Trip Adler, co-founder and CEO of Scribd, talks about building the company from the ground up. He discusses the challenges of hiring and scaling a team, and Scribd's bet that a subscription model could work for books the way it has for music and film.
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Tripp, I'm sure you've learned quite a lot over the past 10 years actually building this company. Coming off of college and actually starting a company, you didn't really have the experience of, you know, this big corporate world and how to run big teams. Can you describe to us a little bit of the challenges that you had starting the company and then growing it to whatever the size of the team is? I'm sure going from 3 people to 50 people is a huge difference. Yeah.
Yeah, well, there's so many challenges. It's really hard to just pick one or a few. I mean, every single stage there's new challenges, right? I mean, getting started, it was finding a co-founder, building a prototype. Then it was getting users, getting funding, hiring people, scaling the team. I mean, there's just a new challenge every— constantly. And I think when you're an entrepreneur, you just kind of sign up for that, right? I mean, every single few months there's like a new challenge you're taking on. I mean, even now we're 170 employees and we're profitable and all that, but there's now just new challenges that we face every day. So I think when you're an entrepreneur, you just sign up for kind of like an endless set of challenges, and I think you have to just enjoy solving problems because that's kind of what you do all day as an entrepreneur.
What is the culture like that you guys have created? built at the company?
I mean, it's a great culture. It's a happy culture. I mean, I think people really like working there. People are inspired by the vision, right? I mean, you know, we have a really good, like, team approach. You know, we really put people first. I think we care about what we're doing. We care about— I mean, our mission is to change the way the world reads, and I think we all care about that. We have a lot of readers at our company, and, you know, we like that we're getting people to read more and that we're, you know, making more money for authors and publishers. I mean, that's what we're trying to do, and I think people are inspired and motivated by that vision, and, you know, we enjoy working together to solve that problem.
You said change the way the world reads. I'll open it up for questions right after this one. What do you see the vision of How the world reads. How is the world gonna read? Do you think there's still gonna be tons of physical books 10, 15 years out? Where do you see that going?
Well, I think there will be a lot of physical books. I don't think physical books are going away. I think people will read physical books. I think people will read ebooks. I think people will read— listen to audiobooks. I mean, that's a really big trend. I think there's a lot of different changes in the In the way people consume books. I mean, I think that the specific way that we're changing the way the world reads is we want people to subscribe for books, right? Because in the past, the way it worked is people would buy books one at a time. We want people to instead just pay one flat monthly fee and then read whatever they like. And when you have a subscription model for books, people end up reading very, very differently. They tend to be much more willing to sample new books they wouldn't read otherwise. They browse through books. They can, like, search for information within books. They're more likely to read books in parallel. So we can basically get people to basically read more and to read stuff they wouldn't read otherwise. And by getting people to read more, we end up just getting more total people who are reading and paying for things to read, and there's more money to return to authors, and that kind of builds out the whole ecosystem.
Right.
And I think subscription— the subscription model for books is gonna just get more and more important. You can see there's, in the video world, you have these services like Netflix and Hulu. There are these huge subscription services for video. In the music world, you have Spotify and Apple Music, which are, you know, they have collectively over 100 million subscribers for music. And I think you're gonna see the same thing start to happen in the world of books and reading.
