Rashmi Sinha is an Indian businesswoman and CEO of San Francisco-based technology company SlideShare. In 2012, Fortune named her No. 8 on its Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs list. In 2008, Rashmi was named one of the World's Top 10 Women Influencers in Web 2.0 by Fast Company.[1] In January 2015, The Economic Times listed her as one of 20 "most influential" global Indian women.[2]
Early life and education
Rashmi Sinha was born in Lucknow, India, grew up in India, and earned a PhD in cognitive neuropsychology at Brown University. There, Rashmi took computer science courses with Andy van Dam, so she had some exposure to the HCI (human-computer interaction) way of thinking. She took a course in designing educational software. Rashmi Sinha went to University of California, Berkeley for a postdoc where she switched her focus to human-computer interaction.
She also earned an M.A. and a B.A. in Psychology from Allahabad University.[3]
Business career
She then left academia at the University of California to start her own user-experience consultancy. Deciding that she enjoyed practical problems more, she co-founded Uzanto, a user experience consulting company and worked on projects for companies like eBay, Blue Shield, AAA etc. Her first foray into products was with MindCanvas (a game-like software for customer research) released in November 2005.[citation needed]
Simultaneously, Rashmi and her husband, with the help of her older brother Amit Ranjan, built SlideShare, a site for people to share presentations online, in just six months. Since its launch in 2006, more than 9 million presentations have been uploaded to SlideShare, helping professionals connect through content. LinkedIn acquired SlideShare for over $100 million (~$127 million in 2022) in 2012.[4][5]
Personal life
Sinha is married to Jonathan Boutelle, who is the co-founder and Chief technology officer of SlideShare.[6][7] They live in San Francisco.[8]
Sinha had 2 sons Rohan Boutelle and Vikram Boutelle who are twins who were born in the year 2012.
In 2008, Rashmi was named one of the World's Top 10 Women Influencers in Web 2.0 by Fast Company.[1][9]
Management philosophy
Rashmi writes about social software and entrepreneurship at her blog; Rashmisinha.com. She is involved in the HCI community, was one of the founding members of the Information Architecture Society, and co-chairs the monthly BayCHI talk series.[5]
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