Ross Mayfield is an American Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Pingpad.^[1] The former CEO^[2] of Socialtext,^[3] and former Vice President of Business Development of SlideShare.^[4] He is also a regular blogger and public speaker.

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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,^[5] after which he moved to Estonia and served as a scriptwriter for, and advisor to, the Office of the President of Estonia. He also 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.^{[citation needed]}

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.^[6][7][8] With the collapse of the dot-com bubble, the company, which had yet to earn any revenue,^[9] saw its billion dollar valuation vanish overnight.^[10] Ross left in August 2000.

He then served as VP of marketing for Lucida Inc.,^[11] a Fujitsu spinout,^{[citation needed]} before co-founding Socialtext in 2002.

Ross hosted the first Barcamp in 2005 at Socialtext.^[12]

In 2012, Mayfield sold his two companies within the same week, Socialtext to Bedford Funding/Peoplefluent and SlideShare to LinkedIn.^[13][14]