Scribd

“This is before AWS. This is on a physical server. Originally physically in my dorm room closet, which is how I learned that servers are loud.”

“Basically they get between a hundred to a hundred and fifty million visits a month.”

“I think probably half the engineering team that we hired came through Hacker News, and that's not atypical for YC companies.”

“So Scribd's a subscription service for reading. So what you can do is pay nine dollars a month, and then you can read books, audio books, magazines, newspapers, documents on whatever device you like. So so it's all basically funded by our consumers who pay the…”

“I mean back then you know, 12,000 was really, you know, it still is sufficient to get, get a service up and running.”

“We raised fifty million at this point. So, so basically the trajectory was it was the first 12,000 from Y Combinator. Then we raised 40,000 in angel money. And then at that point we got some tractions. We really quickly went to raise three and a half million f…”

“And at this point we're profitable, so we're just living off profits and, which is a good spot to be.”

“We're not really intending to raise any more money for the time being.”

“From the, from launch to a hundred million monthly users pretty quickly... Probably four years... Yeah, seven to 2011. I went from roughly zero to a hundred.”

“We were able to now get up to a million books in our service.”

“Well, we have this library of seventy million documents that are uploaded by users and basically we have over a hundred million people a month who come to visit that library of content.”

“I mean, we're growing at maybe 50% per year right now.”

“And I mean, the next one for us is a million subs. I mean, that's really what we're aiming toward. So that's a big one that we're looking forward to celebrating.”

“The main type these days is we will pay by the read of the book. So this way it, from their perspective, it more or less looks like a sale. So just like they're selling the book, we'll pay them anytime the user reads the book.”

“So it's usually about 20% of the book is when that triggers the payment.”

“Me, Tripp, and Jared probably worked on, like, Scribd for at least well, yeah, we worked on Scribd for at least, like, a year and a half before we got, like, real traction on it. So this is back in summer, 2006.”

“Honestly, we would never have made it without that program. And I think that's true of actually most Of those companies and I, I'd argue probably most of the companies because without that community of, like, like-minded people who are highly motivated and wor…”

“It was another year after YC, so we scratched by on that, and not, I mean, being a, you know, being a wealthy grad student, no so having zero savings, like, for really any of us, because Tripp had just left Harvard, Jared dropped out of Harvard to do this so w…”