Trip Adler

It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs.

So Scribd's a subscription service for reading.

So what you can do is pay $9 a month, and then you can read books, audio books, magazines, newspapers, documents on whatever device you like.

So it's all basically funded by our consumers who pay the monthly subscription fee.

Yeah, it's really simple.

I mean, rather than, you know, the old model for media where people would pay for each piece of content one at a time, we now just have one simple monthly subscription, same price for everyone, and then you can pay once, and once you pay, you can just read whatever you like.

And with the subscription model, the beauty of that is it gives users really the freedom to just kind of explore different types of content, discover new types of content, and you kind of focus on what to read and not what to buy.

So I just finished college.

Broke as hell, but at the same time had supportive parents so I could at least live with them.

So I didn't have to worry about my living expenses.

And on top of that, we did apply to Y Combinator and we raised $12,000.

So that also was like a pretty, at the time, a pretty large amount of money that covered

Uh, you know, they, they covered our basic expenses.

Um, so, uh, so, you know, we had the, um, between Y Combinator and, and living at home, you know, we had a few thousand dollars to build a website, get that online.

Um, and that was really enough to get started.

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

And then we were able to, uh, you know, once we got some traction, we were able to raise venture money and kind of scale from there.

We raised $50 million at this point, 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 $3.5 million from Redpoint, and then another $10 from CRV, and then another

10 from Silicon Valley Bank, and then another 25 from Coastal Ventures.