Trip Adler, Scribd's co-founder and CEO, describes how the startup began with a Y Combinator application for a transportation app, pivoted to Hoolist, a Harvard-focused Craigslist clone, then shifted again before landing on Scribd to solve the problem of distributing academic papers.
Did you go into Y Combinator with Scribd originally, or was it another project?
So we actually went with a totally different idea. The initial idea— so I started working on this with my cofounder Jared, who I met at Harvard, and we applied with the idea of a transportation app that was going to have all sorts of different features. It was going to be partly kind of like what Google Maps does in terms of planning your transit, and then partly like ridesharing. what Uber and Lyft do today. And we really were gonna build kind of what Uber is today. The problem is this was pre-iPhone, and phones couldn't really— they didn't have automatic payments built in, they didn't have GPS and all these things. So it really made no sense to build an app like that at that time. So we applied to YC with that idea, and immediately in the interview, Paul Graham was just basically told us that was a terrible idea. And we're like, okay, well, I guess we can't do that. And he said, do you have any other ideas? And then we were like, oh, well, a few days ago we were talking about this idea of doing Craigslist for colleges. And then Paul's like, that's a great idea. I'll fund that. So right on the spot, we basically pivoted to doing Craigslist for colleges. We launched that actually at Harvard. It was called Hoolist. It became like kind of a thing there, but it wasn't really growing. So we eventually decided we didn't like that. And then we went through through 5 different other ideas, and eventually we landed on Scribd. So we actually tried a lot of different ideas before getting to Scribd, and I think that was a really important learning experience, because with each idea we kind of learned about what was working and what wasn't working, and that kind of informed Scribd. So that kind of experience of trial and error was kind of important in getting to Scribd.
Now, it seems from what you're saying that back then Y Combinator would accept ideas and really good teams. Right now I think it's more of, hey, what product have you built thus far, and if you have a good team.
Was that the case? Yeah, I mean, it's much more like— it's more mature now and more competitive. So I think back then it was barely even an idea. I think they would, if they thought it was a good team where the founders had the right mindset, the right relationship, the right technical skills, those kinds of things, they would fund you. Cool.
And how'd you come up with the Scribd concept?
So Scribd started— the initial inspiration was talking to my dad. He was a doctor here at Stanford, and he was talking about how medical publishing is such a difficult process where it takes 18 months just to take a paper and get it out, like, out distributed to your peers to be reviewed. So my co-founder and I had the idea that we would build a site that would just let him take his paper, upload it to the web, and just distribute it really easily. So we started thinking about the use case of an academic paper. We quickly broadened that to all kinds of written content. basically made a site that you take a PDF, a Word doc, a PowerPoint, upload it to the web, turn it into a web page, and that was the idea. And then we launched it, and it went from there.
