The Clean Air Act Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

The Clean Air Act - Essay Example The scientist expresses that since the World War II, the US economy has kept on developing. This development can be ascribed to expanded assembling. The huge number of businesses in the US was a wellspring of toxins that kept on debasing the earth. In this way, the need to direct the sum off contaminations that enterprises could release into the air emerged. Endeavors that finished in the cutting edge Clean Air Act (CAA) can be followed to the 1950s. The Air Pollution Control Act of 1955 was marked into law by President Eisenhower. The underlying adaptation of the law approved the United States Surgeon General to give help to the states on the most proficient method to actualize controls. The â€Å"killer smog† in London and New York in the 1960’s made worry about expanded air contamination. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) was engaged by the 1963 CAA to follow up on interstate air contamination. As indicated by Jonathan and Joseph, this demonstrati on built up a national power that would mediate in air contamination which represented a threat to the strength of any individual. After four years, President Johnson marked the Air Quality Act of 1967 which was an alteration of the 1963 Act. The 1967 Air Quality Act approved HEW to set national air quality measures. The Act expected states to set surrounding air quality gauges. These norms were relied upon to be in accordance with the standards set by HEW. Roy takes note of that the Air Quality Act of 1967 had an inadequacy in that it didn't build up implementation methodology. The Clean Air Act was authorized in 1970. It realized a move in the methodology of handling contamination. The changes enabled the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to build up a National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). These norms are intended to secure general society by setting the degrees of air quality that must be kept up. The 1970 Amendments made New Source Performance Standar ds (NSPS) program. NSPS approved EPA to set principles that would decide innovation necessities for new or changed wellsprings of air contamination. The revisions likewise realized the guideline of air toxins and air toxics. These revisions were questionable and realized difficulties to EPA in the execution of the NAAQs (Jonathan and Joseph 12-14). Little achievement in accomplishing the objectives of the 1970 Amendments incited the 1977 corrections to the Clean Air Act. At that point, just hardly any regions of the nation had gained ground in meeting the appropriate NAAQS. Subsequently, the corrections expanded the time required for consistence. New contamination control models were set for regions that couldn't achieve the principles set by the 1970 Amendments. These alterations planned for characterizing the guidelines that modern advancements would meet so as to control contamination (Roy, 1970). In 1990, Congress updated the Clean Air Act (The 1990 Amendments). These correction s knocked off certain components of the past demonstration and included new projects. The demonstration reinforced the capacity of EPA to authorize principles. It necessitated that the air contamination control commitments of an individual contamination source be settled in a solitary grant that terminated following five years. The states were distributed a multi year time frame to create grant programs. These grant programs must be consistent with EPA principles. In outline, The 1990 Amendments set guidelines that would see a decline in Ozone consumption, air toxics and engine vehicle contamination among different zones (Jolish 306). Industry Response to the Clean Air Act The 1990 Amendments constrained enterprises to make vital budgetary assignments that would provide food for hardware, examination and item improvement. Organizations began incorporating ecological

Description of Nick Vujicic video Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Portrayal of Nick Vujicic video - Essay Example † he even recommend that he should take the wheelchair to be â€Å"pimped.† This should make the wheelchair look extravagant and gaudy, as it is included a few extras, for example, turning metallic wheels on the wheels. He chats with a great deal of diversion about the wheelchair demonstrating the adoration he has for this office; moreover the wheelchair makes him move around. Scratch recommend that the power through pressure framework that will be introduced in the wheelchair after it is â€Å"pimped† will make him knock while going across the street. He cherishes his wheelchair without a doubt, and he even say he would discover it ‘cool’ on the off chance that he could play his drums while on the wheelchair. Scratch Vujicic discloses to the understudies that he doesn’t have appendages, and nothing transpired as he was conceived in that state. There is no clinical motivation to try and clarify his circumstance, yet however he has no arms nor legs there is something that he prefers about this circumstance. He says however he has no legs he has his â€Å"little chicken drumstick.† He call that part ‘chicken drumstick’ in light of the fact that looks like one and furthermore his canine believes is one. He clarifies how his canine thinks it’s a chicken drumstick, and this brief the pooch to come have a nibble, however luckily he figures out how to pursue it away each time. Be that as it may, this doesn't make him unpleasant, rather this marvels improves him. Each individual who meets him wonder what befell him, and some of the time he playfully says its cigarette. He has even been depicted as an outsider however a few children, while different children blow a gasket when they see him. This â€Å"chicken drumstick† he has empowered him to complete a few things, for example, composing, composing, and even learn communication via gestures as he shows the gesture of goodwill. This is rousing, in spite of the way that he doesn’t have appendages and arms he can do a few exercises, for example, swimming that the vast majority favored with arms and appendages can’t swim. He even gave an exhibit playing a few drums impeccably. The understudies are even stunned that he can kick a tennis ball that

Scribd

Scribd INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in San Francisco in the Scribd office. Trip, who are you and what do you do?Trip: My name is Trip Adler and I am the co-founder and CEO of Scribd.Martin: What did you do before you started this company?Trip: Well, I started right after college, so I guess going back to very beginning I was raised here in the Bay Area, in Palo Alto, and then I went to school on the east coast, to Harvard. I studied biophysics and then I right around my senior year I decided I want to start a company. So, started, kind of come up with my ideas, found a co-founder, went to YCombinator, and then it just went from there.Martin: Why didnt you start some company related to biophysics?Trip: Its a good question. That was actually my original plan, and I realized that I just didnt, I would need a lot more time and school to get a biophysics company started, and meanwhile had a lot of ideas for internet companies, I knew Id get started really quickly. So that was, I was too excited to start internet company that I couldnt wait that long. So, I just decided to get started. Maybe in longer term I could go back to a biophysics company, but I think right now Im enjoying working in the internet space.Martin: And how did you decide which of those hundreds of ideas you wanted to pursue?Trip: We went through a period of time for maybe a year, year and a half, where we were just tried a bunch of different ideas. That was, I think for us a really important learning experience, because we would come up with an idea, maybe build it, test it, think about it. And that experience of trial and error really taught us a lot about just how to approach starting a company and how to approach different ideas. So, we went through several ideas, one of them was basically a lot like what Uber and Lyft are today, it was like a ride sharing service, coordinated over your phones. Turns out we was just way ahead of the time it was nearly make sense to pursue it. We also did a coll ege classified site, we launched that at Harvard, we got it going, but we realized that wasnt really scalable so we moved on past that. Then we tried a bunch of other ideas, and then eventually Scribd came along. And that one just got a lot of things going right for it, so that was, ended up being the one that we stuck with.Martin: So you tested different business models and you stick with one with the most traction?Trip: It was a combination of what got early traction, what we thought was going to scale, what was a big opportunity, what would have a good business model, good user need, its a lot of those things combined. But traction is definitely an important one, if you cant get some traction early on, thats a sign that something is not working.BUSINESS MODELMartin: Lets talk about the business model, Trip. So, hows the current business model of Scribd working and how it might have been evolved over time?Trip: Currently, were mostly a subscription service. So, what we do is we le t you read unlimited books and other kinds of written content for $8.99 per month. So you pay one flat monthly fee and then you can read any kind of content on whatever device you like, and we have the really nice experience for discovering things to read and having the social experience around reading. So, its kind of the Netflix or Spotify model, but for books. And our model is that we, consumers pay us for $8.99 and we make revenue that way and then we pay out publishers and authors based on the reading activity. So that way we have really entire ecosystem where the publishers and authors get paid and consumers can have really direct, terrific reading experience.Martin: When youre looking at publisher side, are you also working with bigger brand names or publishing houses, or is it more for the individuals only?Trip: Yeah, were working with We have over the thousand publishers using the platform and we work with some of the biggest publishers in the world, so we have both HarperC ollins and Simon Schuster, selling their full backlist of books through our subscription, and we have some of the other big publishers selling books through the retail model at our site. But, were mostly focused on the subscription.Martin: Can you tell us a bit what kind of verticals in terms of the publishing books are working well and which are not working well, meaning that most people are not reading the specific kind of subsegment or vertical?Trip: Publishing is very broad, theres many different types of books that appeal to many different types of people. So we have many verticals that are working really well, we have a partnership with Lonely Planet to do travel books, and people read travel books, thats doing well, we have the Dummies series, so you can look for information within books, learn things in those books, we have all sorts of non-fiction, we have fiction, mysteries, thrillers, romance. Probably the verticals that are doing the best so far are the fiction and the romance, just because those readers are very various and they fit the subscription model really well, but were really growing across all the different verticals, and I think longer term we could have a lot of new, interesting use cases developed.Martin: And is the ground business model only digital, meaning that you dont deliver physical kind of publishing goods?Trip: Yeah, its all digital. Were completely digital company and we work with publishers and authors that publish their digital files and then we help provide an audience digitally and distribute the content digitally.Martin: Most users maybe know Scribd from the early days, so having some kind of platform where we can share PowerPoint presentations with each other. Can you tell us a little bit more about the beginnings of your startup? How did you grow and scale your company and user base?Trip: The way we got started was, I was having a conversation with my dad, whos a doctor at Stanford, and he had a medical paper that he wanted to get published, and he was talking about how in medical publishing it takes 18 months to get your paper published. So that gave us the idea that we can make a website that would let him really easily publish his paper on the web. And we could quickly broaden that to all kinds of written content so, medical papers, books, power point presentations, school papers, creative writing, any kind of written content, and any kind of content in document format, upload it to the web and then find an audience for it. So, we built that site, got a bit of a community going, just kind of through group force and just finding anyone we could find who would use it to upload their own content, and launch the site. And we had a very lucky launch where within three days we were one of the top 2000 websites on the internet. It was just very explosive launch. You see a lot of these companies doing it nowadays, because theyll get promotion in the App Store, or theyll get viral and put it on Facebo ok or something like that, but we were kind of one of the first companies that Ive seen really explode very quickly like that. And once we had that launched, we had a lot of readers come and then a small fraction of those readers would then upload their own content and that would bring more readers, and then some of those would upload and that created nice viral loop. So, that viral loop continued to grow, its still growing today, weve now reached about 95 million monthly users, we have about 60 million pieces of content in our library, and it continues to keep growing. And then over time what weve realized is that the main things our authors and publishers wanted was more revenue. And we tried then to sell books, but it didn’t really work very well, but weve realized subscription was a very good way to help them make money, because that way we can make more money for them and we can get, give readers a really terrific experience that subscription offers. So that was what leads to us launching the subscription model, on top of the free service we previously had. So, now its a bit of a freemium model.Martin: What do you think, what are the reasons for you fast explosion in terms of when you launched this kind of product? Because Im pretty sure a lot of sellers think by themselves, I want to start the next marketplace, or a social network, whatever. What measures have you taken to grow that fast?Trip: I think there was a real user need for what were doing. I mean, there wasnt an easy way to put something, put a PDF online, and we filled that need and just given the viral nature the internet works, spreads really quickly nowadays. People, back then, we were on like the front page of sites like Digg and Reddit. Nowadays its more like word of mouth, I mean, Reddit is still kind of big, Reddits actually really big now, but its a little harder to launch a site on Reddit than it was, but now you can, theres Hacker News, there are people sharing things on Twitter or on Facebook, so just taking advantage of all those viral channels to basically get the word out there.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: Trip, lets talk about the corporate strategy. What do you think is the competitive advantage of Scribd nowadays?Trip: I think were really focused on two things. The first one is just having the worlds largest library of subscription content. So, for, we want to have a service that for one flat monthly price of 8.99 lets you read almost any kind of content you want to read. So, were, we have over 500.000 books right now, over 60 million user-generated documents, and were adding more all the time. So, we want to have the biggest, broadest and deepest library on the web and in the world, available via subscription. So, the first one is the size of the library, and the second one is just the user experience were building. Were building such a terrific experience for reading and reimagining the way reading should work and serving the needs of readers in ways tha t other competitors are not doing as well as we are. Were building a terrific experience for discovering new books and things to read. The subscription model really decreases the friction of starting a new book, but we are working by now with a really good recommendation engine, with really good editorial process that helps you discover books you want to read and also a really nice social layer around reading. So you can discover things to read trough your friends. So, were combining all of this together just to provide a really good experience for discovering things to read and it really just pleasant user experience overall. So, its really those two things, having the world’s largest library subscription content and a really good user experience for reading it, that differentiate the company.Martin: Trip, can you tell us a little bit more about the product strategy and what you think are some areas of development for your business?Trip: Under product specifically theres just a l ot we can do around book discovery. So, Im sure youve seen there are companies like Netflix that has really organized videos really well, where they actually tag all the videos by hand, so they can recommend very specific kinds of videos, or Pandora has a music genome project, where you can organize songs by the type of song they are, and were basically in the same thing for books. Were taking every single book and by hand generating tags for that book so we can really organize the books really well and make it really easy to discover books you want, based on your particular interests. So, theres a lot that were doing on that front, to make books much more discoverable, were also doing a lot on the social side of things, so we think social reading is, can be a really big thing. Weve already seen that happen with sites like Goodreads, but what we can do is we can actually combine the social experience with the actual reading experience of the content. And since were subscription, eve ryones reading the same books and the same products, you can make that experience really good. So, when youre reading something you can highlight it, comment on it and then your friends can see that activity. So, theres a lot we do to build a really differentiated social experience through our reading.Martin: Are you also analyzing, like for example, the reader behavior, so what types of books are they reading, or documents in general, and until what time they are reading as well what paragraph, and based on this giving some kind of recommendations what your peer group is reading?Trip: We collect a lot of data on how people are reading, we can see what parts of the book people are reading, which parts theyre reading faster and slower, we have to collect all of those because we use this data to pay to the publishers, based on the reading activity. So, we collect a lot of data on reading and we use that to make recommendations, to pay the publishers and to continue to improve the prod uct.Martin: Imagine Im an author and I want to publish my book, my PDF, whatever, via Scribd. Is there some kind of mechanism like with SEO, so how I can optimize and reach more people via your platform? I mean there is some kind of playing with algorithms, I guess.Trip: First of all, youd had to get your book published on platform. So, currently, youd have to work with one of the publishers we work with. Theres over 1000 of those, the probably the least friction ones with the self publishing platforms, like Smashwords, you can go there and get your book published to our platform very quickly. Eventually, we plan to open subscription to authors directly, but right now were working with publishers specifically. So, first you get the books up there and then, we do a really good job with the distribution at that point. Were very good at finding an audience for your books, by making it really searchable, making it SEOable, making it the paid sharable. But the more authors can promote th e books on their own, the better that will help with the promotion overall. So, if the books, if they can promote them on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, if they can embed the book on their blog, if they can just generally share the link, that just gets the content out there, it gets more links to it, increases the amount of traffic Google sends it, so the more authors can promote their books, the more that will increase the readership overall.Martin: What do you think of the idea of having this books not only as a read-only, but as an audio book? Because its, the thing is how you want to consume those content. Have you thought about having something like this, because I mean adding this as a plugin at the books that is also quite easy with the player?Trip: Its a really good idea, audio books are definitely in the rise, people are listening to them more and more, and there are, its a huge market, most people dont even realize what a big market it is. So, its definitely so mething were thinking about. And I think that by combining audio books with the book experience in subscription is just a really, it could be a really terrific experience for both reading and consuming audio books in the same product.MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: Trip, lets talk about the market development, in terms of publishing. There are several distributional platforms out there like Amazon, or Scribd, and there are also different kind of products. What is your take on the overall market development in those publishing industry?Trip: I think that theres, its a really interesting time, the shift to digital is so happening very quickly, because a lot of people are still reading on print and they are going to be switching to digital. So, the digital publishing market is growing very quickly and I think it will continue to grow. And I think that this entire shift from the ownership model to the access model that were pursuing is really exciting change, because previously the way it wor ked was, even in digital, it was still basically an ownership model, where you pay the publisher or the distributer and they give you a file in return for that. Were now, were shifting it at the access model where you pay for access to the library and then the publisher or the author gets paid when the books are actually read. So that creates huge changes in just the overall ecosystem. So, weve already seen very different data and how we borrow our reading through subscription. So, one thing weve seen is that with the subscription model people are reading a lot more than they were before, unless people are discovering differently, theyre rather than just searching for the book they want and read that, theyre browsing books and reading books they wouldnt have read otherwise. And the result of these changes is that the ecosystem were building is much more long tail. We drive much more distribution to books that were published 10 years ago than to books published really recently. So, i ts a much more long tail distribution than its typically seen in publishing. So, overall just bringing subscription to the industry is just a, it caused a lot of changes both for reading experience and for authors and I think youll see just a lot more general reading and a lot more authors and writers and books being published as a result of this.Martin: If you compare this what you call owned book market and then the kind of subscription based book market, do you think that by entering the subscription based book market that you grow the overall publishing market? Because, on the one end side, its definitely the quantity of reading books will increase, but the question should really like, whether the multiplication of quantity times €/$ per book will increase overall. What do you think?Trip: I definitely think so, because the way to get the market to grow is to get consumers to ultimately consume more, you want them to consume more and pay more and that expands the market. So, in the way we get consumers to read more is to by giving them better products. Its kind of amazing to me that the subscription model is coming to books last, it came to video and music before it came to books, so I think that this kind of model coming to books is just, as it gets larger, I think people will read more and it will just grow the market overall.Martin: Did you think of going after the education market? Because I can imagine having this kind of content and imagine some kind of pupils sitting in the lecture room and currently have all the physical books, which cost a lot of money, to just having on an iPad all the kind of digital books provided by Scribd, for example?Trip: You sort of where we are, we have a lot of students sharing their school papers, a lot of teachers putting up their course notes out there, and I mean there are a lot of users who are already students. And there are students that are reading the books they need to for class, if youre taking an English cla ss, youre going to have most of the books that youre going to need to read for class, so turns out we already are in that market. In terms of going into the professional textbook market, its definitely a market that were looking at, I think theres definitely a big opportunity there.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS In San Francisco, we meet co-founder and CEO of Scribd, Trip Adler. He shares his story how Scribd was founded and how the current business model works, as well as what the current plans for near future, and some advice for young entrepreneurs.The transcript of the interview is included below.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in San Francisco in the Scribd office. Trip, who are you and what do you do?Trip: My name is Trip Adler and I am the co-founder and CEO of Scribd.Martin: What did you do before you started this company?Trip: Well, I started right after college, so I guess going back to very beginning I was raised here in the Bay Area, in Palo Alto, and then I went to school on the east coast, to Harvard. I studied biophysics and then I right around my senior year I decided I want to start a company. So, started, kind of come up with my ideas, found a co-founder, went to YCombinator, and then it just went from there.Martin: Why didnt you start some company related to biophysic s?Trip: Its a good question. That was actually my original plan, and I realized that I just didnt, I would need a lot more time and school to get a biophysics company started, and meanwhile had a lot of ideas for internet companies, I knew Id get started really quickly. So that was, I was too excited to start internet company that I couldnt wait that long. So, I just decided to get started. Maybe in longer term I could go back to a biophysics company, but I think right now Im enjoying working in the internet space.Martin: And how did you decide which of those hundreds of ideas you wanted to pursue?Trip: We went through a period of time for maybe a year, year and a half, where we were just tried a bunch of different ideas. That was, I think for us a really important learning experience, because we would come up with an idea, maybe build it, test it, think about it. And that experience of trial and error really taught us a lot about just how to approach starting a company and how to a pproach different ideas. So, we went through several ideas, one of them was basically a lot like what Uber and Lyft are today, it was like a ride sharing service, coordinated over your phones. Turns out we was just way ahead of the time it was nearly make sense to pursue it. We also did a college classified site, we launched that at Harvard, we got it going, but we realized that wasnt really scalable so we moved on past that. Then we tried a bunch of other ideas, and then eventually Scribd came along. And that one just got a lot of things going right for it, so that was, ended up being the one that we stuck with.Martin: So you tested different business models and you stick with one with the most traction?Trip: It was a combination of what got early traction, what we thought was going to scale, what was a big opportunity, what would have a good business model, good user need, its a lot of those things combined. But traction is definitely an important one, if you cant get some tractio n early on, thats a sign that something is not working.BUSINESS MODELMartin: Lets talk about the business model, Trip. So, hows the current business model of Scribd working and how it might have been evolved over time?Trip: Currently, were mostly a subscription service. So, what we do is we let you read unlimited books and other kinds of written content for $8.99 per month. So you pay one flat monthly fee and then you can read any kind of content on whatever device you like, and we have the really nice experience for discovering things to read and having the social experience around reading. So, its kind of the Netflix or Spotify model, but for books. And our model is that we, consumers pay us for $8.99 and we make revenue that way and then we pay out publishers and authors based on the reading activity. So that way we have really entire ecosystem where the publishers and authors get paid and consumers can have really direct, terrific reading experience.Martin: When youre looking at publisher side, are you also working with bigger brand names or publishing houses, or is it more for the individuals only?Trip: Yeah, were working with We have over the thousand publishers using the platform and we work with some of the biggest publishers in the world, so we have both HarperCollins and Simon Schuster, selling their full backlist of books through our subscription, and we have some of the other big publishers selling books through the retail model at our site. But, were mostly focused on the subscription.Martin: Can you tell us a bit what kind of verticals in terms of the publishing books are working well and which are not working well, meaning that most people are not reading the specific kind of subsegment or vertical?Trip: Publishing is very broad, theres many different types of books that appeal to many different types of people. So we have many verticals that are working really well, we have a partnership with Lonely Planet to do travel books, and people read t ravel books, thats doing well, we have the Dummies series, so you can look for information within books, learn things in those books, we have all sorts of non-fiction, we have fiction, mysteries, thrillers, romance. Probably the verticals that are doing the best so far are the fiction and the romance, just because those readers are very various and they fit the subscription model really well, but were really growing across all the different verticals, and I think longer term we could have a lot of new, interesting use cases developed.Martin: And is the ground business model only digital, meaning that you dont deliver physical kind of publishing goods?Trip: Yeah, its all digital. Were completely digital company and we work with publishers and authors that publish their digital files and then we help provide an audience digitally and distribute the content digitally.Martin: Most users maybe know Scribd from the early days, so having some kind of platform where we can share PowerPoint presentations with each other. Can you tell us a little bit more about the beginnings of your startup? How did you grow and scale your company and user base?Trip: The way we got started was, I was having a conversation with my dad, whos a doctor at Stanford, and he had a medical paper that he wanted to get published, and he was talking about how in medical publishing it takes 18 months to get your paper published. So that gave us the idea that we can make a website that would let him really easily publish his paper on the web. And we could quickly broaden that to all kinds of written content so, medical papers, books, power point presentations, school papers, creative writing, any kind of written content, and any kind of content in document format, upload it to the web and then find an audience for it. So, we built that site, got a bit of a community going, just kind of through group force and just finding anyone we could find who would use it to upload their own content, and launch the site. And we had a very lucky launch where within three days we were one of the top 2000 websites on the internet. It was just very explosive launch. You see a lot of these companies doing it nowadays, because theyll get promotion in the App Store, or theyll get viral and put it on Facebook or something like that, but we were kind of one of the first companies that Ive seen really explode very quickly like that. And once we had that launched, we had a lot of readers come and then a small fraction of those readers would then upload their own content and that would bring more readers, and then some of those would upload and that created nice viral loop. So, that viral loop continued to grow, its still growing today, weve now reached about 95 million monthly users, we have about 60 million pieces of content in our library, and it continues to keep growing. And then over time what weve realized is that the main things our authors and publishers wanted was more revenue. And we tried then to sell books, but it didn’t really work very well, but weve realized subscription was a very good way to help them make money, because that way we can make more money for them and we can get, give readers a really terrific experience that subscription offers. So that was what leads to us launching the subscription model, on top of the free service we previously had. So, now its a bit of a freemium model.Martin: What do you think, what are the reasons for you fast explosion in terms of when you launched this kind of product? Because Im pretty sure a lot of sellers think by themselves, I want to start the next marketplace, or a social network, whatever. What measures have you taken to grow that fast?Trip: I think there was a real user need for what were doing. I mean, there wasnt an easy way to put something, put a PDF online, and we filled that need and just given the viral nature the internet works, spreads really quickly nowadays. People, back then, we were on like the fro nt page of sites like Digg and Reddit. Nowadays its more like word of mouth, I mean, Reddit is still kind of big, Reddits actually really big now, but its a little harder to launch a site on Reddit than it was, but now you can, theres Hacker News, there are people sharing things on Twitter or on Facebook, so just taking advantage of all those viral channels to basically get the word out there.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: Trip, lets talk about the corporate strategy. What do you think is the competitive advantage of Scribd nowadays?Trip: I think were really focused on two things. The first one is just having the worlds largest library of subscription content. So, for, we want to have a service that for one flat monthly price of 8.99 lets you read almost any kind of content you want to read. So, were, we have over 500.000 books right now, over 60 million user-generated documents, and were adding more all the time. So, we want to have the biggest, broadest and deepest library on the web a nd in the world, available via subscription. So, the first one is the size of the library, and the second one is just the user experience were building. Were building such a terrific experience for reading and reimagining the way reading should work and serving the needs of readers in ways that other competitors are not doing as well as we are. Were building a terrific experience for discovering new books and things to read. The subscription model really decreases the friction of starting a new book, but we are working by now with a really good recommendation engine, with really good editorial process that helps you discover books you want to read and also a really nice social layer around reading. So you can discover things to read trough your friends. So, were combining all of this together just to provide a really good experience for discovering things to read and it really just pleasant user experience overall. So, its really those two things, having the world’s largest librar y subscription content and a really good user experience for reading it, that differentiate the company.Martin: Trip, can you tell us a little bit more about the product strategy and what you think are some areas of development for your business?Trip: Under product specifically theres just a lot we can do around book discovery. So, Im sure youve seen there are companies like Netflix that has really organized videos really well, where they actually tag all the videos by hand, so they can recommend very specific kinds of videos, or Pandora has a music genome project, where you can organize songs by the type of song they are, and were basically in the same thing for books. Were taking every single book and by hand generating tags for that book so we can really organize the books really well and make it really easy to discover books you want, based on your particular interests. So, theres a lot that were doing on that front, to make books much more discoverable, were also doing a lot on the social side of things, so we think social reading is, can be a really big thing. Weve already seen that happen with sites like Goodreads, but what we can do is we can actually combine the social experience with the actual reading experience of the content. And since were subscription, everyones reading the same books and the same products, you can make that experience really good. So, when youre reading something you can highlight it, comment on it and then your friends can see that activity. So, theres a lot we do to build a really differentiated social experience through our reading.Martin: Are you also analyzing, like for example, the reader behavior, so what types of books are they reading, or documents in general, and until what time they are reading as well what paragraph, and based on this giving some kind of recommendations what your peer group is reading?Trip: We collect a lot of data on how people are reading, we can see what parts of the book people are reading, whic h parts theyre reading faster and slower, we have to collect all of those because we use this data to pay to the publishers, based on the reading activity. So, we collect a lot of data on reading and we use that to make recommendations, to pay the publishers and to continue to improve the product.Martin: Imagine Im an author and I want to publish my book, my PDF, whatever, via Scribd. Is there some kind of mechanism like with SEO, so how I can optimize and reach more people via your platform? I mean there is some kind of playing with algorithms, I guess.Trip: First of all, youd had to get your book published on platform. So, currently, youd have to work with one of the publishers we work with. Theres over 1000 of those, the probably the least friction ones with the self publishing platforms, like Smashwords, you can go there and get your book published to our platform very quickly. Eventually, we plan to open subscription to authors directly, but right now were working with publishe rs specifically. So, first you get the books up there and then, we do a really good job with the distribution at that point. Were very good at finding an audience for your books, by making it really searchable, making it SEOable, making it the paid sharable. But the more authors can promote the books on their own, the better that will help with the promotion overall. So, if the books, if they can promote them on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, if they can embed the book on their blog, if they can just generally share the link, that just gets the content out there, it gets more links to it, increases the amount of traffic Google sends it, so the more authors can promote their books, the more that will increase the readership overall.Martin: What do you think of the idea of having this books not only as a read-only, but as an audio book? Because its, the thing is how you want to consume those content. Have you thought about having something like this, because I mean adding this as a plugin at the books that is also quite easy with the player?Trip: Its a really good idea, audio books are definitely in the rise, people are listening to them more and more, and there are, its a huge market, most people dont even realize what a big market it is. So, its definitely something were thinking about. And I think that by combining audio books with the book experience in subscription is just a really, it could be a really terrific experience for both reading and consuming audio books in the same product.MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: Trip, lets talk about the market development, in terms of publishing. There are several distributional platforms out there like Amazon, or Scribd, and there are also different kind of products. What is your take on the overall market development in those publishing industry?Trip: I think that theres, its a really interesting time, the shift to digital is so happening very quickly, because a lot of people are still reading on print and they are going to be switching to digital. So, the digital publishing market is growing very quickly and I think it will continue to grow. And I think that this entire shift from the ownership model to the access model that were pursuing is really exciting change, because previously the way it worked was, even in digital, it was still basically an ownership model, where you pay the publisher or the distributer and they give you a file in return for that. Were now, were shifting it at the access model where you pay for access to the library and then the publisher or the author gets paid when the books are actually read. So that creates huge changes in just the overall ecosystem. So, weve already seen very different data and how we borrow our reading through subscription. So, one thing weve seen is that with the subscription model people are reading a lot more than they were before, unless people are discovering differently, theyre rather than just searching for the book they want and rea d that, theyre browsing books and reading books they wouldnt have read otherwise. And the result of these changes is that the ecosystem were building is much more long tail. We drive much more distribution to books that were published 10 years ago than to books published really recently. So, its a much more long tail distribution than its typically seen in publishing. So, overall just bringing subscription to the industry is just a, it caused a lot of changes both for reading experience and for authors and I think youll see just a lot more general reading and a lot more authors and writers and books being published as a result of this.Martin: If you compare this what you call owned book market and then the kind of subscription based book market, do you think that by entering the subscription based book market that you grow the overall publishing market? Because, on the one end side, its definitely the quantity of reading books will increase, but the question should really like, whet her the multiplication of quantity times €/$ per book will increase overall. What do you think?Trip: I definitely think so, because the way to get the market to grow is to get consumers to ultimately consume more, you want them to consume more and pay more and that expands the market. So, in the way we get consumers to read more is to by giving them better products. Its kind of amazing to me that the subscription model is coming to books last, it came to video and music before it came to books, so I think that this kind of model coming to books is just, as it gets larger, I think people will read more and it will just grow the market overall.Martin: Did you think of going after the education market? Because I can imagine having this kind of content and imagine some kind of pupils sitting in the lecture room and currently have all the physical books, which cost a lot of money, to just having on an iPad all the kind of digital books provided by Scribd, for example?Trip: You sort of where we are, we have a lot of students sharing their school papers, a lot of teachers putting up their course notes out there, and I mean there are a lot of users who are already students. And there are students that are reading the books they need to for class, if youre taking an English class, youre going to have most of the books that youre going to need to read for class, so turns out we already are in that market. In terms of going into the professional textbook market, its definitely a market that were looking at, I think theres definitely a big opportunity there.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURSMartin: Trip, most of our readers are first time entrepreneurs and people who think about starting their own company. What advice could you give them, especially what would you have done differently if you had to start all over again?Trip: This is a big question! Its.., and I think I change my answer to this about every 3 months, because Im always learning and I think right when I feel like Ive figured everything there is out about entrepreneurship, I realize that I actually was completely wrong and that feeling that theres something else I have to learn, and that seems to keep happening and I imagine it will probably keep happening for your whole career. So, I guess that would be my first piece of advice, which is to just keep learning and to just, you just realize how much there is to know and just like how long it takes to get at building companies. I mean its not, building company is not, the media often makes it out to be this kind of thing where you start your app, and then Facebook buys it for a million dollars a year later. And that does happen occasionally, but thats really kind of the exception, anyone can build a really big company, its just that if you get lucky it takes time and learning. So, if you try the first time and you dont get it right, even if it takes you a year of trying something or a couple of years, eventually youll get there if you just keep tr ying, if youre just constantly learning and constantly trying, youll eventually figure out something that will, users will like and will scale and get the rest attention, and become a big business.Martin: And what when your little brother asks you Trip, what should I do and what shouldnt I do when I start a company? What would you answer him?Trip: The first thing would be just to get started. Thats actually probably the hardest step, which is just doing anything at all, because most people are just afraid to get started. So, you need just sort of like take that take that first step and sort of have some confidence at what youre doing. So you need to be very confident and aggressive when you do things, but at the same time just be humble and learn as you go along, because probably that first step that you take youll make a mistake and do something wrong, so you need to just learn from that, and then change course and get to the next step. So, it would just be basically get started an d be really determined and learn as you go along.Martin: What advice can you give young entrepreneurs when they think about financing their company?Trip: First of all, I think people often think of financing their company as the big challenge, but its, or the think that they do to be successful, but thats not really true. You often need a lot less money than you think you do. And you can make a lot of progress without much financing, and you should only raise money if you really have a use for the money, because Especially nowadays, theres so many companies in Silicon Valley that raise a lot of money and they just spend it all and then they didnt really do anything with that money. Thats a really wrong way to go down. So, my general advice, which is a little bit kind of what most people say, which is raise, delay raising money and raise less than you need, because that will kind of force you to really build a good company. If you do want to raise money, the best thing you could do i s just build a good business. If you have a really good business with real user need and real traction, a real business model, investors will come and its pretty easy. And if youre having problem tracking investors, it probably means you should just focus on building your business, not necessarily spend more time trying to attract the investors.Martin: What advice would you give on how to manage your time focusing on business and focusing on raising money? Because I mean some of the startups just focus six months on raising money, while neglecting the business and the other guys are only building the business, and not fueling the company with cash, for example.Trip: You definitely want to spend more time building the business. If you do want to raise money, it does take time, usually, you do need to get investors comfortable with giving your company money, you need to spend some time going through the whole process, but the best thing you want to do is to either, if you do fundraise , to just go 100% into fundraising boat and then get it done quickly. So, you want to be building the business, then you decide to raise money, go raise money and as soon as youre done go back to building the business. You dont want to be spending six months on fundraising, especially early on, maybe if its an IPO or something, you could spend some more time on it, but on the early on it should really be a much shorter period of time than six months.Martin: Trip, thank you very much for your time.Trip: Well, thank you.Martin: And next time you are thinking about starting a company, you can read on our website the practical guidance and in addition some kind of presentations on Scribd. Thank you very much.

Scribd

Scribd INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in San Francisco in the Scribd office. Trip, who are you and what do you do?Trip: My name is Trip Adler and I am the co-founder and CEO of Scribd.Martin: What did you do before you started this company?Trip: Well, I started right after college, so I guess going back to very beginning I was raised here in the Bay Area, in Palo Alto, and then I went to school on the east coast, to Harvard. I studied biophysics and then I right around my senior year I decided I want to start a company. So, started, kind of come up with my ideas, found a co-founder, went to YCombinator, and then it just went from there.Martin: Why didnt you start some company related to biophysics?Trip: Its a good question. That was actually my original plan, and I realized that I just didnt, I would need a lot more time and school to get a biophysics company started, and meanwhile had a lot of ideas for internet companies, I knew Id get started really quickly. So that was, I was too excited to start internet company that I couldnt wait that long. So, I just decided to get started. Maybe in longer term I could go back to a biophysics company, but I think right now Im enjoying working in the internet space.Martin: And how did you decide which of those hundreds of ideas you wanted to pursue?Trip: We went through a period of time for maybe a year, year and a half, where we were just tried a bunch of different ideas. That was, I think for us a really important learning experience, because we would come up with an idea, maybe build it, test it, think about it. And that experience of trial and error really taught us a lot about just how to approach starting a company and how to approach different ideas. So, we went through several ideas, one of them was basically a lot like what Uber and Lyft are today, it was like a ride sharing service, coordinated over your phones. Turns out we was just way ahead of the time it was nearly make sense to pursue it. We also did a coll ege classified site, we launched that at Harvard, we got it going, but we realized that wasnt really scalable so we moved on past that. Then we tried a bunch of other ideas, and then eventually Scribd came along. And that one just got a lot of things going right for it, so that was, ended up being the one that we stuck with.Martin: So you tested different business models and you stick with one with the most traction?Trip: It was a combination of what got early traction, what we thought was going to scale, what was a big opportunity, what would have a good business model, good user need, its a lot of those things combined. But traction is definitely an important one, if you cant get some traction early on, thats a sign that something is not working.BUSINESS MODELMartin: Lets talk about the business model, Trip. So, hows the current business model of Scribd working and how it might have been evolved over time?Trip: Currently, were mostly a subscription service. So, what we do is we le t you read unlimited books and other kinds of written content for $8.99 per month. So you pay one flat monthly fee and then you can read any kind of content on whatever device you like, and we have the really nice experience for discovering things to read and having the social experience around reading. So, its kind of the Netflix or Spotify model, but for books. And our model is that we, consumers pay us for $8.99 and we make revenue that way and then we pay out publishers and authors based on the reading activity. So that way we have really entire ecosystem where the publishers and authors get paid and consumers can have really direct, terrific reading experience.Martin: When youre looking at publisher side, are you also working with bigger brand names or publishing houses, or is it more for the individuals only?Trip: Yeah, were working with We have over the thousand publishers using the platform and we work with some of the biggest publishers in the world, so we have both HarperC ollins and Simon Schuster, selling their full backlist of books through our subscription, and we have some of the other big publishers selling books through the retail model at our site. But, were mostly focused on the subscription.Martin: Can you tell us a bit what kind of verticals in terms of the publishing books are working well and which are not working well, meaning that most people are not reading the specific kind of subsegment or vertical?Trip: Publishing is very broad, theres many different types of books that appeal to many different types of people. So we have many verticals that are working really well, we have a partnership with Lonely Planet to do travel books, and people read travel books, thats doing well, we have the Dummies series, so you can look for information within books, learn things in those books, we have all sorts of non-fiction, we have fiction, mysteries, thrillers, romance. Probably the verticals that are doing the best so far are the fiction and the romance, just because those readers are very various and they fit the subscription model really well, but were really growing across all the different verticals, and I think longer term we could have a lot of new, interesting use cases developed.Martin: And is the ground business model only digital, meaning that you dont deliver physical kind of publishing goods?Trip: Yeah, its all digital. Were completely digital company and we work with publishers and authors that publish their digital files and then we help provide an audience digitally and distribute the content digitally.Martin: Most users maybe know Scribd from the early days, so having some kind of platform where we can share PowerPoint presentations with each other. Can you tell us a little bit more about the beginnings of your startup? How did you grow and scale your company and user base?Trip: The way we got started was, I was having a conversation with my dad, whos a doctor at Stanford, and he had a medical paper that he wanted to get published, and he was talking about how in medical publishing it takes 18 months to get your paper published. So that gave us the idea that we can make a website that would let him really easily publish his paper on the web. And we could quickly broaden that to all kinds of written content so, medical papers, books, power point presentations, school papers, creative writing, any kind of written content, and any kind of content in document format, upload it to the web and then find an audience for it. So, we built that site, got a bit of a community going, just kind of through group force and just finding anyone we could find who would use it to upload their own content, and launch the site. And we had a very lucky launch where within three days we were one of the top 2000 websites on the internet. It was just very explosive launch. You see a lot of these companies doing it nowadays, because theyll get promotion in the App Store, or theyll get viral and put it on Facebo ok or something like that, but we were kind of one of the first companies that Ive seen really explode very quickly like that. And once we had that launched, we had a lot of readers come and then a small fraction of those readers would then upload their own content and that would bring more readers, and then some of those would upload and that created nice viral loop. So, that viral loop continued to grow, its still growing today, weve now reached about 95 million monthly users, we have about 60 million pieces of content in our library, and it continues to keep growing. And then over time what weve realized is that the main things our authors and publishers wanted was more revenue. And we tried then to sell books, but it didn’t really work very well, but weve realized subscription was a very good way to help them make money, because that way we can make more money for them and we can get, give readers a really terrific experience that subscription offers. So that was what leads to us launching the subscription model, on top of the free service we previously had. So, now its a bit of a freemium model.Martin: What do you think, what are the reasons for you fast explosion in terms of when you launched this kind of product? Because Im pretty sure a lot of sellers think by themselves, I want to start the next marketplace, or a social network, whatever. What measures have you taken to grow that fast?Trip: I think there was a real user need for what were doing. I mean, there wasnt an easy way to put something, put a PDF online, and we filled that need and just given the viral nature the internet works, spreads really quickly nowadays. People, back then, we were on like the front page of sites like Digg and Reddit. Nowadays its more like word of mouth, I mean, Reddit is still kind of big, Reddits actually really big now, but its a little harder to launch a site on Reddit than it was, but now you can, theres Hacker News, there are people sharing things on Twitter or on Facebook, so just taking advantage of all those viral channels to basically get the word out there.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: Trip, lets talk about the corporate strategy. What do you think is the competitive advantage of Scribd nowadays?Trip: I think were really focused on two things. The first one is just having the worlds largest library of subscription content. So, for, we want to have a service that for one flat monthly price of 8.99 lets you read almost any kind of content you want to read. So, were, we have over 500.000 books right now, over 60 million user-generated documents, and were adding more all the time. So, we want to have the biggest, broadest and deepest library on the web and in the world, available via subscription. So, the first one is the size of the library, and the second one is just the user experience were building. Were building such a terrific experience for reading and reimagining the way reading should work and serving the needs of readers in ways tha t other competitors are not doing as well as we are. Were building a terrific experience for discovering new books and things to read. The subscription model really decreases the friction of starting a new book, but we are working by now with a really good recommendation engine, with really good editorial process that helps you discover books you want to read and also a really nice social layer around reading. So you can discover things to read trough your friends. So, were combining all of this together just to provide a really good experience for discovering things to read and it really just pleasant user experience overall. So, its really those two things, having the world’s largest library subscription content and a really good user experience for reading it, that differentiate the company.Martin: Trip, can you tell us a little bit more about the product strategy and what you think are some areas of development for your business?Trip: Under product specifically theres just a l ot we can do around book discovery. So, Im sure youve seen there are companies like Netflix that has really organized videos really well, where they actually tag all the videos by hand, so they can recommend very specific kinds of videos, or Pandora has a music genome project, where you can organize songs by the type of song they are, and were basically in the same thing for books. Were taking every single book and by hand generating tags for that book so we can really organize the books really well and make it really easy to discover books you want, based on your particular interests. So, theres a lot that were doing on that front, to make books much more discoverable, were also doing a lot on the social side of things, so we think social reading is, can be a really big thing. Weve already seen that happen with sites like Goodreads, but what we can do is we can actually combine the social experience with the actual reading experience of the content. And since were subscription, eve ryones reading the same books and the same products, you can make that experience really good. So, when youre reading something you can highlight it, comment on it and then your friends can see that activity. So, theres a lot we do to build a really differentiated social experience through our reading.Martin: Are you also analyzing, like for example, the reader behavior, so what types of books are they reading, or documents in general, and until what time they are reading as well what paragraph, and based on this giving some kind of recommendations what your peer group is reading?Trip: We collect a lot of data on how people are reading, we can see what parts of the book people are reading, which parts theyre reading faster and slower, we have to collect all of those because we use this data to pay to the publishers, based on the reading activity. So, we collect a lot of data on reading and we use that to make recommendations, to pay the publishers and to continue to improve the prod uct.Martin: Imagine Im an author and I want to publish my book, my PDF, whatever, via Scribd. Is there some kind of mechanism like with SEO, so how I can optimize and reach more people via your platform? I mean there is some kind of playing with algorithms, I guess.Trip: First of all, youd had to get your book published on platform. So, currently, youd have to work with one of the publishers we work with. Theres over 1000 of those, the probably the least friction ones with the self publishing platforms, like Smashwords, you can go there and get your book published to our platform very quickly. Eventually, we plan to open subscription to authors directly, but right now were working with publishers specifically. So, first you get the books up there and then, we do a really good job with the distribution at that point. Were very good at finding an audience for your books, by making it really searchable, making it SEOable, making it the paid sharable. But the more authors can promote th e books on their own, the better that will help with the promotion overall. So, if the books, if they can promote them on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, if they can embed the book on their blog, if they can just generally share the link, that just gets the content out there, it gets more links to it, increases the amount of traffic Google sends it, so the more authors can promote their books, the more that will increase the readership overall.Martin: What do you think of the idea of having this books not only as a read-only, but as an audio book? Because its, the thing is how you want to consume those content. Have you thought about having something like this, because I mean adding this as a plugin at the books that is also quite easy with the player?Trip: Its a really good idea, audio books are definitely in the rise, people are listening to them more and more, and there are, its a huge market, most people dont even realize what a big market it is. So, its definitely so mething were thinking about. And I think that by combining audio books with the book experience in subscription is just a really, it could be a really terrific experience for both reading and consuming audio books in the same product.MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: Trip, lets talk about the market development, in terms of publishing. There are several distributional platforms out there like Amazon, or Scribd, and there are also different kind of products. What is your take on the overall market development in those publishing industry?Trip: I think that theres, its a really interesting time, the shift to digital is so happening very quickly, because a lot of people are still reading on print and they are going to be switching to digital. So, the digital publishing market is growing very quickly and I think it will continue to grow. And I think that this entire shift from the ownership model to the access model that were pursuing is really exciting change, because previously the way it wor ked was, even in digital, it was still basically an ownership model, where you pay the publisher or the distributer and they give you a file in return for that. Were now, were shifting it at the access model where you pay for access to the library and then the publisher or the author gets paid when the books are actually read. So that creates huge changes in just the overall ecosystem. So, weve already seen very different data and how we borrow our reading through subscription. So, one thing weve seen is that with the subscription model people are reading a lot more than they were before, unless people are discovering differently, theyre rather than just searching for the book they want and read that, theyre browsing books and reading books they wouldnt have read otherwise. And the result of these changes is that the ecosystem were building is much more long tail. We drive much more distribution to books that were published 10 years ago than to books published really recently. So, i ts a much more long tail distribution than its typically seen in publishing. So, overall just bringing subscription to the industry is just a, it caused a lot of changes both for reading experience and for authors and I think youll see just a lot more general reading and a lot more authors and writers and books being published as a result of this.Martin: If you compare this what you call owned book market and then the kind of subscription based book market, do you think that by entering the subscription based book market that you grow the overall publishing market? Because, on the one end side, its definitely the quantity of reading books will increase, but the question should really like, whether the multiplication of quantity times €/$ per book will increase overall. What do you think?Trip: I definitely think so, because the way to get the market to grow is to get consumers to ultimately consume more, you want them to consume more and pay more and that expands the market. So, in the way we get consumers to read more is to by giving them better products. Its kind of amazing to me that the subscription model is coming to books last, it came to video and music before it came to books, so I think that this kind of model coming to books is just, as it gets larger, I think people will read more and it will just grow the market overall.Martin: Did you think of going after the education market? Because I can imagine having this kind of content and imagine some kind of pupils sitting in the lecture room and currently have all the physical books, which cost a lot of money, to just having on an iPad all the kind of digital books provided by Scribd, for example?Trip: You sort of where we are, we have a lot of students sharing their school papers, a lot of teachers putting up their course notes out there, and I mean there are a lot of users who are already students. And there are students that are reading the books they need to for class, if youre taking an English cla ss, youre going to have most of the books that youre going to need to read for class, so turns out we already are in that market. In terms of going into the professional textbook market, its definitely a market that were looking at, I think theres definitely a big opportunity there.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS In San Francisco, we meet co-founder and CEO of Scribd, Trip Adler. He shares his story how Scribd was founded and how the current business model works, as well as what the current plans for near future, and some advice for young entrepreneurs.The transcript of the interview is included below.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in San Francisco in the Scribd office. Trip, who are you and what do you do?Trip: My name is Trip Adler and I am the co-founder and CEO of Scribd.Martin: What did you do before you started this company?Trip: Well, I started right after college, so I guess going back to very beginning I was raised here in the Bay Area, in Palo Alto, and then I went to school on the east coast, to Harvard. I studied biophysics and then I right around my senior year I decided I want to start a company. So, started, kind of come up with my ideas, found a co-founder, went to YCombinator, and then it just went from there.Martin: Why didnt you start some company related to biophysic s?Trip: Its a good question. That was actually my original plan, and I realized that I just didnt, I would need a lot more time and school to get a biophysics company started, and meanwhile had a lot of ideas for internet companies, I knew Id get started really quickly. So that was, I was too excited to start internet company that I couldnt wait that long. So, I just decided to get started. Maybe in longer term I could go back to a biophysics company, but I think right now Im enjoying working in the internet space.Martin: And how did you decide which of those hundreds of ideas you wanted to pursue?Trip: We went through a period of time for maybe a year, year and a half, where we were just tried a bunch of different ideas. That was, I think for us a really important learning experience, because we would come up with an idea, maybe build it, test it, think about it. And that experience of trial and error really taught us a lot about just how to approach starting a company and how to a pproach different ideas. So, we went through several ideas, one of them was basically a lot like what Uber and Lyft are today, it was like a ride sharing service, coordinated over your phones. Turns out we was just way ahead of the time it was nearly make sense to pursue it. We also did a college classified site, we launched that at Harvard, we got it going, but we realized that wasnt really scalable so we moved on past that. Then we tried a bunch of other ideas, and then eventually Scribd came along. And that one just got a lot of things going right for it, so that was, ended up being the one that we stuck with.Martin: So you tested different business models and you stick with one with the most traction?Trip: It was a combination of what got early traction, what we thought was going to scale, what was a big opportunity, what would have a good business model, good user need, its a lot of those things combined. But traction is definitely an important one, if you cant get some tractio n early on, thats a sign that something is not working.BUSINESS MODELMartin: Lets talk about the business model, Trip. So, hows the current business model of Scribd working and how it might have been evolved over time?Trip: Currently, were mostly a subscription service. So, what we do is we let you read unlimited books and other kinds of written content for $8.99 per month. So you pay one flat monthly fee and then you can read any kind of content on whatever device you like, and we have the really nice experience for discovering things to read and having the social experience around reading. So, its kind of the Netflix or Spotify model, but for books. And our model is that we, consumers pay us for $8.99 and we make revenue that way and then we pay out publishers and authors based on the reading activity. So that way we have really entire ecosystem where the publishers and authors get paid and consumers can have really direct, terrific reading experience.Martin: When youre looking at publisher side, are you also working with bigger brand names or publishing houses, or is it more for the individuals only?Trip: Yeah, were working with We have over the thousand publishers using the platform and we work with some of the biggest publishers in the world, so we have both HarperCollins and Simon Schuster, selling their full backlist of books through our subscription, and we have some of the other big publishers selling books through the retail model at our site. But, were mostly focused on the subscription.Martin: Can you tell us a bit what kind of verticals in terms of the publishing books are working well and which are not working well, meaning that most people are not reading the specific kind of subsegment or vertical?Trip: Publishing is very broad, theres many different types of books that appeal to many different types of people. So we have many verticals that are working really well, we have a partnership with Lonely Planet to do travel books, and people read t ravel books, thats doing well, we have the Dummies series, so you can look for information within books, learn things in those books, we have all sorts of non-fiction, we have fiction, mysteries, thrillers, romance. Probably the verticals that are doing the best so far are the fiction and the romance, just because those readers are very various and they fit the subscription model really well, but were really growing across all the different verticals, and I think longer term we could have a lot of new, interesting use cases developed.Martin: And is the ground business model only digital, meaning that you dont deliver physical kind of publishing goods?Trip: Yeah, its all digital. Were completely digital company and we work with publishers and authors that publish their digital files and then we help provide an audience digitally and distribute the content digitally.Martin: Most users maybe know Scribd from the early days, so having some kind of platform where we can share PowerPoint presentations with each other. Can you tell us a little bit more about the beginnings of your startup? How did you grow and scale your company and user base?Trip: The way we got started was, I was having a conversation with my dad, whos a doctor at Stanford, and he had a medical paper that he wanted to get published, and he was talking about how in medical publishing it takes 18 months to get your paper published. So that gave us the idea that we can make a website that would let him really easily publish his paper on the web. And we could quickly broaden that to all kinds of written content so, medical papers, books, power point presentations, school papers, creative writing, any kind of written content, and any kind of content in document format, upload it to the web and then find an audience for it. So, we built that site, got a bit of a community going, just kind of through group force and just finding anyone we could find who would use it to upload their own content, and launch the site. And we had a very lucky launch where within three days we were one of the top 2000 websites on the internet. It was just very explosive launch. You see a lot of these companies doing it nowadays, because theyll get promotion in the App Store, or theyll get viral and put it on Facebook or something like that, but we were kind of one of the first companies that Ive seen really explode very quickly like that. And once we had that launched, we had a lot of readers come and then a small fraction of those readers would then upload their own content and that would bring more readers, and then some of those would upload and that created nice viral loop. So, that viral loop continued to grow, its still growing today, weve now reached about 95 million monthly users, we have about 60 million pieces of content in our library, and it continues to keep growing. And then over time what weve realized is that the main things our authors and publishers wanted was more revenue. And we tried then to sell books, but it didn’t really work very well, but weve realized subscription was a very good way to help them make money, because that way we can make more money for them and we can get, give readers a really terrific experience that subscription offers. So that was what leads to us launching the subscription model, on top of the free service we previously had. So, now its a bit of a freemium model.Martin: What do you think, what are the reasons for you fast explosion in terms of when you launched this kind of product? Because Im pretty sure a lot of sellers think by themselves, I want to start the next marketplace, or a social network, whatever. What measures have you taken to grow that fast?Trip: I think there was a real user need for what were doing. I mean, there wasnt an easy way to put something, put a PDF online, and we filled that need and just given the viral nature the internet works, spreads really quickly nowadays. People, back then, we were on like the fro nt page of sites like Digg and Reddit. Nowadays its more like word of mouth, I mean, Reddit is still kind of big, Reddits actually really big now, but its a little harder to launch a site on Reddit than it was, but now you can, theres Hacker News, there are people sharing things on Twitter or on Facebook, so just taking advantage of all those viral channels to basically get the word out there.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: Trip, lets talk about the corporate strategy. What do you think is the competitive advantage of Scribd nowadays?Trip: I think were really focused on two things. The first one is just having the worlds largest library of subscription content. So, for, we want to have a service that for one flat monthly price of 8.99 lets you read almost any kind of content you want to read. So, were, we have over 500.000 books right now, over 60 million user-generated documents, and were adding more all the time. So, we want to have the biggest, broadest and deepest library on the web a nd in the world, available via subscription. So, the first one is the size of the library, and the second one is just the user experience were building. Were building such a terrific experience for reading and reimagining the way reading should work and serving the needs of readers in ways that other competitors are not doing as well as we are. Were building a terrific experience for discovering new books and things to read. The subscription model really decreases the friction of starting a new book, but we are working by now with a really good recommendation engine, with really good editorial process that helps you discover books you want to read and also a really nice social layer around reading. So you can discover things to read trough your friends. So, were combining all of this together just to provide a really good experience for discovering things to read and it really just pleasant user experience overall. So, its really those two things, having the world’s largest librar y subscription content and a really good user experience for reading it, that differentiate the company.Martin: Trip, can you tell us a little bit more about the product strategy and what you think are some areas of development for your business?Trip: Under product specifically theres just a lot we can do around book discovery. So, Im sure youve seen there are companies like Netflix that has really organized videos really well, where they actually tag all the videos by hand, so they can recommend very specific kinds of videos, or Pandora has a music genome project, where you can organize songs by the type of song they are, and were basically in the same thing for books. Were taking every single book and by hand generating tags for that book so we can really organize the books really well and make it really easy to discover books you want, based on your particular interests. So, theres a lot that were doing on that front, to make books much more discoverable, were also doing a lot on the social side of things, so we think social reading is, can be a really big thing. Weve already seen that happen with sites like Goodreads, but what we can do is we can actually combine the social experience with the actual reading experience of the content. And since were subscription, everyones reading the same books and the same products, you can make that experience really good. So, when youre reading something you can highlight it, comment on it and then your friends can see that activity. So, theres a lot we do to build a really differentiated social experience through our reading.Martin: Are you also analyzing, like for example, the reader behavior, so what types of books are they reading, or documents in general, and until what time they are reading as well what paragraph, and based on this giving some kind of recommendations what your peer group is reading?Trip: We collect a lot of data on how people are reading, we can see what parts of the book people are reading, whic h parts theyre reading faster and slower, we have to collect all of those because we use this data to pay to the publishers, based on the reading activity. So, we collect a lot of data on reading and we use that to make recommendations, to pay the publishers and to continue to improve the product.Martin: Imagine Im an author and I want to publish my book, my PDF, whatever, via Scribd. Is there some kind of mechanism like with SEO, so how I can optimize and reach more people via your platform? I mean there is some kind of playing with algorithms, I guess.Trip: First of all, youd had to get your book published on platform. So, currently, youd have to work with one of the publishers we work with. Theres over 1000 of those, the probably the least friction ones with the self publishing platforms, like Smashwords, you can go there and get your book published to our platform very quickly. Eventually, we plan to open subscription to authors directly, but right now were working with publishe rs specifically. So, first you get the books up there and then, we do a really good job with the distribution at that point. Were very good at finding an audience for your books, by making it really searchable, making it SEOable, making it the paid sharable. But the more authors can promote the books on their own, the better that will help with the promotion overall. So, if the books, if they can promote them on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, if they can embed the book on their blog, if they can just generally share the link, that just gets the content out there, it gets more links to it, increases the amount of traffic Google sends it, so the more authors can promote their books, the more that will increase the readership overall.Martin: What do you think of the idea of having this books not only as a read-only, but as an audio book? Because its, the thing is how you want to consume those content. Have you thought about having something like this, because I mean adding this as a plugin at the books that is also quite easy with the player?Trip: Its a really good idea, audio books are definitely in the rise, people are listening to them more and more, and there are, its a huge market, most people dont even realize what a big market it is. So, its definitely something were thinking about. And I think that by combining audio books with the book experience in subscription is just a really, it could be a really terrific experience for both reading and consuming audio books in the same product.MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: Trip, lets talk about the market development, in terms of publishing. There are several distributional platforms out there like Amazon, or Scribd, and there are also different kind of products. What is your take on the overall market development in those publishing industry?Trip: I think that theres, its a really interesting time, the shift to digital is so happening very quickly, because a lot of people are still reading on print and they are going to be switching to digital. So, the digital publishing market is growing very quickly and I think it will continue to grow. And I think that this entire shift from the ownership model to the access model that were pursuing is really exciting change, because previously the way it worked was, even in digital, it was still basically an ownership model, where you pay the publisher or the distributer and they give you a file in return for that. Were now, were shifting it at the access model where you pay for access to the library and then the publisher or the author gets paid when the books are actually read. So that creates huge changes in just the overall ecosystem. So, weve already seen very different data and how we borrow our reading through subscription. So, one thing weve seen is that with the subscription model people are reading a lot more than they were before, unless people are discovering differently, theyre rather than just searching for the book they want and rea d that, theyre browsing books and reading books they wouldnt have read otherwise. And the result of these changes is that the ecosystem were building is much more long tail. We drive much more distribution to books that were published 10 years ago than to books published really recently. So, its a much more long tail distribution than its typically seen in publishing. So, overall just bringing subscription to the industry is just a, it caused a lot of changes both for reading experience and for authors and I think youll see just a lot more general reading and a lot more authors and writers and books being published as a result of this.Martin: If you compare this what you call owned book market and then the kind of subscription based book market, do you think that by entering the subscription based book market that you grow the overall publishing market? Because, on the one end side, its definitely the quantity of reading books will increase, but the question should really like, whet her the multiplication of quantity times €/$ per book will increase overall. What do you think?Trip: I definitely think so, because the way to get the market to grow is to get consumers to ultimately consume more, you want them to consume more and pay more and that expands the market. So, in the way we get consumers to read more is to by giving them better products. Its kind of amazing to me that the subscription model is coming to books last, it came to video and music before it came to books, so I think that this kind of model coming to books is just, as it gets larger, I think people will read more and it will just grow the market overall.Martin: Did you think of going after the education market? Because I can imagine having this kind of content and imagine some kind of pupils sitting in the lecture room and currently have all the physical books, which cost a lot of money, to just having on an iPad all the kind of digital books provided by Scribd, for example?Trip: You sort of where we are, we have a lot of students sharing their school papers, a lot of teachers putting up their course notes out there, and I mean there are a lot of users who are already students. And there are students that are reading the books they need to for class, if youre taking an English class, youre going to have most of the books that youre going to need to read for class, so turns out we already are in that market. In terms of going into the professional textbook market, its definitely a market that were looking at, I think theres definitely a big opportunity there.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURSMartin: Trip, most of our readers are first time entrepreneurs and people who think about starting their own company. What advice could you give them, especially what would you have done differently if you had to start all over again?Trip: This is a big question! Its.., and I think I change my answer to this about every 3 months, because Im always learning and I think right when I feel like Ive figured everything there is out about entrepreneurship, I realize that I actually was completely wrong and that feeling that theres something else I have to learn, and that seems to keep happening and I imagine it will probably keep happening for your whole career. So, I guess that would be my first piece of advice, which is to just keep learning and to just, you just realize how much there is to know and just like how long it takes to get at building companies. I mean its not, building company is not, the media often makes it out to be this kind of thing where you start your app, and then Facebook buys it for a million dollars a year later. And that does happen occasionally, but thats really kind of the exception, anyone can build a really big company, its just that if you get lucky it takes time and learning. So, if you try the first time and you dont get it right, even if it takes you a year of trying something or a couple of years, eventually youll get there if you just keep tr ying, if youre just constantly learning and constantly trying, youll eventually figure out something that will, users will like and will scale and get the rest attention, and become a big business.Martin: And what when your little brother asks you Trip, what should I do and what shouldnt I do when I start a company? What would you answer him?Trip: The first thing would be just to get started. Thats actually probably the hardest step, which is just doing anything at all, because most people are just afraid to get started. So, you need just sort of like take that take that first step and sort of have some confidence at what youre doing. So you need to be very confident and aggressive when you do things, but at the same time just be humble and learn as you go along, because probably that first step that you take youll make a mistake and do something wrong, so you need to just learn from that, and then change course and get to the next step. So, it would just be basically get started an d be really determined and learn as you go along.Martin: What advice can you give young entrepreneurs when they think about financing their company?Trip: First of all, I think people often think of financing their company as the big challenge, but its, or the think that they do to be successful, but thats not really true. You often need a lot less money than you think you do. And you can make a lot of progress without much financing, and you should only raise money if you really have a use for the money, because Especially nowadays, theres so many companies in Silicon Valley that raise a lot of money and they just spend it all and then they didnt really do anything with that money. Thats a really wrong way to go down. So, my general advice, which is a little bit kind of what most people say, which is raise, delay raising money and raise less than you need, because that will kind of force you to really build a good company. If you do want to raise money, the best thing you could do i s just build a good business. If you have a really good business with real user need and real traction, a real business model, investors will come and its pretty easy. And if youre having problem tracking investors, it probably means you should just focus on building your business, not necessarily spend more time trying to attract the investors.Martin: What advice would you give on how to manage your time focusing on business and focusing on raising money? Because I mean some of the startups just focus six months on raising money, while neglecting the business and the other guys are only building the business, and not fueling the company with cash, for example.Trip: You definitely want to spend more time building the business. If you do want to raise money, it does take time, usually, you do need to get investors comfortable with giving your company money, you need to spend some time going through the whole process, but the best thing you want to do is to either, if you do fundraise , to just go 100% into fundraising boat and then get it done quickly. So, you want to be building the business, then you decide to raise money, go raise money and as soon as youre done go back to building the business. You dont want to be spending six months on fundraising, especially early on, maybe if its an IPO or something, you could spend some more time on it, but on the early on it should really be a much shorter period of time than six months.Martin: Trip, thank you very much for your time.Trip: Well, thank you.Martin: And next time you are thinking about starting a company, you can read on our website the practical guidance and in addition some kind of presentations on Scribd. Thank you very much.

Philip II of Macedonia Essays - 2234 Words

Philip II of Macedonia became king when he was 23 years old in very dire situations in 359 B.C.E. (Sekunda 4). There were threats from barbarians north of Macedonia, and threats from the Greek southern cities (4). Philip had to act quickly to gain control so he needed to create an army (4). He had spent time in Thebes as a hostage and gained military knowledge from Epaminondad, one of the greatest generals of the day (Philip). He armed his military with a sarissa, a pike that, at about 16 feet long, had a greater reach than Greek Weapons (Philip). This weapon made his army very powerful and allowed them to strike first (Philip). In 338 B.C.E., Philip defeated Chaeronea, one of the Greek city-states (Heckel 2). The League of†¦show more content†¦Philip and Cleopatra soon have a daughter and name her Europa (34). Philip is preparing for his invasion, and without a male heir to the throne, everyone is concerned about what will happen to the empire if he is killed in battle (35 ). Philip follows the advice of Demaratus and sends for his son Alexander (35). Almost as soon as Alexander returns to Pella, Philip is offered a proposal of marriage between his mentally handicapped son, Arrhidaeus, and the daughter of the Carian throne (35). Philip would gain a key Greek city and agrees, but he is not overly impressed with the offer (35). Alexander goes behind his father and sends Thesalus to negotiate the marriage with him instead (35). Philip finds out and tells Alexander that he has showed little hope for being a worthy king (36). Alexander has just returned to the empire and does not want to create a new rift with Philip so he readily admits he had behaved imprudently (36). Philip has Thesalus sent home in chains and banishes four of Alexanders friends (36). With all of the family distractions, Philip tries to focus on his plans for the invasion. He does have one other family matter to take care of before he leaves. Philip fears that Olympias brother, Alexande r of Epirus, will not keep his allegiance with him since he divorced Olympias (36). He arranges the marriage of his daughter Cleopatra to Alexander to secure hisShow MoreRelatedPhilip II of Macedonia Essay1913 Words   |  8 PagesPhilip II of Macedonia became king when he was 23 years old in very dire situations in 359 B.C.E. (Sekunda 4). There were threats from barbarians north of Macedonia, and threats from the cunning Greek southern cities (4). Philip had to act quickly to gain control so he needed to create an army (4). He had spent time in Thebes as a hostage and gained military knowledge from the work of Epaminondas, one of the greatest generals of the day (Philip II). He armed his military with a sarissa, a pikeRead MoreAlexander IIi : The Great949 Words   |  4 PagesAlexander taking the throne, his father Philip II was king of Macedonia, which as the time was possible predominantly pastoral and rural. 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He was king of Macedonia, a military genius, and the greatest conqueror of all time-to name a few. Alexander was taught by many great minds, perhaps most responsible for his greatness was Aristotle. Alexander was given many hard tasks and tremendous responsibilities as a child and teen, which he carried out with ease. As an adult king, Alexander ruled over Macedonia and kept it safe from invasion and rebellion. He then sought to conquer asRead MoreThe War Of The Persian War854 Words   |  4 Pageswars. This war was the first b ig war between the persian empire and Spartans/Athens. After the Persian war, the Peloponnesian war took place, which was led by sparta. Than in Ancient Greece there were two main conquerors, Philip II and Alexander. As they are father and son, Philip II did a lot less than his son Alexander. Alexander wanted to fulfill his father s visions, which he exceeded his expectations. The trojan war took place in 1250 B.C.E. As this war has little evidence that it happened,Read MoreAlexander The Great Essay846 Words   |  4 PagesKonark Raithatha Alexander the Great Acted as ruler of Macedonia from 336 to 323 B.C. Alexander the Great unified Greece, regenerated the Corinthian League and occupied the Persian Territory. Alexander the Great was born in the Pella region of Macedonia on July 20, 356 B.C., to parents King Philip II of Macedon and Queen Olympia, daughter of King Neoptolemus. The youthful leader and his sibling were upraised in Pella s royal court. While growing up, alexander the dark-eyed and curly-headed hardlyRead MoreAlexander The Great : Report1250 Words   |  5 PagesTanner Johnson â€Æ' In 356 B.C.E., a young boy was born who would one day rule almost the entire known world. His name was Alexander III, eventually Alexander the Great. His father was Philip II, king of Macedonia. Philip himself had already transformed Macedonia into a military might to be reckoned with, before Philip came into power, a historian by the name of Arrian of Nicomedia said â€Å"the Macedonians were wandering about without resources, many of them clothed in sheepskins and pasturing small flocks