and am also a friend of Max’s at Slide. I can’t comment on the substance of this rumor, but wanted to respond to some of the comments.
Looking at Rockyou and Slide as pure technology, and considering their worth as simply the engineering time to duplicate their code, substantially undervalues them. Both companies serve up over 100 million total widgets, and create more than 100k new widgets, every single DAY. Thats a lot of adoption.
Users of social networks don’t decide who to create a slideshow with by issuing an RFP, or by doing an exhaustive feature comparison of vendors. They use what they see others using, what they see their friends using. In that sort of decision making environment, size matters in generating further growth. A great user experience and good technology are antes to play, but they are not enough to win the hand. Both Rockyou and Slide have scale and that is a key driver of the value that they’ve created.
I think skeptical comments about business model are understandable. I posted in my set of 2007 Consumer Internet Predictions that this year widgets will find a business model (if you’re interested in reading more, click my name in this comment). But it’s also fair to say that they haven’t demonstrated a business model yet.
Youtube was able to generate a destination browsing site and monetize traffic directly. Photobucket drives enough traffic through creation and editing to make very substantial advertising revenue. But many other widget companies (and I’d include both Slide and Rockyou in this category) have not yet crossed this bridge.
However, I think that there are a number of promising business model avenues that have not yet been fully explored, some ad based, some sponsorship based, some freemium models, some likely requiring a revenue share with the social networks. But I wouldn’t have invested if I didn’t think that!
sourabh niyogi said:
I think FOX’s strategy is to cast FUD with myspace widget cos until they begin to monetize. As soon as they monetize, they will twist the widget cos arms and demand revenue splits (presumably, on ads inserted into a very small % of impressions on these free widgets) between the widget owner, social networking site, and user. Different social networks already have different strategies here: Bebo, for example, is carefully managing widget co relations with RockYou etc. Facebook doesn’t really have widget adoption.
It might be the case that FOX + other social networks develop every single one of the top 10 widgets themselves (Myspace video is a pseudocopy of Youtube etc) in the same way MSFT developed their top 10 PC apps (given evidence of popularity, copy or buy, then pump into distribution channel). So outright banning them would be like eliminating free R&D: Not sensible.
Most widgets for social networks are written in Flash (because JS banned for security, not for FUD). So when the Flash widget cos monetize by inserting ads into Flash, who will step up and do the targeted Flash ad insertions and give the social networks, widget cos (and users) something to split?Certainly GYM, the newer behavioral ad networks and the “rich media” ad networks will try, with widget cos leading the way, with social network in hand, arm twisted.
Mr. Justin Tang
