Trip Adler Quotations

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.