They are Scribd

From street musician to Internet impresario? At Christmastime, entrepreneur Trip Adler entertained a busy street corner in the heart of San Francisco's shopping district with his Santa cap and saxophone. The $17 that passersby dropped into his music case was the sum total of the 2007 revenue for his start-up, Scribd.

That colorful story of yuletide busking has become start-up lore (complete with a special cameo by The Dancing Man, a.k.a. Kurt Davis, a onetime consultant for Scribd and Adler's very own Silent Bob). The story even shows up in the Frequently Asked Questions section of Scribd's website:

"How do you guys make money?"

"Trip plays sax on the street corner sometimes."

Nowadays the company, which is known as the YouTube for documents, is getting greenbacks by gaining traction in its mission to make it easy to share any kind of document online. It offers free, unlimited storage of files in all formats, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel.

The idea has caught on. Scribd users have built an online library with ...

... more than 2 million documents including term papers, college theses, e-zines, even old scanned newspaper articles. The selling point: No more downloading; you can view everything in your browser. You can also search full texts, comment on documents and share them with your friends.

Not all content is acceptable content. Scribd gets it share of take-down notices (a copyright filter removes a lot of Harry Potter). But Scribd's most popular stuff is user-generated, including the very amusing "They didn't study," which showcases the very creative answers from students who clearly did not. So far the document has racked up 1.5 million views, encroaching on YouTube territory.

An essay entitled "Why intelligent people tend to be unhappy" received 355,366 views and landed its author on a syndicated morning radio program. Also popular is Pictures of Geek Culture.

Scribd drew more than 21 million unique visitors in May, little more than a year after launching, and claims 1.5 million registered users. As the team figures out how to make big money, Google text ads strategically placed in the documents yield about $1 million a year, enough to keep Adler off the street and in his office.

"We think of ourselves as a great library of content," said Adler, who, at 23, is Scribd's chief executive and co-founder.

Scribd is not alone in its paperless quest. Its competitors include DocStoc and Slideshare. But so far investors are impressed. Scribd has raised nearly $3.9 million from Redpoint Ventures and individuals including serial entrepreneur Marc Andreessen.

Adler may be even more proud of the pink "Web weenie" trophy his team won from upstairs neighbor and fellow Y Combinator alumnus Xobni (inbox spelled backwards). Scribd won it in ping pong, which its employees play when not crashing into office walls on an electric scooter.

What a Trip.

-- Jessica Guynn

Photo courtesy of Scribd

Comments

[Dave]

So these guys are just accumulating other people's works and displaying them. Color me unimpressed. What's the big picture behind this startup?? There doesn't seem to be one.

Dave

PS: They host a huge number of copyrighted material... search for Asimov for example to see the extent of their piracy. Not good :(

[Popo]

I use Scribd all the time to publish my own stuff. The previous commenter is looking at it the wrong way. They're providing a publishing service and a new way to display documents in web pages. It's also a library. A library's job is to "accumulate other people's works and display them." Only I can put my own stuff into this library where thousands of people can see it. Pity the poor imagination that doesn't burst with ideas when presented with that concept.

[Mahmudul Hasan]

I am a huge fan of Scribd.

[Scott Macdonald]

Yeah, I have to say that all the copyright violations on Scribd. It's got some great innovations with iPaper.

I've seen some similar sites that take the user experience to a better level. One of them is YouPublish. There anyone can submit their own creations and share them for free or even name a price and make some extra scratch.

Check it out at www.youpublish.com