John R. "Trip" Adler III is an American
entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...
.
He is the
CEO
A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...
and
co-founder
An organizational founder is a person who has undertaken some or all of the formational work needed to create a new organization, whether it is a business, a charitable organization, a governing body, a school, a group of entertainers, or any other ...
of
Scribd
Scribd Inc. is an American e-book and audiobook subscription service that includes one million titles. Scribd hosts 60 million documents on its open publishing platform.
The company was founded in 2007 by Trip Adler, Jared Friedman, and Tikhon ...
, a digital library and document-sharing platform, which has 80 million users.
Background and early career
Adler grew up in
Palo Alto
Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto.
The city was estab ...
, California and attended
Gunn High School
Henry M. Gunn Senior High School is one of two public high schools in Palo Alto, California, the other being Palo Alto High School.
Established in , Gunn High School was named after Henry Martin Gunn, who served as the Palo Alto superintendent fr ...
. He graduated from
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
with a
biophysics
Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from molecular to organismic and populations. ...
degree.
His father,
John R. Adler
John R. Adler (born 1954) is an American neurosurgeon.
He was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1954. He graduated at Harvard College in 1976 and at Harvard Medical School in 1980. From 1980 to 1987 he did a neurosurgical residency at Massachusetts ...
, is a neurosurgeon at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
and also an entrepreneur.
After graduating from Harvard, Adler contemplated starting various online ventures, including a ride-sharing service, a
Craigslist
Craigslist (stylized as craigslist) is an American classified advertisements website with sections devoted to jobs, housing, for sale, items wanted, services, community service, Gig worker, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums.
Craig Newmark ...
-type site for colleges, a call center called 1-800-ASKTRIP, and a social media site called "Rate your happiness."
Scribd
Adler received inspiration for Scribd from a conversation with his father, who had difficulty
publishing
Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...
an
academic paper
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally publ ...
in a medical journal.
Adler then built Scribd with
Jared Friedman
Jared Friedman (born 1984) is an American entrepreneur and angel investor. He is a partner at Y Combinator in San Francisco, where he invests in and helps startups. Previously, Jared was the co-founder and CTO at Scribd, a digital library and do ...
, a fellow Harvard student, and they attended
Y Combinator
Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Str ...
in the summer of 2006. Scribd was launched from a San Francisco apartment in March 2007.
In 2008, it ranked as one of the top 20
social media
Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...
sites according to Comscore. In June 2009, Scribd launched Scribd Store, and shortly thereafter closed a deal with
Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster () is an American publishing company and a subsidiary of Paramount Global. It was founded in New York City on January 2, 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. As of 2016, Simon & Schuster was the third largest publ ...
to sell ebooks on Scribd. In 2012, the company became profitable.
In October 2013, Scribd launched a
subscription
The subscription business model is a business model in which a customer must pay a recurring price at regular intervals for access to a product or service. The model was pioneered by publishers of books and periodicals in the 17th century, and ...
ebook
An ebook (short for electronic book), also known as an e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Alt ...
service, and signed a deal with
HarperCollins
HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Cor ...
to make their backlist books available on Scribd.
Scribd was once known for unlimited audiobooks and downloadable books. In 2016 the subscription limited the number of titles available to subscribers. This was reversed in 2018, wherein readers were offered access to an "unlimited number of books and audiobooks for $8.99 per month".
Scribd has over 300,000 titles from 1,000 publishers in its book subscription service. In August 2017, the company announced a partnership with Zinio, which calls itself the world's largest digital magazine producer and distributor, to add 30 new magazine titles to the Scribd portfolio.
Personal life
As a member of the Harvard Surfing team, Adler participated in the first Ivy League Surf Championships in May 2003. He also plays the
saxophone
The saxophone (often referred to colloquially as the sax) is a type of single-reed woodwind instrument with a conical body, usually made of brass. As with all single-reed instruments, sound is produced when a reed on a mouthpiece vibrates to pr ...
.
In 2007, Adler earned the company's first $17 in revenue by playing the saxophone outside Scribd's office at Christmas time.
Awards and recognition
* Named to
TIME
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...
’s list of tech pioneers of 2010
* Named to
Bloomberg Businessweek
''Bloomberg Businessweek'', previously known as ''BusinessWeek'', is an American weekly business magazine published fifty times a year. Since 2009, the magazine is owned by New York City-based Bloomberg L.P. The magazine debuted in New York City ...
’s list of best young entrepreneurs
*
Forbes
''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also re ...
30 Under 30
References
External links
Adler's profile page on ScribdScribd CEO Trip Adler on the Economics of Ebook Subscription Models, the ‘Big Five,’ and the Competitionon Digital Book World
Scribd CEO Explains His 'Eureka' Momenton CNBC
Scribd CEO Trip Adler Speaks!on All Things Digital
{{DEFAULTSORT:Adler, Trip
Living people
American computer businesspeople
American technology chief executives
American technology company founders
Businesspeople in information technology
Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences alumni
People from Palo Alto, California
Year of birth missing (living people)
Gunn High School alumni