Created By Humans: Trip Adler & His Dad

I remember having this moment when everything was going really badly. I was like looking around and was like, well, this is a disaster. Like, who's gonna fix this? Who's in charge here? And I'm like, wait a minute, I'm in charge. I need to fix this. And I think there was like a moment where I like I really kind of like toughened up and was like, okay, I gotta figure this out.

Welcome to Leap Forward, a show about founders and the people who believed in them before anyone else. I'm David Rusenko, and on today's show, we talk to Trip Adler. Trip is the founder of Created by Humans, a platform where people can get paid when AI uses their work. Before that, Trip started several companies, most notably Scribd, which is like a Netflix for books, where you pay a monthly fee to access a massive library of documents. Trip grew Scribd through lots of twists and turns to over $300 million of revenue. Now, every founder story has ups and downs, but Trip's were especially extreme. We're talking instant success and huge growth until just a few years later, the company hit a wall and half the team left. So, how do you know if you should push harder, pivot, or quit? To find out, I also talked to Trip's dad, John Adler.

What's your perspective on how long and how hard you should keep going?

Isn't that the most important question an entrepreneur has to ask themselves?

And now, Trip Adler.

Yeah, I'd love if you could just like take us back. Like, what was your childhood like? Where'd you grow up, and what were you like as a kid?

I had a lot of exposure to companies growing up. I mean, I grew up in Silicon Valley, specifically Stanford campus. You know, a lot of my friends' parents were founders or executives or investors. You know, one really funny story is my childhood babysitters were Susan and Wajinski from you know YouTube and 23ME. So I was just, you know, really exposed to Silicon Valley a lot. And then my dad was an entrepreneur.

I'm John Adler. Notably, I'm a professor of neurosurgery at Stanford, and I'm also currently CEO of Zap Surgical. And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I'm Trip Adler's father.

My dad was a brain surgeon, turned entrepreneur. So I remember the brain surgery job a lot more. I mean, it's easier for a kid to understand what a brain surgeon does and what an entrepreneur does, right? I don't remember like consciously that much what entrepreneurs were doing, but I just remember it seemed like it was interesting and cool. And, you know, my good friend growing up, like his family was the family behind Atari. So we would get to play with Atari games before they were on the market. So, you know, I like I remember those kinds of things. Like, you know, it's pretty cool to be able to play video games before everyone else could play them, right? So I think those are the things as a kid that I noticed about like technology entrepreneurship.

So I remember one of my earlier memories, I remember being 10 or 11. So I was still young enough to sit on a jungle gym. And I remember being at the top of a jungle gym and thinking to myself that I was gonna start a business building PCs from scratch to make money. Um, I don't know if you like, did you ever have a moment like that where you had these dreams of starting a company?

You know, not like super consciously. I remember somebody like asking me what I wanted to do, and I said I wanted to like start and run a business. I think it wasn't really until my early 20s that I really figured out that's what I want to do.

Do you remember when he was a little kid? Do you remember what he said he wanted to be when he grew up?

Hell no. No, I didn't know what he was gonna do. So I mean, no, I don't know. I just was hoping he'd be employed.

But like I was a really good student. I mean, I I did really well in school and ended up going to Harvard. And once I went to college, I was like, I thought I was gonna be a doctor, I thought I was gonna be an investment banker.

In his graduating class from college, a lot of the technology-minded students at the time were all pivoting towards finance. They were going to New York and trying to become investment bankers, which I think for many technically minded people is a waste of a lifetime. But uh he was bit by the bug, and so between his uh junior and senior year, he uh went to work in New York City for Bank of America as an intern, and he hated it. It's one of the happiest things I've ever heard in my life. But then I said, What the hell are you gonna do? You're otherwise you're unemployable. And finally got bit by the entrepreneur bug.

Yeah. So I was at Harvard and I saw a sign on the wall for the Harvard Entrepreneurial Contest, and I just had this idea. It was kind of like Uber. And I submitted the idea to the contest and ended up being a finalist, and that kind of just got me going.

Was it a goal of yours back then to start a company, or was it literally just that was the moment when you saw the sign?

No, I think it was percolating for a while. I mean, I was at Harvard in the same class as Mark Zuckerberg, and he launched Facebook in our class. So I watched his journey. I mean, to give you a sense, like my freshman roommate was Facebook user number four. He was like in the first group that got emailed about Facebook. So I watched, you know, Zuck building Facebook. And then, you know, maybe this sign for the Harvard Art Building contest was just sort of like the next signal. So I think it was like a lot of things kind of building on top of each other. And how'd you meet your co-founder? Yeah, so I had this idea, and then I was like, you know, I needed a co-founder. So I emailed the entire Harvard computer science list and just said, I have an idea for a company that's going to be bigger than Google, who wants to work together? And um, I actually got a ton of responses. I got like like 20 responses. But one of them, the person did just respond, but he responded with like a 20-page analysis of the idea. And that person was Jared Friedman, who became my co-founder, who's now uh partner at Y Combinator. And then we just started talking startups. And uh yeah, I remember we would meet up in like the Harvard dining halls like once or twice a week and just talk startups, and we just kind of got going working together.

Did you get any responses that email, like kind of stop spamming me or any kind of interesting responses?

I remember there's a lot of interest. Like, yeah, I remember it being a very positive response, but Jared was the only one who like really sort of like took the ideas further and challenged the ideas. So we just started kind of like getting along on that level.

Was this after Facebook had really started taking off? And so a lot of people started getting interest.

It might have been related to Facebook because that had a lot of like buzz at Harvard at the time, especially in the whole computer science department. But yeah, so Mark launched that when we were sophomores, and then I sent that email out when I was a senior. So a couple of years later.

And so you first had this idea that was kind of an Uber idea, and I know you went through a few different ideas, but tell me the story of the scribed idea.

Yeah, so I met Jared, and then what Jared said to me was that, you know, he wanted to start a company, but he was only gonna do it if we applied to Y Combinator. And I was like, oh, well, I I looked it up and it described it as like a program. I was like, I was like, Jared, I don't want to start a company in a program. Like I just want to start a company. But he said he would only work with me if it did Y Combinator. So I was like, okay, fine, we'll apply to Y Combinator. So we applied in uh, let's see, that was spring of 2006. So this was the second year of Y Combinator. And we got invited out to interview with Paul Graham. And yeah, we we applied with our idea. It was kind of like this like, at this point, like a transportation super app. It was gonna be like a little bit of Uber and a little bit of like, you know, Google Maps for transportation, kind of all combined together. And we pitched the idea to Paul Graham, and then Paul's just like, yeah, that's a that's a really bad idea. Do you guys have any other ideas? And there's another idea that I came up with like a week before, which is basically to do like a Craigslist type of model, but for colleges. So we pitched that to PG, and PG's just said, that's an amazing idea. I'll fund that idea. So we basically just pivoted right then. We we called it Who List for Harvard University List, and we launched it at Harvard. We had like some moderate success, but nothing really. And then from there we just started pivoting and we just started trying like one idea after another. Probably spent like a year in just kind of like rapid pivot mode. Um, and then eventually landed on scribed, and then it kind of went from there.

Trip and I had a series of discussions when he was at Harvard, and he kind of wanted to do a startup of some sort, and I don't think he really knew what it was going to be about. And while we were driving back and forth, we liked to surf on the coast. Uh we had a discussion about solving my own problem, which was to make medical communication more seamless and effortless. And he took another pivot to the idea that they would now allow people to share documents anywhere. And that became the heartbeat of Scrib then for a long time.

Yeah. So the original tagline was put your docs online. Um, we would just allow anyone to take a PDF, a Word doc, a PowerPoint, upload it to the web. We would embed it in a web page using Flash, and then you know, we would get an audience for that. So people would land on it through SEO, or you know, we had a home page, people could like vote the top documents up and down, kind of like Reddit style. But yeah, that was the initial idea. Just take a document, upload it to the web, and let the world see it. You know, at the time like uh YouTube had launched, you know, shortly before then. I mean, it was launched and acquired by Google shortly before then. That was we described it often as like YouTube for documents, just a way to like you know share your documents with the world. Um, so it had some like YouTube light growth dynamics, which I think helped it get started.

Scribed in his early days was in my living room. Trip and his buddies, you know, they would poach off our Wi-Fi, and there was never any coke in the refrigerator because they were drinking it like nonstop. And big challenge was supplying the troops with enough chips or whatever they were eating. They were where were they living? I don't even know. Like a trip was living at home at that time. Where was Jared? I don't know where they were living. It was uh quintessential, you know, young kids startup.

And we had uh a really momentous launch. We got like a lot of traction. I mean, at the time, you know, like we had a probably one of the first good stories of like an app launching and just getting a lot of traction on day one because we just got a huge number of traffic coming in. And then that really quickly started a viral loop where like the traffic would come in, some of that would upload their own content, those uploaders would then bring in more traffic, and we got this viral loop going. So it was like pretty clear just from like this momentous start that we were on to something.

So I remember that super clearly because we were in YC, the batch after you. We had just moved to the Y scraper, and I remember everyone's talking about you guys, about your crazy viral loop, about growth just absolutely taking off. And I remember going up to your apartment and you're, you know, I think you're showing me some graphs of like things that were really working. Tell me a little bit about kind of how it felt to have really hit this viral loop.

Yeah, it was really like a life-changing moment, right? Because we went from having no investors want to talk to us. I mean, I remember we we got introduced to a bunch of the top VCs, like you know, Sequoia and all those guys, and no one would even like take a meeting with us, right? They're just like, oh, this this idea is not a very just not an interesting idea. And now all of a sudden, like, you know, I had my phone number on the website, and my phone was just like ringing every hour with like an investor trying to invest in the company. So it was a very like just big shift to go from like nobody caring about what you're doing to everyone caring about what you're doing. Um, and since we were young, I was only like, I don't know, 21 or 20 or 22 or something. I was pretty young. Like that's just a big change. So yeah, it was a big shift. And then from there, we were like raising millions of dollars, hiring a team and all that kind of stuff.

Do you ever remember the first moment when you looked at the graphs and you just kind of knew that things were working, kind of like that holy shit moment? Was it right after launch, or or when was that moment that you could really see everything was working?

Well, I think there was like there was a little bit of a moment before launch because like we noticed that we had like worked really hard to get a few like hundred documents on the site before we launched. And we noticed that the average document was getting one visitor per day from Google. And we're just like, well, if we're already getting a hundred visitors a day, we haven't launched yet. What if we had like a million documents or a hundred million documents? Then when we launched, we just had so much traffic and attention that it just was pretty obvious it was working.

Just looked like the entrepreneurial dream come true. You know, after about half a year, he was moving to an office in San Francisco, and these offices had all the kind of cool, funky things. You know, they were, you know, racing go-karts around the office building heads, zip lines and the crazy zety stuff that was going on among young 20-year-old startups in San Francisco at the time. And I just thought it looked like great fun, you know, and he was hitting it out of the park and having great fun while doing it, surrounded by good people. So I I was, if anything, jealous of uh trip's uh success. Not that I didn't I wish them all the great success in the world, but I just never had anything like that. Interestingly, eventually uh Hens came home the roost because uh those early years which were magical and a lot of fun eventually led to some difficult times after. So I I guess you always got to pay the piper in the end. No matter what your startup everyone in startup life is gonna face some hard times, even if it seems magical for part of your journey.

I mean, eventually, you know, that first trick kind of stopped working. We had to reinvent the company multiple times.

I remember when we were kind of struggling at Weebly and I wanted to get your advice. So we went to lunch and you're like, tell me what's going on, man. Seems like you know, things aren't going that well. And I broke it down for you, and you know, we were struggling with less gross than we were hoping for. And you told me, Well, dude, things aren't that bad. Like, let me tell you the story about this moment we went through. So I'd love to kind of break into that. I remember you told me at one point revenue had kind of slowed. Kind of tell us that story. Tell the bad parts, the tough parts. Yeah. We'll be right back. And now, back to the episode. You know, there's part in the middle where everyone kind of struggles a lot of times.

Yeah. I think probably like the toughest moment for me. Um, so the first few years we had kind of really good, just sort of like organic growth, we had no trouble raising money and all that. We were in the press a lot, we had like a lot of attention what we're doing. And I think I was so much in that mode of launching new products that I thought like the answer to get to next level just was to launch something new. So we launched like a pretty new product under a new brand called Float. It was meant to be sort of like, you know, connected to Scrib, a little different. We put like way too much resources on it. We executed poorly. The product like totally flopped. That, you know, led to just like a morale crisis in the company. I remember like half a team quitting in like a pretty short period of time. It was like six months, like half the team turned over, which is you know very heartbreaking to see that many people that's crazy, quit your company a short period of time. So I think that was really tough, tough time.

And so kind of you had this product launch that didn't go so well, you know, like half the company turned over. I mean, what what was that experience like? I, you know, I know for you know, as a CEO, a lot of times you feel like the whole company rests on your shoulders.

Yeah. Well, I remember having this moment when everything was going really badly. And I was like, I was like looking around, I was like, well, this is a disaster. Like, who's gonna fix this? Who's in charge here? And I'm like, wait a minute, I'm I'm in charge. I need to fix this. And I think that was like a moment where I like I really kind of like toughened up and was like, okay, I gotta figure this out.

Being a CEO is not a fun, cushy job. It's you know, especially when you don't have anybody to kind of shoulder the cry on. I don't think Trip shared all the tough times with me. I think we tend to, me too, I protect my my own parents. And we all know that if you're gonna do a startup, there's gonna be a lot of tough times, a lot of suffering. But Trip and I, we did kind of consult each other a lot. He consulted with me a lot as I tried to counsel him through a difficult situation. Uh so Trip and I, we did talk about the challenges he was facing. And I hope I gave him some good advice along the way. If anything, you just need a shoulder to cry on sometime. And so I served that function a little bit. It is true, I think the higher you go, there's fewer shoulders available to you to cry on. And so at that point, he got he had his father.

I mean, a lot of people go through that kind of thing and give up. And certainly it's intensely stressful. What do you think kind of got you through that? Uh, you know, that perspective of like, I'm gonna fix it versus, you know, I want to give up.

I I don't I I I don't know. I just think I'm I'm just kind of wired that way. I just don't really give up on really kind of anything. Um, I think I've been wired that way for like, you know, most of my life. Just I'm kind of wired to keep sticking with things and just really determined to stick things out and see them succeed. But I think the way we responded to that was we we just sort of like got back to the core business. We just started like focusing on the business model on profitability. And then we realized the subscription model was really like the best thing working for us. So that's when we started talking to book publishers and we pioneered the subscription model for books. And then we made it so you can for $99 a month, you can get unlimited books with your script membership. Um, and I think that was kind of like maybe the second major moment when the company was reinvented, which kind of took revenue and and profitability and took it as a business up to the next level. And subscriptions just sort of like took off very easily and um it just sort of grew organically over time.

I remember talking to you around then too, and your growth was rapidly accelerating, you're growing the team. I mean, you know, I'd love to hear a little bit more about what that was like.

Yeah, so I think like, you know, we got to a point, yeah, maybe around like 2015 or so. I think things were going pretty well in that we had, you know, we had this whole like organic growth funnel built out with the document side of the business. We had the subscription side built out with like having all these book deals. We kind of connected these two things together really well. So, you know, I think growth those years was probably growing like 50% per year or so, which is pretty good because we're at you know pretty big scale at that point, probably like pushing up 100 million of revenue. We tend to operate around break-even. We maybe we're like little profitable, maybe some years a little less profitable, but just do it around around breakeven is a good way to think about it. And yeah, we just kind of kept building the business at that point. It was probably like some of the easier years. We kept adding new books, we kept adding new content types, like launching things like audiobooks. Um, we started going directly to authors and building out an original content business. But overall, I think we did a pretty good job and you know, got the company above 200 million in revenue, highly profitable with kind of like steady growth curve behind it. You know, those years, I think a lot of the trouble those years was probably like putting in like a management layer in the company and you know, getting it kind of operating as a real kind of scale company. So made a lot of mistakes in terms of just like, you know, getting the right managers in place and getting the culture ready to operate at that kind of like higher level of scale.

How did it feel to be back on the rocket ship personally? Like after you had a couple, you know, a tough couple of years and all of a sudden, you know, some people left, but you stuck around. Like what was that, you know, what's that feeling like?

I mean, it felt good, but like the nature of my personality is I just move on to the next thing pretty quick, you know. As soon as like as soon as I get a win, I'm already on to building the next thing. So um, yeah, I mean, it obviously feels great whenever you have a win, but like I, you know, I'm one of those people that's just always kind of pushing for the next level. And I I'm I'm always kind of, you know, as I work, I'm living in the future and trying to get to that next step.

And yeah, you said it was 17 years all in. Uh 17 years at Scrib. Yeah, that was like half half my life at the time. 17 years. I mean, I know for me personally, you know, 10 years felt like a long time, you know, and then I was ended up being at Weebly for 14 years all in. How did you know? I mean, where did you start thinking, like, you know, I may be ready to go do something else? Like, how did you decide to move on?

Yeah, I mean, I think over time there's always this thought of like, well, I could start this idea, I could start, you know, I like, you know, I had a perfectly built up plan for Uber. I was just like five years too early. So there's a lot of a lot of good ideas I was always thinking about. But in general, I was always pretty excited about what we're doing at Scribd, and we're always working on new novel things. So it never, even though it was, you know, one job for 17 years, it really felt like a new job every few months. So I think it was overall just a really good, rewarding learning experience.

So I think, you know, there's an interesting parallel. I think both you and your dad were at your companies for a really long time, over 17 years. Do you think there's any kind of parallels there with both you sticking through something for a really long time?

Oh, I think we're both the kinds of people who like build things and stick things out. He's now started a total of three companies, one that went public, one that sold, one that's kind of still going. And yeah, I mean he's he sticks them out for a long, long period of time. So I I probably get it from him. So if you're wondering where I get it from, you should probably ask him because uh I probably got it from him.

Well, I think he has, if I do say so, some of me in him. He's a pretty focused person and has the capacity to stay on task for a long period of time, you know, hammering away to win. I think he's clearly ambitious. He's quite reticent to show that ambition to the family, but it's clear as day that he is.

I just go for things, I stick with it. I think I've been that way my whole life. I was like that with Scribd. I'm sure I'll be like that with my companies going forward.

Yeah, I guess that's a good segue. You're starting a new company. Can you tell us about your new company?

Yeah, so uh recently started Created by Humans. We are a startup that is aiming to solve how copyright and AI work together. Uh, you know, this has been a really complex issue. A lot of people are grappling with it. And, you know, we thought that we could we could jump in as a startup and help make a difference.

So, how'd you come up with the idea?

So, what we're doing is we are building a marketplace for AI rights. So, the way we can solve this copyright problem is we basically clear the rights for a large number of works and just make it really easy for AI companies to access the copyright works they need for AI purposes. And we're starting specifically with books here. We want to solve this for books, and then we're gonna expand other kinds of content. And Came up with the idea because I, you know, I had for my last company all these contacts in the book industry and the A industry, and I saw everybody, you know, suing each other and fighting. And uh I just really wanted to solve this problem. So uh, you know, we're we're building a marketplace and we're just trying to make AI licensing plug and play for everyone involved. So authors they sign up, they verify their identity just to make sure we know we're dealing with the real author. Um, they then select the books they want to license, they select the the different AI rights they want to license. Um, they sign a licensing agreement, which licenses the books to create it by humans. And then we can then in turn go out and strike deals where we we license these books out to AI companies and we just make it plug and play for AI companies where they can just sign up, get the data they need, pay for it real easily, and we get that money back to authors. We handle all the complexity around that. So yeah, I just felt like it's something I had to do. So I jumped in and uh been working on it. It's been going great.

Yeah, tell us a little bit more how it's been going so far.

Starting a new company as a second time founder is it's actually a pretty enjoyable experience. It's also just a lot easier to get started these days. There's just so much more infrastructure for getting a company going that, yeah, it got started about a year ago and just really kind of got going really fast. We've raised about $12 million to date, a team of about 10 full-time employees. We've got a live product with authors signing up and licensing their works, and that's growing really nicely. We've got a number of AI deals in the works. So yeah, we just have really great momentum and it's been just a great, great start and a fun experience.

So you mentioned it's your, you know, the second time. What's changed for you the second time around?

Yeah, I mean, after 17 years, I just I I had this new vision and it was just like Scrib wasn't the place to do it anymore. And now I'm just doing it as a new company, and I think there's pros and cons doing it as a new company. You know, it's it's a little sad to not have you know have the scale of having like, you know, a billion annual users and and all that kind of stuff. But there's a lot of benefits of starting from scratch. I've been really enjoying having the clean slate and just, you know, having like the creative reset is really nice. Because when you're running one company for a long time, there's just a lot of constraints in place that are really kind of hard to let go of. And when you can start from scratch, I mean you just have a full blank sheet of paper to work with. And yeah, there's times to build something for a long time, there's times to start over.

So, I mean, I can only speak from personal experience. You know, I know you kind of roll off one company. There's for sure this real decompression moment where you have to catch your breath and kind of recover in a lot of ways. How was that for you? And when did you know it was the right time for you to start another company, or did you just roll right into the second one?

Yeah, I rolled pretty quickly. I was out of scribed and I just couldn't get this idea out of my head. So I went right into it. So I really took about two months off. And um, I think it was the right, it was the right call. You know, I mean, Paul Graham was really trying to get me to take a longer break. Um, but I was just uh I was just ready to go.

That's awesome. So you said 17 years, you know, this might be the start of another 17-year journey. I mean, paint the picture for me if everything goes amazing in 17 years, what is created by humans look like?

Well, uh, I hope that this whole issue of copyright and AI is is solved. I think that it won't be such a contentious issue, and I think we'll play a key role in in solving it. I mean, even bigger than that, I mean, our our mission is to protect and preserve human creativity in the AI era and make it thrive in the AI era. And I think like hopefully we're achieving that mission. You know, I mean, there's like a lot of big questions with AI right now of like, you know, what are humans gonna do? Will humans be creative? Will AI just do all the creative work for us? And I mean, we we're kind of horrified by that future. We want to make sure that humans still are creating things and we want to create a business model that perpetuates human creativity. So I just I saw this huge problem and I felt like I was kind of the right person to solve it.

You know, he's caught between tectonic plates here, you know, human creators making the essence of humanity, and AI bots just trying to suck it all up and trying to replace the humans. So uh it's a tectonic battle, and I hope he's the winner in it. But I have to admit, the forces that he's dealing with are as large as they get in the world today, and uh even we never talked ever really about how he was gonna succeed. He did that out of sheer ambition. So uh no one kicked his ass to do it. He just wanted to do it. I think he wanted to win.

This podcast is brought to you by Leap Forward Ventures, an investor in early stage startups. If you like the show, the number one thing you'll want to do is sign up to get notified when we release new episodes that includes transcripts and key takeaways from each story. Head to leapforward.fm to sign up. I'd also love to hear your feedback on the episode and who you want to hear from next. Just shoot us a text at 415-915-3050 to get in touch. This episode was produced by Theo Balcomb and Kim Nederveen Pieterse. Craig Eley is our engineer. Reece Laudano made our cover art. Music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. I'm David Rusenko, and this is the Leap Forward Podcast. See you next episode.