Trip Adler
Trip Adler
John R. "Trip" Adler IIIis an American entrepreneur. He is the CEO and co-founder of Scribd, a digital library and document-sharing platform, which has 80 million users...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth24 June 1984
CountryUnited States of America
experience failure fuel good hit inform learning next people simply treat
When most people hit failure, they give up, but good entrepreneurs simply treat failure as a learning experience and use it to fuel and inform their next move.
expand music ourselves sheet types
We see ourselves as the world's digital library. That can be a lot more than books. We do want to expand to other types of content: sheet music, magazines, user-generated content.
experience netflix saw similar success top
The subscriptions were working so well, and on top of that, we saw the success of Netflix and Spotify and thought, 'We can create a similar kind of experience for books.'
business came click few high incredibly looking money people rates searching site
The reason we make money is because we have a few different business models. One is ads: we get incredibly high click rates because most people on Scribd are searching the site for something, or they came from a search engine, and they're looking for something specific.
learned original publish publishers readers web
The original idea was to make it easy to publish content on the Web and find an audience. What we learned from publishers is that the thing they want the most is more readers and more revenue.
central goal hub instantly material people publish step written
The goal is to become the central hub of publishing, where we have all the written material - user-generated and professional. We want to be the place where people can publish instantly to their audiences... and to get there, it's just about doing things step by step.
attract easily readers spot switch
Readers can read what they want and easily switch to other books, so we're seeing a lot of reading behaviors. Some verticals attract different usage than others. We can spot reading patterns.
definitely failures fair life missed share sure time wasted
I'm not sure I'd go back and do anything over in my life. I've definitely had my fair share of failures and moments where I wasted my time or that of other people, but if I did those moments over, I'd have missed out on so many lessons.
dad journals months paper publish
I was talking to my dad, who's a neurosurgeon. He had this academic paper he wanted to publish. Journals take about 18 months to publish a paper, and he just wanted to get things up there.
books comic include main music sheet type
Books is our main type of content, but we include user-generated content and will include other verticals such as scientific papers, sheet music, and comic books.
whether
We actually determine whether the book is read and make payments to the publisher based on that.
The more you learn, the more you realize how much there is to learn.
addictive
Just as it can be addictive to be in a real world bookstore or library, it's the same on the Web.
early explain hard
In a startup, in the early days, it can be hard to explain what you do.