An editor has nominated this article for deletion. You are welcome to participate in the deletion discussion , which will decide whether or not to retain it. |
 |
Ross Mayfield is an American Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Pingpad [1] and a product lead for Zoom. [2] He was previously the CEO of Socialtext [3] [4] and Vice President of Business Development of SlideShare. [5] He is also a regular blogger and public speaker.
Mayfield received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and completed the Management Development for Entrepreneurs (MDE) program at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
He began his career in the nonprofit sector with the U.S.-Baltic Foundation, after which he moved to Estonia and served as advisor to the President of Estonia. [6] He served as marketing director of Levicom, one of the largest privately held telecom groups in Eastern Europe, where he also started an Internet service provider and a web design company. [7]
In 1998 he joined RateXchange, a business-to-business commodity exchange for telecom, where he served as chief operating officer and then as president. [8] [9] With the collapse of the dot-com bubble, the company saw its billion dollar valuation vanish overnight. [10] [11] He left in August 2000, working briefly at Fujitsu spinout Lucida Inc. [12] before co-founding Socialtext in 2002.
At Socialtext, Mayfield designed wikis and other social software for use inside businesses. He was an early champion of open-source wikis as a general-purpose tool for collective knowledge, [13] both for personal use and for business. [14] [15] [16] In 2005, he organized the world's first Barcamp in the Socialtext office. [17] In 2006, most of Socialtext's suite of tools was open sourced. [18]
In 2007, Mayfield joined the founding team of Slideshare, a social network focused on preserving and sharing slide decks and presentations. [19] In 2012, his two companies sold in the same week, Socialtext to Bedford Funding/Peoplefluent and SlideShare to LinkedIn. [20] [21] In 2015, he founded Pingpad, a conversational enterprise collaboration tool. [22] In 2020, he was the product lead for Zoom Apps. [2] [23]
