History of Scribd

The idea for Scribd was originally inspired when Trip Adler was at Harvard and had a conversation with his father, John R. Adler, about the difficulties of publishing academic papers. He teamed up with cofounders Jared Friedman and Tikhon Bernstam and they attended Y Combinator in Cambridge in the summer of 2006[citation needed]. Scribd was launched from a San Francisco apartment in March 2007 and quickly grew in traffic. In 2008, it ranked as one of the top 20 social media sites according to Comscore. In June 2009, Scribd launched Scribd Store,and shortly thereafter closed a deal with Simon & Schuster to sell ebooks on Scribd.[6] Over 150 publishers including Random House, Wiley, Workman, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Pearson, Harvard University Press and Stanford University Press are now associated with Scribd. ProQuest began publishing dissertations and theses on Scribd in December 2009. In October 2009, Scribd launched its branded reader for media companies with The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Huffington Post, TechCrunch and MediaBistro. Over 100 media companies now use Scribds branded reader to embed source material into their stories. In August 2010, news stories began to break and documents and books began to go viral on Scribd including the overturned Prop 8 and HPs lawsuit against Mark Hurds move to Oracle Corporation. Adler is currently the CEO of Scribd, where he is responsible for the product and strategic direction of the company. BusinessWeek named Adler one of the Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs 2010.