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The Times Tech Podcast

Scribd’s Trip Adler: “In the future, we won’t buy or own anything.”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9654 Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2017

⏱️ 37 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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).

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Transcript

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0:00.0

I'm always up before the birds and the kids.

0:02.9

Good thing Costa Express is always up too.

0:07.0

Early starts are easier with great coffee.

0:09.7

And if I grab one for Bob, I might even get some decent company.

0:14.5

Large cappuccino for the bloc who's half asleep.

0:17.2

Oh, you legend.

0:19.6

Now that's a proper coffee.

0:21.3

Should kick in Justin Samfut, remember which end of the screwdriver to use.

0:25.1

Hmm.

0:26.3

Costa Express, quality coffee every time.

0:32.5

Yo, technology.

0:35.3

What is it all about?

0:37.1

Every time you want something having to spend money i mean that's

0:39.5

kind of like an old school idea right the future is you just pay one thing and then you just have

0:43.9

total freedom to consume what you want welcome to today's episode of danny in the valley thank you

0:53.1

as always for tuning in we've got a great show today. My guest is Tripp Adler, who is all of 33 years old, and he's the founder of S-C-R-I-B-D. So if you spend any appreciable amount of time on the internet, you've probably come across the company, which really has a

1:10.8

fascinating story behind it.

1:12.7

So it's 10 years old, which in startup years means it's basically a senior citizen.

1:17.8

And it's gone through lots of permutations.

1:19.7

It started out as a very basic website that just allowed people to publish and share documents.

1:25.3

But now, after many pivots, Adler thinks he's finally hit upon the business model that's

1:29.8

really going to make it fly.

...

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