Trip Adler | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Occupation(s) | former CEO and Co-founder of Scribd |
| Known for | Founding Scribd |
| Website | www |
John R. "Trip" Adler III is an American entrepreneur. [1] He is the former CEO and co-founder of Scribd, a digital library and document-sharing platform, which has 80 million users. [1] [2] [3]
Adler grew up in Palo Alto, California and attended Gunn High School. He graduated from Harvard University with a biophysics degree. [4] His father, John R. Adler, is a neurosurgeon at Stanford University and also an entrepreneur. [1]
After graduating from Harvard, Adler contemplated starting various online ventures, including a ride-sharing service, a Craigslist-type site for colleges, a call center called 1-800-ASKTRIP, and a social media site called "Rate your happiness." [5]
Adler received inspiration for Scribd from a conversation with his father, who had difficulty publishing an academic paper in a medical journal. [4] Adler then built Scribd with Jared Friedman, a fellow Harvard student, and they attended Y Combinator in the summer of 2006. [6] [7] [8] Scribd was launched from a San Francisco apartment in March 2007. [9] In 2008, it ranked as one of the top 20 social media sites according to Comscore. [10] In June 2009, Scribd launched Scribd Store, [11] and shortly thereafter closed a deal with Simon & Schuster to sell ebooks on Scribd. [12] In 2012, the company became profitable. [13]
In October 2013, Scribd launched a subscription ebook service, and signed a deal with HarperCollins to make their backlist books available on Scribd. [9] [14] [15] [16] 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". [17]
Scribd has over 300,000 titles from 1,000 publishers in its book subscription service. [18] [19] 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. [20]
In April 2024, it was announced that the Adler would step down from his CEO role, while remaining on the company's board of directors. Tony Grimminck [21] was appointed as the new CEO to lead the company. [22]
As a member of the Harvard Surfing team, Adler participated in the first Ivy League Surf Championships in May 2003. [23] He also plays the saxophone. [1] [24] In 2007, Adler earned the company's first $17 in revenue by playing the saxophone outside Scribd's office at Christmas time. [1]
Mark Jonathan Pincus is an American Internet entrepreneur known as the founder of Zynga, a mobile social gaming company. Pincus also founded the startups Freeloader, Inc., Tribe Networks, and Support.com. Pincus served as the CEO of Zynga until July 2013, then again from 2015 to 2016.
Y Combinator, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 4,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and was entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies started via Y Combinator include Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Reddit, Stripe, Lezzoo, and Twitch.
CouchSurfing is a hospitality exchange service by which users can request free short-term homestays or interact with other people who are interested in travel. It is accessible via a website and mobile app. It uses a subscription business model, and while hosts are not allowed to charge for lodging, members in some countries must pay a fee to access the platform.
Scribd Inc. operates three primary platforms: Scribd, Everand, and SlideShare. Scribd is a digital document library that hosts over 195 million documents. Everand is a digital content subscription service offering a wide selection of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, podcasts, and sheet music. SlideShare is an online platform featuring over 15 million presentations from subject matter experts.
Samuel Harris Altman is an American entrepreneur and investor best known as the chief executive officer of OpenAI since 2019. He is also the Chairman of clean energy companies Oklo Inc. and Helion Energy. Altman is considered to be one of the leading figures of the AI boom. He dropped out of Stanford University after two years and founded Loopt, a mobile social networking service, raising more than $30 million in venture capital. In 2011, Altman joined Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and was its president from 2014 to 2019.
Iconology Inc., d/b/a ComiXology, was a cloud-based digital distribution platform for comics owned by Amazon, with over 200 million comic downloads as of September 2013. At its height it offered a selection of more than 100,000 comic books, graphic novels, and manga across Android, iOS, Kindle Fire, Windows 10, and the Internet. In 2023, the ComiXology app was officially retired and the material was made available exclusively on the Amazon Kindle app.
Rent the Runway is an e-commerce platform that allows users to rent, subscribe, or buy designer apparel and accessories. It was founded by Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss, who launched the company in November 2009.
Surf Air is a Los Angeles-based aviation marketplace offering regional flight services and a strong focus on developing electric aircraft solutions. Surf Air is a subsidiary of Surf Air Mobility.
Oyster was a commercial streaming service for digital e-books, available for Android, iOS, Kindle Fire, and NOOK HD/HD+ devices. It was also available on any web browser on a desktop or laptop computer. Oyster held over 1 million books in its library, and as of September 2015, the service was only available in the United States.
Tikhon Bernstam is an American Internet entrepreneur who cofounded the companies Scribd and Parse.
Jared Friedman is an American entrepreneur and angel investor. He is a partner at Y Combinator in San Francisco, where he invests in and helps startups. Previously, Jared was the co-founder and CTO at Scribd, a digital library and document-sharing platform, which has 80 million users.
Booktrope was a Seattle-based hybrid publisher which specialized in community-based team publishing. Applying a "team publishing" model, under which authors, editors, designers and marketing managers shared revenue, the company published approximately 1000 books in print and ebook formats. It ceased operations as of May 31, 2016.
SmartAsset is a financial technology company, founded in July 2012 by Michael Carvin and Phillip Camilleri and headquartered in New York, New York. The company publishes articles, guides, reviews, calculators and tools to help people make decisions about personal finance.
ClassPass is a monthly fitness and wellness membership that provides users with access to thousands of fitness studios, gyms, salons and spas around the globe. With 66,000+ businesses across 29 countries, ClassPass is home to the world’s largest collection of classes and appointments. Members can book a variety of workouts and salon and spa appointments like pilates, yoga, massages and manicures. ClassPass is a subsidiary of Mindbody Inc.
Evan Beard is an American entrepreneur, engineer, and co-founder/CEO of Standard Bots, an artificial intelligence robotics startup which has raised $63m from investors including General Catalyst and Amazon and build robots in the United States. Beard has been recognized on the Forbes "30 under 30" list which features the "brightest young entrepreneurs, breakout talents and change agents" and Business Insider's list of the "most inspiring and influential people in New York tech". Prior to A Plus, Beard co-founded Etacts and ArmorHub, both acquired by publicly traded companies.
Bookmate is a social ebook subscription service, available primarily on mobile, with catalogues in 9 languages. The mobile app is supported on iOS, Android, Windows Phone and feature phones, and the service is also available in a web version.
Willem Van Lancker is an American entrepreneur and product designer, who is best known for being the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of ebooks company Oyster. He is currently the Head of Incubations at Thrive Capital, a technology investment firm based in New York City.
Meron Gribetz is an Israeli technology entrepreneur. He was the founder and CEO of Meta, a Silicon Valley technology company that produced augmented reality products, closed in 2019. He was a founder of Inner Cosmos, makers of a digital pill designed to re-balance brain networks, and continued as CEO As of 2023.
Thomas Benjamin Blomfield is a British entrepreneur and a Group Partner at Y Combinator.
Daniel Hoffer is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, known for his role as Co-Founder and previous Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the hospitality exchange service, CouchSurfing. Presently, Hoffer serves as Senior Vice President, Corporate Development at technology startup Hayden AI, a Series C stage startup backed by TPG.