Slide: widgets worth $ 500 million

Having earned about $ 34 million on the sale of his financial startup PayPal, 32-year-old Kiev emigrant Max Levchin, who moved to Chicago in 1991, continues to launch new successful projects. His next startup Slide , a set of multimedia widgets for users of social networks, has already been valued by investors at half a billion dollars.

Using Slide widgets, users create slide shows, animations, colorful frames for photos, and then post it on their pages on the social networks Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, etc. Supported processing videos from YouTube. The site offers unlimited hosting for multimedia files.

A few days ago it became known that in the fourth round of funding, Slide received an investment of $ 50 million, which corresponds to a total project valuation of $ 550 million. Perhaps this is a record investment for a startup that specializes in creating so-called widgets, that is other sites - and this is his whole business.

According to some analysts, such an assessment of the project may revive discussions about the return of the “dot-com bubble”. Like, how can a widget developer estimate half a billion dollars? What is the business model - no one knows that either. Some experts even speculate on how to earn money by showing slideshows on foreign sites? Nevertheless, the fact remains: this startup was valued at half a billion.
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It is believed that widgets are the most popular application platform in the future, and soon we will see them on almost every website. Theoretically, if you make a popular widget (the same slideshow with photos), then its total audience can be several times larger than any, even the most popular, web site. Apparently, investors, who invested $ 50 million in Slide, were guided by such calculations of the size of the potential advertising audience. And, of course, they paid bonuses for the name of the founder.

According to comScore statistics for October 2007, the Slide widget platform ranks ninth in the Internet in terms of audience size, immediately after Amazon.com. Its audience is about 150 million people, an increase of almost two and a half times over the year.

The investment will be spent on expanding the company and increasing the staff from 65 to 100 people.

via BusinessWeek