socialmedian: Max Levchin: Will virtual goods bring Slide profitability next year?

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Max Levchin: Will virtual goods bring Slide profitability next year?

Source: VentureBeat

Nov 06, 2009

Summary

Slide, which started in photo-sharing, moved into Facebook widgets and then raised funding at a reported $550 million valuation last year, shifted gears this year and went aggressively into virtual goods. The company’s looking to become a mainstream version of Second Life, where there’s a virtual economy at work of real people buying and selling goods.

Instead of churning out new apps like many of its competitors, the company has focused its existing ones — including seven on Facebook like SuperPoke, Top Friends and FunSpace, with about 27 million users between them. Slide introduced a virtual currency into its SuperPoke! Pets application, where you can raise and care for a virtual pet. You can earn gold through the game or you can purchase 10 pieces of Slide Gold for $1.

So is the strategy shift paying off? I sat down with CEO Max Levchin to ask about how his vision for the company has evolved and how he’s changed as an entrepreneur since launching the company four years ago. Slide is the company he started after selling PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 200

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