Powerpoint presentation sharer SlideShare has raised a $3 million first-round investment. David Siminoff, a partner with lead investor Venrock, is joining a board that includes Guy Kawasaki, Marc Cuban, Ross Mayfield and Saul Klein. With bases in San Francisco and New Delhi, the company claims over 300,000 presentations have been added since its 2007 launch and, rather optimistically, aims to host “every presentation in the world”. SlideShare offers document embedding, includes social features like “most viewed” and also supports PDF and OpenOffice docs. But it’s competing variously with the likes of Scribd, Slide, SplashCast, Preezo, SlideBoom, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Docs and tools like iSpring. It said the funds would grow its San Francisco office and aide product development. Release.

Nikhil adds: The team has a consulting practice (Uzanto Consulting), the revenues from which were being used to fund Slideshare. In that context, I asked Amit Ranjan, COO of Slideshare, on why they decided to go in for funding: Ranjan said the company has decided to consciously focus more on growing Slideshare...it’s a bigger bet in the long run. They’re going to increase their team in the US, have a business development team in place for monetization. Some part of the money will go into better server infrastructure - till the time you are bootstrapped, you do have financial constraints, he says. The company currently has 12 people in India and will be hiring more. In the next few months, they’ll be looking to strike deals with other companies for whom presentation software is just a part of the overall plan - like in case of Zoho and Google Docs. “What we’re doing overlaps what they’re doing, and it will be great if they could serve slides” says Ranjan.

Monetization? “It will be a lead generation kind of advertising model - presentations are an excellent way of marketing your idea”. Slideshare was planning to roll out Pro features that users can subscribe to and pay for. Ranjan says they will roll out some pro features 4-5 months down the line, but it’s something they have to take a call on - whether to segregate their users into regular and pro users. Every time they launch a feature, they’re tempted to make it available to everyone. What about the exit? Ranjan says they’ve got 5-6 million unique visitors since launch, and they’ve raised money at a fairly late stage. They believe they can build a standalone business. For the investors - typically, investors have a 4-5 year timeframe, so nothing fixed there yet either. He says they went ahead with Venrock because they had similar beliefs - that Slideshare can be developed into a marketplace for ideas.

• Kawasaki, Varian And Mayfield Join Slideshare’s Board Of Directors