Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I am the Founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. And in this interview we are going to find out how listening to your users will help you evolve your company into a bigger opportunity. That’s what happened to today’s guest. Last time I did an interview with the co-founder of Scribd. It is a different one that I’ve got on today. The company was all about document sharing. Upload a file online and instead of showing a PDF in its own app, you can show it inline on a web page. That’s what they were doing, and they were doing it phenomenally.
But today I went on Scribd, and I noticed they are doing something completely different. They have evolved into building the library of the future. It lets you access unlimited e-books and audio-books, all for $8.99 per month. I’ve watched this evolution happen from a distance. Today, we are going to find out how they did it.
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Trip Adler, the co-founder of Scribd, welcome to Mixergy.
Trip: Thank you. It’s good to be here today.
Andrew: So it was Tikhon, your co-founder who was on here. You guys built a phenomenal company doing document sharing. Before you decided to get into books, do you remember how big the business was?
Trip: Well, yeah, definitely. Before we really got into books, we started in 2007 with Tikhon not only as my co-founder but also my roommate for a number of years. We had this idea, along with Jared, who is currently our CTO. The three of us were making a simple tool to allow anyone to take any kind of document or reading content and publish it on the web and find an audience. And that concept had worked quite well. We grew our library to over 65 million written works. That continues to grow really nicely. It currently reaches an audience of about 100 million monthly uniques. And that also continues to grow.
Andrew: The document sharing part, 100 million monthly uniques.
Trip: Yes. So definitely a huge amount of content and a huge audience and that business was quite successful. We were even quite profitable. In 2012 we had a really nice profit.
Andrew: What kind of profit were you guys doing back then? I didn’t realize you were profitable on that.
Trip: It was millions, yeah.
Andrew: Millions in profit. Can you say what your revenue was?
Trip: It was in the tens of millions.
Andrew: And the revenue was coming from both advertising and also document sales, right?
Trip: And subscriptions.
Andrew: And subscriptions. What did people get in their subscription back then?
Trip: It was unlimited printing, downloading, and an ad-free experience.
Andrew: I see.
Trip: So we had those three business models, and we really thought actually people selling documents was going to be the biggest opportunity. We worked with all the big book publishers to try to sell their books, but it never worked terribly well. And meanwhile, we saw that subscriptions just continued to grow, and we weren’t even really trying. The publishers really wanted a new source of revenue, and our readers apparently kept wanting to subscribe for content.
So we had this idea, well, what we could do is partner with the book publishers to put their books behind a subscription, let them have this new access to this new revenue source. Meanwhile, we can develop a really great subscription reading experience for our readers. And that is kind of how this concept of a subscription model for books was born. Now what we do is we offer unlimited books, audio-books, user generated documents, and more kinds of content. All for one flat monthly fee, and you can read it on whatever device you like.
Andrew: Were you starting to see that the use of the document sharing app was going down?
Trip: No, it’s never really gone down. It continues to steadily climb year over year.
Andrew: And so, despite that, you said what else can we sell on the site and you shifted to talking to publishers. Why didn’t talking to publishers help? Why was it that they weren’t interested in selling books individually?
Trip: Well, we had tried and we’d already been working on book publishers. And they just wanted a way to reach a new audience and a new kind of distribution. This kind of solved their needs, and it solved the needs of our readers. We still have free Scribd. It works exactly the way it always has, but there is free Scribd and then there is paid Scribd for $8.99 per month. You can use it for free and then after a while if you want to upgrade.
Andrew: I get it, for $8.99 a month. It’s a great freaking deal. You’re even beating Amazon on price, right? So it’s a fantastic deal, but what I’m curious about, as an entrepreneur trying to study you guys, is the change. How did you realize that this was going to be the business? What you’re telling me is it became a slow evolution. You discovered that one thing wasn’t working, but another thing was working. So I’m curious, why didn’t selling books work for you guys?
Trip: It’s a good question, and I think it surprised us a little bit too. I think the main reason it works, it is just the nature of our audience. We had an audience that was trained to use us as a free product and turning a free product, selling it into a store front was just very hard for us. I know there are other companies that have done this successfully, but it was just very difficult for us. When we asked them to subscribe, it was a one-time purchase. And then they would just keep using it as they were before. They would browse and discover and just read what they wanted to.
So it was just really easy to get our audience to subscribe for content and very difficult to get them to actually buy individual pieces. And it works much better. The fact is our subscriber numbers are growing extremely quickly, and then once people subscribe, our retention numbers are very good. People stick around and have a much better experience for discovering books and finding new things to read. What’s great about subscription is that it really changes the discovery dynamics of content because once you’re subscribed you don’t need to hit a pay wall every single time you want to sample a piece of content. You can just read what you want, and the result is that people read more. Their reading is much more discovery and browsing driven, and is much more a long tail. We have a much more long tail reach.
Andrew: Let me understand how you did it. Because I want to understand the process because that’s what people come to Mixergy for. When you guys were at Y Combinator, I know that you heard speakers come in and the ones that really broke down their process, guys like Paul Buhite, who explained the way that they built businesses were so much more interesting than people that didn’t. So your process, was it talking to customers? How did you understand what customers wanted?
Trip: It’s a combination of talking to customers and looking at data.
Andrew: Break it down. How did you talk to customers that helped you understand that this is what they were looking for?
Trip: In our case, there are two groups of customers. There’s the people publishing and selling content, and then there’s the people reading content. So for the case of people publishing and selling content, the authors and publishers, we were in close touch with the people who were publishing content on our site, and it was pretty obvious what they wanted. They wanted more readers and more revenue, right? That’s typically what any author or publisher is going to want. So in one respect we are thinking, how are we going to get more readers and revenue for them. We were thinking that maybe a subscription model is a good way to do that.
And then on the readers side, I think it was really data and trial and error. We did a really good job building a free audience of readers and when we tried selling content to that audience, they didn’t really buy it. But when we offered a subscription model, a freemium model, they tended to pay for it and then use it a lot. So we kind of just connected those two groups. And once we had this idea, we just started very iteratively, we just went one step at a time and we started on the publishers side, started working with very small publishers. We got two relatively small publishers based in San Francisco on the model just to get started with this new kind of business model.
And then on the readers side, we just started to gradually tweak the product towards more of a subscription model. And within the first few months of doing this, we were getting real traction both for the publishers and among the readers. Then it became a matter of just scaling it up, and then once we signed our first really large publisher, it was Harper Collins, that’s when it really took off.
Andrew: When you’re saying you evolved the product early on towards subscription, do you remember some of those early tweaks? Some of the early iterations? What were they?
Trip: We’ve always had a very big reading audience, so simply just putting the content up. The first two publishers we had in subscription were this one business book publisher called Berrett Koehler and a spiritual publisher named Inner Traditions. We just basically to our already freemium users, we just took their full catalog of books and made the full text freely available to our subscribers. And we just watched the subscribers just start to read them. I think we really noticed we had something when there was this one guy in New Zealand who read over 100 books in one week on our service.
When you see that kind of stuff, you realize that type of book reading behavior is not happening on other book reading platforms. That’s definitely not happening with physical books or with the standard digital retail models, but it was happening on our model. And we had just done a few small tweaks to do that. We partnered with one small publisher and just started to show the books to our existing user base. So that was really just the first step was to get that first core of active power readers. And then it just became … We started iterating. We started getting more and more publishers and then making the product better for discovering and reading books.
Andrew: What was the deal that you made with the first publisher? How do you break down a monthly fixed revenue fee with a publisher?
Trip: So the first idea was to just take all the revenue and distribute to the publishers based on usage. But we went and we talked to publishers about that, and none of them were too excited about that idea. That’s when we came to the idea where we said, instead of paying you a percentage or pool, we will just pay you every single time a book is read. So it’s almost like the a la carte model that is already in place. We just flipped it from paying for ownership of the file to paying for access to the file, and then we actually pay the publisher when the content is read. So the way it works is all the books are available as a subscriber to you effectively for free or the subscription fee, and then when you actually read the book, we pay the publisher as if they sold it.
When we started with that model, which we determined pretty simply just from talking to the publishers, publishers liked it right from the beginning, and we were able to sign up a few dozen right away. Now we already have three of the big five. In the publishing world, there is five big publishers, and we have three of the big five signed on. We just launched actually MacMillan a couple weeks ago. And we are getting just more and more momentum with publishers. As we get more publishers, it brings more readers. We return more revenue to the publishers, and it just gets the cycle going.
Andrew: And so, it’s not when the reader finishes a whole book. How much of a book does a reader need to go through before you guys have to pay?
Trip: It depends on the book and the publisher. For fiction, there is usually a threshold. So when the reader hits a certain threshold, we pay as if they sold it. For non-fiction, we will actually do partial payments. So let’s say, it’s a travel book or a recipe book, Let’s say, you only get one recipe out of the recipe book. We might pay the publisher for a piece of the total price of the book for the reader getting that value out of part of the book. So it really depends on the book.
Andrew: Do you ever take a big… I guess the risk was that you might end up paying more than your audience was paying you, right? Because you were on the hook to pay. If they end up reading a lot of books, you could have been out.
Trip: That is the risk, but the nice thing about subscription is that people tend to read a lot more. They tend to read very different books, and ultimately on average, they are willing to pay a premium for that experience. So we’ve been able to make it work quite well from a profitability perspective.
Andrew: I didn’t know that you guys… I was looking at the pre-interview notes and you told April Dykeman that you got your first customers by contacting them individually, by emailing people one at a time.
Trip: Yeah, back when we first started the company in 2007, that was how we got the first 100 users. We found people on the internet who looked like they had a need to publish some kind of writing on the web, and we would email them one at a time and convince them to use the service. When we then switched everyone to the subscription model, it was kind of the same thing. We reached out to some small local publishers, got them using the service, and then just kept working our way up.
Andrew: One at a time. And then when it came to getting subscribers, you just had a built-in audience so you can reach out to them, right?
Trip: Yeah, in our business, as long as we have the content, either free or available via subscription, that brings either free users or it brings subscription users. These days, content goes viral pretty naturally, so if you have the right product and the right content, generally the audience comes organically. We spent very little on marketing. Almost all of our growth is organic.
Andrew: So I mentioned that I did an interview with Tikhon, and I pushed the interview towards how he co-founded Scribd with you guys. I asked him why he wanted to partner with you and he said, incredibly, he said you and your co-founder, Jared, were incredibly quick at developing and turning things around. Let me ask you the same thing about him. What was it about him that made you want to work with him?
Trip: Tikhon is an extremely smart guy. He’s one of the smartest guys I know. He has really good vision, and really good ideas, and really good energy. He always brought a lot of really good ideas to the table and just brought an energy to the team. He helped recruit a lot of our early people. I think out of our first 10 hires, he recruited almost all of them. He was just a recruiting machine. So he helped us with recruiting, raising money, the vision, a lot of things. I mean, when you’re a co-founder you kind of do everything so it wasn’t really one thing. We were very close together for a few years.
Andrew: You went to high school together, right?
Trip: Same high school, different years. We didn’t actually meet until Y Combinator years later, but we did go to the same high school.
Andrew: I see. Do you guys still talk? Are you guys still close?
Trip: All the time, yeah. We are getting dinner, I think, Thursday night, so yeah.
Andrew: I mentioned his name and I thought, well, did I just mention a guy who you guys have a rift with? How do I pick up on that? So I said, you know what/ I’m just going to ask right up front.
Trip: It’s a small community. There’s a whole bunch of companies from early days of Y Combinator who really stay close in touch with each other. It’s the companies from the early days and the current Y Combinator companies, but I think, especially a lot of us who started companies at similar times at Y Combinator back in the early days, are still in close touch with each other now.
Andrew: How did you know that Scribd, the original idea, would be the one that worked? You guys considered so many different ideas including, I think, there was going to be a Craigslist for colleges. How did you know that this one was the one?
Trip: The first idea we actually started working on is basically exactly what Uber is today. We were, at least, five years too early, and it turns out being too early is as good as being wrong. So that was kind of the first idea. We went through a bunch of ideas. We did Craigslist for colleges when we were at Y Combinator, so actually it was a totally different idea we worked on at Y-Combinator. And that was something we actually launched at Harvard. We actually got moderate traction at Harvard. The problem was that we couldn’t figure out how to scale it to other schools. So we ended up moving on from that idea.
And Scribd, I think it was a combination of a few things. I think we saw a really big opportunity and the chance to grow it and scale it. We saw a real market need for it, and when we launched it we had a lot of traction. What was really nice about Scribd as compared to other ideas is we launched it and it became a really successful website pretty much overnight. Within 48 hours it was already a top thousand Elixir ranked site, and it was growing from there. There was a nice viral loop in place that allowed to keep growing.
Andrew: And the viral loop, of course, was somebody embeds a Scribd doc on their website, and they are also telling the world about Scribd because all the readers get to see Scribd and understand what it is.
Trip: Exactly. People come and they see it and then they come and upload their own content and then that brings just more readers which that brings more uploaders and it creates this nice viral loop. Similarly, nowadays we bring more and more revenue to publishers and authors, and then that gets more subscribers, and then that gets more publishers and authors to contribute their content. It’s an ecosystem where you balance both the needs of the people who are reading content and the people publishing the content.
Andrew: Where do you get your users? Is it all people who come across the documents, or do you guys do any advertising?
Trip: We are doing advertising, but it’s pretty small for us in the grand scheme of things. We reach 100 million monthly users through the document service and a small fraction of those convert to paying subscribers every single day. And that’s the bulk of our new subscribers.
Andrew: Oh, I see it now actually. I see some Google ads here, free e-books, people are searching for e-reader, free e-books. I see that a lot. Every time I type in the name of a book that I’m curious about, the very next thing I see in the google suggest bar is, free PDF. People really want to see a free copy of the book.
Trip: Yeah, people are always looking for discounts on things, and I think we figured out a model that gives people a really good offer economically when they get unlimited books for one flat monthly price and also gives them a really good value prop where once they pay, they can just discover and read whatever they like. It’s a great way to discover new things once we get them in the door.
Andrew: One of my interview coaches said nobody cares about an interviewee unless they have a reason to root for them, unless they hear about the challenges. So I want to ask you about one of your challenges. You told April in the pre-interview that scaling the company was a challenge. Two thousand eleven you guys also launched an app, and it just didn’t really work out. Can you talk about that? What was the vision for the app?
Trip: Just to talk generally about challenges, there have been a lot of challenges. You can kind of point to any point in time, even now, there are always a ton of challenges that we are dealing with. I think what I was talking about before we had one year where it was kind of tough. The strategy we were pursuing wasn’t really working. We were kind of running low on cash that year, and it was just kind of a tough year. So what we had done specifically was Scribd started out as a place for people to publish content. We were always focused on being more of a reading destination, right? We didn’t want to just be a widget or an embed for documents or be a destination for Google. We wanted to be a real destination.
So we wanted to build a standalone app for reading, and the vision was it would be one app for basically reading anything you wanted to read. We’d have books, and we’d have all other kinds of written content. Magazines, news, and it’s actually a lot like what FlipBoard has evolved into. We launched this app and we decided to rebrand at the same time, or launch a new brand or whatever you want to call it. I think that was kind of a mistake.
Andrew: Was this Float?
Trip: It was Float, yeah. While it was a good name, it was kind of confusing on what we were trying to do because rebranding at the same time was kind of a mistake. The app just didn’t get the traction we were hoping for, and it was kind of a new brand and business model. There was just not much sense behind it, so we kind of shut it down. And it was tricky because we just got distracted by it. We wasted a lot of time. We got away from the core strategy. It was just a waste of time for six months or so. But the fortunate thing is that we learned a lot from that experience and we quickly cut it out and we got focused on profitability. And actually, profitability was quite easy to achieve once we focused on it.
And we went from one year, we were burning through a lot of cash when we were trying to launch Float, to a year later when we were making millions of dollars of profit the next year. So it ended up being a really good learning experience. It was tough to change the strategy around a lot and waste some time and some capital…
Andrew: Was Jason Kincaid right in the way he described it in his post on TechCrunch? It was going to be the Netflix for reading?
Trip: Well, we’ve always been kind of focused on that kind of direction. We’ve always been trying to become a destination for readers, and we’ve always been trying to get the subscription model to work. Fortunately, we’ve really gotten it working nowadays. Now we can actually point to it working. I mean, for some of our book publishers, we are actually the third largest revenue source behind Amazon and i-books. And those numbers are growing quite fast. So I think we’ve finally pulled off that vision. But yeah, we’ve been at it for a while with a few false starts.
Andrew: And then you guys closed it. Was TechCrunch also right, one more question about Float, was TechCrunch right when they said that Yahoo was going to buy it and Yahoo walked away.
Trip: It’s so funny to see how the press writes these things and hear about it years later. Yeah, Yahoo approached us about acquiring it, We had some conversations. I don’t really think it was that serious at all. If you’re in our situation, big companies are reaching out constantly, talking about acquisitions. That’s just part of building a startup in Silicon Valley these days. I think Paul Graham just wrote an essay on this. His advice was, when the corp dev guys reach out, just don’t talk to them unless you really want to sell the company. That’s just how it always works. I don’t know why that one got picked up by TechCrunch, it just did for some reason.
Andrew: But it wasn’t a connection. It wasn’t like Yahoo wanted to buy. You guys couldn’t pull a deal off, and as a result, Yahoo walked away and you had to shut it down and got depressed.
Trip: No, it was more like we launched it, we did a meeting with Yahoo, and that was it. It sounds a lot more dramatic the way that TechCrunch put it. That would have been more fun, but it wasn’t really that special of an event.
Andrew: They are really good at making things dramatic, especially back when Michael Errington was there. Boy, things would really heat up for anything.
Trip: I remember those days, although Michael Errington gave us a lot of TechCrunch posts in early days, so I give him a lot of credit for that. Our first post was on TechCrunch, which really got the company started. So.
Andrew: And then it took off and I think it did cover that post on TechCrunch and then TechCrunch used you guys to embed PDF files back when that’s all you did.
Trip: They were the first ones to start embedding PDFs. So they got that started.
Andrew: Yeah, that was fantastic. You said, even today, you guys go through trouble. Today you look like a happy-go-lucky guy. Everything is working out well, revenues is coming in, profits are coming in, you’ve got this new product. What’s a challenge to you?
Trip: And we just raised the funding round just a few weeks ago. We announced we raised 22 million from Coastal Ventures. I think they see the opportunity that they were going after and we are just in the mode of scaling it up. And we are real excited to get Keith Reboy [SP] involved. He is now our new board observer. He’s been a really terrific guy, so we are really thrilled to have him involved.
Andrew: He’s amazing. Is it true that you took some money off the table for yourself too?
Trip: You like these direct questions. We have not sold very much, we are very much in a long-term build mode. I think that the opportunity we are going after is huge, and we are just focused on building.
Andrew: I see. How much did you take? Can you say that?
Trip: We pay ourselves pretty modestly here. There are many people at this company who are paid much better than the founders. So that’s the way we like to do things.
Andrew: You know what? I’ll tell you, the way that I phrased that question instantly told me I wasn’t going to get the answer I was looking for. Of course, you should never ask a tough question that’s a “Can I ask you that”. That’s a problem.
Trip: Well, what is your salary?
Andrew: You know what, frankly not very much. Hang on a second. I’m trying to figure out. Something like I take… that’s a really good question, now you’re making me sweat. It’s not that much.
Trip: They are not politically correct questions. You know like …
Andrew: Really? The thing is, you never know what people feel …
Trip: It would be nice if we could talk about this stuff openly, but it’s not in our culture, you know? Maybe we should change the culture. Steve Jobs tried to do that in the early days, where they had this comp structure where everything was public on the wall, so that everyone’s salary, every detail of the company was public. Which would be really cool to do, but it’s just really hard to pull off, you know?
Andrew: Have you tried being open about something and realized, you know, this just isn’t working. It works great in the books, it works great in theory, but not in reality? What did you try to do? What did you try to get open about that didn’t work?
Trip: To get open about?
Andrew: I was wondering if you had a bad experience being excessively open and realized that this isn’t really practical.
Trip: It’s a good question. I feel like when I was really young starting out I was much more open about everything. When you’re in my position and you have a little bit of a bigger team, you have to be a little bit careful about things you say. One thing I noticed, if I say one thing that is kind of like an off hand idea, it will actually start to change the direction of the company and you have to be careful about that. You want to be really careful and deliberate with what you say, because what you say does get repeated throughout the company, and you want to make sure that what you say, you really mean, and people actually take action on it. Because if you’re not careful about that, you won’t have a really clear focused direction for the company.
Andrew: Even here in my little operation, I realize that that’s true. I remember saying to someone, to Emory who was here, we were having trouble with someone. I said, we should just stop working with them, and she took that seriously. Like that’s the end of it, that means that if someone has a problem, if someone makes a mistake, we’re just done working with them completely. And I didn’t realize that just being upset in public or being upset and venting could send somebody in a wrong direction. Or give them the wrong direction about how we work.
Trip: Yeah, and venting never accomplishes anything, right? Having a positive tone and a positive outlook on what you’re working on is really important in a tech company. It is really easy to poke holes in what you’re working on or your strategy. What’s really hard is to kind of connect all the dots and actually … When the outlook looks kind of hazy and you’re not really sure how to get somewhere, but still to stick with that and persevere and figure it out as you go along. That’s a lot harder and it takes a positive outlook to achieve that.
Andrew: I Googled you and saxophone and I saw you on the street with a saxophone playing for money, I guess, somewhere here on Market street probably in San Francisco. You used to do that?
Trip: I did. That was my first job. I used to play saxophone professionally, both gigs. I would play at restaurants and weddings and then occasionally actually on the street for money. So our joke was in 2007 I played on the street corner in San Francisco and made $17. And then we joked that that was our 2007 revenue. It was during work hours, so of course I had to donate the money to the company. Otherwise, that wouldn’t be fair. But yeah, that was our 2007 revenue was the $17 I made. Actually I’m very proud that video has over 10,000 views on YouTube. My most viewed YouTube video by far.
Andrew: I’m going to do sax and then Trip Adler, I think, is the Google search term that brought that up. Yes, there it is, the very first response. You, Christmas, playing outside. That takes some guts to be able to stand there on the corner and ask people for money, doesn’t it?
Trip: Yeah, probably the first time. It’s like anything where you put yourself out there, if you’re performing or talking in front of a group. Those kind of things take some guts at first, but then you get used to it and it just becomes part of your life.
Andrew: So I’m looking at you in that video, and you look like a young hustler. You’re a guy trying to figure it out, a guy really working hard, willing to put it out on the line there and have someone video tape you as you play the sax for money. Today, you’re a polished executive. You’re running a big company where people are paying attention to every word. How do you …
Trip: I don’t know about polished, but thank you.
Andrew: I think very polished. I mean, you have a cold and I wouldn’t have known it if you hadn’t told me. But …
Trip: Good immune system.
Andrew: How do you go from where you were to here? A lot of entrepreneurs start off with that hustler spirit, and they never make it to the place where they can really lead a big company with authority. Who are some of the mentors who helped you get here?
Trip: Well first of all, I think that the hustling spirit really … I have not changed at all, and I definitely think that can’t really ever change, no matter how big your company is. Even if your company is big and it looks from the outside like it is profitable and stable, it really requires a lot of hustling to keep it going. Especially in this climate where everything changes every year. Just to stay relevant in the current climate, you have to really keep pushing the envelope.
So the question was who are the mentors? Well, I think it’s a lot of things. There is kind of the obvious people. I have a really good board, a couple of our investors, like our Series A investor Jeff Yang, our Series B investor, which was originally Del Tie [SP] and now is George Zachary; they have been really helpful. David Sachs, the founder/CEO of Yammer, co-founder of PayPal, now he is CEO of Zenefits. He’s been on our board for a number of years. He’s been a great mentor. A mentor who is a longtime book publishing exec named Richard Sarnoff. He’s been really helpful and helped to navigate the book publishers and that whole world. Just a lot of mentors like that.
Andrew: How do you get Richard Sarnoff as an advisor and mentor who will help you navigate the publishing world? Did he come from one of the investors? He works for KKL, right?
Trip: I think he both had been following the company and had reached out, and also he was kind of introduced by Jeff Yang. So in general, one connection just leads to other connections. I remember thinking it was so hard to get networked in Silicon Valley in the early days, but once you meet some people, you meet other people and eventually, it’s actually a pretty small community once you break into it and get to know everybody. Same thing with the publishing world. You can develop these connections pretty easily if you just have to be a hustler and get out there and go meet people. And at this point I have a really terrific advisory board and we are lucky to have them.
Andrew: It looks like it. Really impressive.
Trip: Thanks.
Andrew: Finally, you have a lot of books on the site. What’s a book that you recommend entrepreneurs read?
Trip: Good question. I’m going to name a few. I will name two, both available on our service. First one is only available in audio-book format on Scribd so far. I’m working on getting the e-book. It’s called “Good to Great”. I think it’s my favorite all-time business book. They basically look at what it takes to transform good companies to great companies and isolated those variables. There is a few concepts that I think are just really helpful. They are kind of counterintuitive. But once you get those concepts, it makes a lot of things about building a company much easier. So I would really recommend that book. It’s on Scribd, you pay $8.99 a month or start your free trial. You can just listen to it on your iphone or your Android or whatever you like.
So that’s one, and the other one I’d recommend is “The Alchemist”. It’s a novel by Paul Coelho, but it is an inspiring story and I think it really appeals to anyone, but I think for an entrepreneur it’s the story of a boy traveling through north Africa. I think it speaks to entrepreneurs about the type of journey you have as an entrepreneur. So I find that book pretty inspiring.
Andrew: All right, great and they are both available on there. I didn’t realize you guys had “Good to Great”, especially as an audio-book. It’s a great find.
Trip: Yeah, you like the book?
Andrew: I do. I like it a lot. I also remember reading Paul Coelho’s book. I wasn’t as moved by that. What was it about that book that moved you? And I’m alone, everyone else seems to be, from entrepreneurs to hippy dippies, right? It’s got everybody covered if you want self-improvement. I feel like I’m missing something.
Trip: I don’t know. It’s one of those books that is hard to describe it. It describes his journey and how a lot of things happen to him where it’s not necessarily clear at first why certain things are happening to him and why he sometimes has good luck or bad luck, but everything kind of comes together in the end and it ends up being as much about the journey as about the destination. And I think that’s an important point to keep in mind as an entrepreneur. If you are really focused on getting to the exit or getting to this big evaluation or whatever it is, then you are kind of chasing the wrong thing.
“Good to Great” talks about just focus on just making your company better every single day and every single month, and just keep moving things forward. Sometimes you’ll go through periods where things are slow or things are difficult. Sometimes you’ll go through periods of hyper-growth, and you just need to keep moving forward and persevering and connecting the dots and things generally work out pretty well in the end.
Andrew: Well, I’m glad I asked you. It felt like a really jerky question for me to ask, but sometimes those jerky questions are the ones that do the best. Or they give me the best insight. Sorry?
Trip: Never mind. I was thinking it’s not as tricky as the comp questions, but let’s skip those questions.
Andrew: I thought you handled those very well. It’s okay to say, “Hey, it’s a private company, Andrew, back off, don’t say anything”. I also liked how you turned the question back around on me. I didn’t give the answer earlier I just did the math on it right now. It’s 102 a year is what I take out of the company. There you go.
Trip: Wow. Good for you. Congratulations.
Andrew: Which is pretty tough to live on in San Francisco. That’s enough basically for me to pay half a rent.
Trip: I know, rents are going up.
Andrew: All right, well it was so good to have you on the site, of course. Your site is Scribd. Thank you for doing this interview.
Trip: Thank you. Nice talking to you.
Andrew: You got it. Thank you all for being a part of it. Bye everyone.
