Friday, October 16, 2009 | Modified: Wednesday, October 21, 2009, 3:01am PDT
Web publisher on hiring spree, scores new HQ
San Francisco Business Times - byPatrick Hoge
Scribd
is a roughly three-year-old startup with a modest ambition (cough).“Our goal is to accumulate all of the written material in the world,” says the San Francisco company’s youthful CEOand co-founder Trip Adler. Whether Scribd achieves that goal remains to be seen, but it already has 35 billion words compiled, ranging from bestselling books to recipes, and expects that number to double in six months.The company has 44.4 million monthly users worldwide, 9.6 million of them in the United States, according toQuantcast.It has distribution deals with major publishers like
Simon & Schuster
, as well as thousands of independent authors, famous and not. And though Adler won’t share revenue figures, he said Scribd was profitable in the second quarter, a feat that may not be repeated in thethird quarter depending on the number of new employees.The company is making money off advertising and digital sales of written material, for which it takes 20 percent. It has 10 milliondocuments for sale in its store and has plans to sell printed versions in the future, Adler said.San Francisco author Kemble Scott was one of the first to use the Scribd store for his second novel “The Sower,” which he priced at $2. Hesubsequently got a publisher, two foreign distribution deals and a high profile New York literary agent.Scott’s book went onto the local bestseller list its first week, and he credits in part his ability to notify his roughly 16,000 subscribers whenthe book hit shelves. The book has also been read more than 10,000 times on Scribd.“It was kind of amazing, I have to say,” said Scott. “It’s been a terrific experiment so far. There’s a lot of upside and new things they aredoing all the time.”Scribd has 35 employees, 10 of them hired since January, and it expects to hire 15 people by year’s end, mostly engineers, all in SanFrancisco. It recently moved into a larger SoMa office that has the markings of a startup, with a ping-pong table, bicycle tire marks on therug from antic riding, a zipline and free dinner nightly. Adler got the idea for the company when he was talking to his father, John Adler, an entrepreneur, neurosurgeon and oncologist at
Stanford University Medical Center
who was frustrated at the lengthy process for publishing an academic article. The elder Adlerfounded
Accuray Inc.
, a developer of laser cancer surgery treatment that went public in 2007. Adler, then an undergraduate biophysics major at Harvard College, teamed up with classmate Jared Friedman, a computer science major.Together they won a $12,000 seed round from the Y Combinator incubator in Mountain View.There they met third co-founder Tikhon Bernstam, and the three launched Scribd in March of 2007 from an apartment in a North Beach building known as the “Yscraper,” where other Y Combinator founders were living and working.Scribd immediately got traction on the web and in June of 2007 it picked up a $3.7 million Series A round, followed by a $9 million SeriesB round last December. Investors include Charles River Ventures,
Redpoint Ventures
and the
Kinsey Hills Group
.Since then, the company has rapidly rolled out products and features, including a social news feed functionality similar to that onFacebook or Twitter in which people can publish instantly to their followers.“We’re building the world’s largest community around reading and writing,” Adler said. “And every time we connect people to each other, you know, we’re making the world a better place.”
WHO’S HIRING:
scribdJobs: 15.
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Scribd profits from online writers’ bazaar
“Our goal is toaccumulate all of thewritten material in theworld,” says Adler.
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