In being a sexist community filled with adolescents with high testosterone levels Silicon Valley is only second to the Wall Street. While being a high-level woman executive in such a world is hard enough, founding a company from scratch, making that company a formidable force, and finally becoming an angel investor who helps others is beyond hard. Rashmi Sinha did all that and more in less than a decade. And the best part is that she has no background in technology. The co-founder and CEO of SlideShare, the San Francisco-based slide hosting service, was born in Lucknow and has a BA and an MA in Psychology from the Allahabad University.
Rashmi who has conducted research on ‘search engines and recommender systems’ at the University of California, Berkeley, went on to earn a Ph.D in Cognitive Neuropsychology from the Brown University, the premier Ivy League research university. After building MindCanvas, a game-like software, and co-founding user experience consulting company Uzanto, Rashmi co-founded SlideShare in 2006 with Jonathan Boutelle. Often referred to as the YouTube for slides, SlideShare has grown to be one of the world’s top 10 tools for education and is used everywhere from the White House and NASA to the World Economic Forum and was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012. Presently as the CEO, Rashmi’s main areas of focus include product strategy and design of the website. She has been named among the world’s top 10 influencers in Web 2.0 by Fast Company.