Trip Adler

When most people hit failure, they give up, but good entrepreneurs simply treat failure as a learning experience and use it to fuel and inform their next move.

Entrepreneurship is about tackling big problems - often non-obvious problems - that will have a meaningful impact on the world, and this usually involves solving these problems in counterintuitive ways.

The goal is to become the central hub of publishing, where we have all the written material - user-generated and professional. We want to be the place where people can publish instantly to their audiences... and to get there, it's just about doing things step by step.

Anytime there is a new, interesting space that comes along, there are a bunch of companies that enter the market.

Books is our main type of content, but we include user-generated content and will include other verticals such as scientific papers, sheet music, and comic books.

Readers can read what they want and easily switch to other books, so we're seeing a lot of reading behaviors. Some verticals attract different usage than others. We can spot reading patterns.

If I make a good product and deliver value to users and to the world, the financial gains will come.

We realized the best way to monetize content was through a subscription model.

The subscriptions were working so well, and on top of that, we saw the success of Netflix and Spotify and thought, 'We can create a similar kind of experience for books.'

I'm not sure I'd go back and do anything over in my life. I've definitely had my fair share of failures and moments where I wasted my time or that of other people, but if I did those moments over, I'd have missed out on so many lessons.

I think the most important trait for an entrepreneur is persistence. When you try to do something new and difficult, you are more likely to fail than to succeed.

The reason we make money is because we have a few different business models. One is ads: we get incredibly high click rates because most people on Scribd are searching the site for something, or they came from a search engine, and they're looking for something specific.