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 t ...

. 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 especiall ...

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 othe ...

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 Tik ...

, 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 es ...

, 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 f ...

. 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 high ...

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, is a neurosurgeon at Stanford University 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, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums. Craig Newmark began the ...

-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 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 pub ...

in a medical journal. Adler then built Scribd with Jared Friedman, 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 me ...

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 pub ...

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. Al ...

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 C ...

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 instrument, single-reed woodwind instrument with a conical body, usually made of brass. As with all single-reed instruments, sound is produced when a reed (mouthpi ...

. 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, t ...

’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 r ...

30 Under 30

References

External links

Adler's profile page on Scribd

Scribd CEO Trip Adler on the Economics of Ebook Subscription Models, the ‘Big Five,’ and the Competition
on Digital Book World
Scribd CEO Explains His 'Eureka' Moment
on 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