Ross Mayfield is an American

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...

technology

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...

. He is the co-founder and CEO of Pingpad. The former

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

Socialtext Socialtext Incorporated was a company based in Palo Alto, California, that produced enterprise social software for companies. It offered an integrated suite of wiki tools and social software applications, including microblogging, user profiles, ...

, and former Vice President of Business Development of

SlideShare SlideShare is an American hosting service, now owned by Scribd, for professional content including presentations, infographics, documents, and videos. Users can upload files privately or publicly in PowerPoint, Word, PDF, or OpenDocument format. ...

. He is also a regular

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

ger and public speaker.

Biography

Mayfield received a

Bachelor of Arts Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...

degree in

political science Political science is the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and power, and the analysis of political activities, political thought, political behavior, and associated constitutions and la ...

from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and completed the Management Development for Entrepreneurs (MDE) program at the

UCLA Anderson School of Management The John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management, also known as the UCLA Anderson School of Management, is the graduate business school at the University of California, Los Angeles, one of eleven professional schools. The school offers MBA (ful ...

. He began his career in the nonprofit sector with the U.S.-Baltic Foundation, after which he moved to

Estonia Estonia, formally the Republic of Estonia, is a country by the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland across from Finland, to the west by the sea across from Sweden, to the south by Latvia, a ...

and served as a scriptwriter for, and advisor to, the Office of the

President of Estonia The president of the Republic of Estonia ( et, Eesti Vabariigi President) is the head of state of the Republic of Estonia. The current president is Alar Karis, elected by Parliament on 31 August 2021, replacing Kersti Kaljulaid. Estonia is ...

. He also served as marketing director of Levicom, one of the largest privately held telecom groups in

Eastern Europe Eastern Europe is a subregion of the Europe, European continent. As a largely ambiguous term, it has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic connotations. The vast majority of the region is covered by Russ ...

, where he also started an

Internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...

and a

web design Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design (UI design); authoring, including standardised code an ...

company. In 1998 he was hired by RateXchange, a business-to-business commodity exchange for telecom, where he quickly progressed from vice president of sales and marketing to chief operating officer and then to president. With the collapse of the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

, the company, which had yet to earn any revenue, saw its billion dollar valuation vanish overnight. Ross left in August 2000. He then served as VP of marketing for Lucida Inc., a

Fujitsu is a Japanese multinational information and communications technology equipment and services corporation, established in 1935 and headquartered in Tokyo. Fujitsu is the world's sixth-largest IT services provider by annual revenue, and the la ...

spinout, before co-founding

in 2002. Ross hosted the first Barcamp in 2005 at Socialtext. In 2012, Mayfield sold his two companies within the same week, Socialtext to Bedford Funding/Peoplefluent and SlideShare to

LinkedIn LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented online service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Launched on May 5, 2003, the platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, and allows job se ...

References

* http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2004/tc20041019_0375_tc182.htm * http://online.wsj.com/article/SB109105974578777189.html * https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/19/technology/19NECO.html * https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/technology/17wiki.html * https://web.archive.org/web/20090520062815/http://www.redherring.com/Home/pages/print/posts/?bid=f24e10f3-dbae-436b-b6b4-93fbb30b3d8b&mode=Full

External links

Ross Mayfield's Blog

Company website

Many2Many, a group blog on social Software that Mayfield contributes to

71MB
an
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QuickTime movies of Ross Mayfield lecturing on emergent democracy and group forming networks at Stanford in 2005, licensed under

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

, hosted by the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mayfield, Ross Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American computer businesspeople American bloggers University of California, Los Angeles alumni People from Palo Alto, California American expatriates in Estonia American technology chief executives UCLA Anderson School of Management alumni