Scribd’s Trip Adler: “In the future, we won’t buy or own anything.”
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Trip Adler, founder of Scribd, to talk about creating the “Netflix of reading” (2:00), teaming up with newspapers (4:30), the evolving attitude to subscriptions (5:50), why less than 1% of users are paid subscribers (7:45), pivoting and pivoting again (9:05), taking on Amazon (11:20), the parallels to the music business (12:15), the generation gap (14:35), being classmates with Mark Zuckerberg (15:35), starting at Y Combinator (16:55), experimenting with a ride-sharing service (18:35), going from zero to 100 million users (19:05), the end of ownership (21:00), raising the company’s first $12,000 and working out of the “Y-scraper” (23:30), luring in venture capitalists (25:15), paywalls (29:30), splitting the pie with publishers (32:00), Scribd’s trove of sheet music (33:10) and teaming up with The New York Times (33:45). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.