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Jared Friedman

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Jared Friedman
Born1984
Occupation(s)Co-founder and CTO of Scribd
Websitewww.scribd.com

Jared Friedman (born 1984) is an American entrepreneur and angel investor. He is the co-founder and CTO of Scribd, a digital library and document-sharing platform, which has 80 million users.[1][2]

Scribd

Friedman co-founded Scribd with fellow Harvard University student Trip Adler. The pair attended Y Combinator in the summer of 2006, and launched Scribd from a San Francisco apartment in March 2007.[3][4][5][6] In 2008, Scribd ranked as one of the top 20 social media sites according to Comscore.[7] In June 2009, Scribd launched Scribd Store,[8] and shortly thereafter closed a deal with Simon & Schuster to sell ebooks on Scribd.[9] In 2012, the company became profitable.[10]

In October 2013, Scribd launched a subscription ebook service, and signed a deal with HarperCollins to make their backlist books available on Scribd.[6][11][12][13] Scribd currently has more than 300,000 titles from 1,000 publishers in its book subscription service.[14][15]

As CTO, Friedman led one of the earliest and largest site-wide transitions of Adobe Flash to HTML5.[16][17][18] Friedman was also notably opposed to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and was quoted in Bloomberg, The Washington Post, VentureBeat, ArsTechnica, TechCrunch, and Fox News.[19][20][21][22][23][24] In protest to the bill, Scribd pulled its entire database—over 1,000,000,000 documents—from the internet on January 18, 2012 for one day.[19] Three days later, SOPA was postponed, which press outlets reported as the “death” of the bill.[25][26]

Angel investor

Friedman is also an angel investor. His investments and advisory positions include: Parse (company), Swiftype, Creative Market, Vayable, MuckerLab, FundersClub, Goldbelly, Instacart, JamLegend, Rickshaw, Madison Reed, Marco Polo, Colourlovers, Copyin, and Appszoom.[27][28][29][30]

Friedman became the 16th full-time partner at Y Combinator in October 2015.[31]

Honors

  • Named to TIME’s list of tech pioneers of 2010[1]

References

  1. ^ a b Dan Fletcher (2010). "Tech Pioneers 2010: Trip Adler and Jared Friedman". TIME.
  2. ^ Lynn Neary (October 4, 2013). "New E-Book Lending Service Aims To Be Netflix For Books". NPR.
  3. ^ Cromwell Schubarth (October 28, 2013). "Y Combinator's 10 most valuable startup alumni". Silicon Valley Business Journal.
  4. ^ Bobbie Johnson (July 22, 2009). "How Scribd made pages pay". The Guardian.
  5. ^ Spencer E. Ante (June 11, 2009). "Scribd: An E-Book Upstart with Unlikely Fans". Businessweek.
  6. ^ a b Calvin Reid (October 1, 2013). "Scribd Launches E-book Subscription Service". Publisher’s Weekly.
  7. ^ "Scribd Had A Blowout Year, And So Did the Web Document". TechCrunch. 2008-12-31. Retrieved 2012-07-11.
  8. ^ "Scribd Invites Writers to Upload Work and Name Their Price". The New York Times. Retrieved 2012-07-11.
  9. ^ "Simon and Schuster to Sell Digital Books on Scribd.com". The New York Times. Retrieved 2012-07-11.
  10. ^ Anthony Ha (August 13, 2012). "Social Publishing Startup Scribd Gets A Facelift: New Website, New Logo, New iPhone App". TechCrunch.
  11. ^ Anthony Ha (October 1, 2013). "With HarperCollins Deal, Scribd Unveils Its Bid To Become The Netflix For Books". TechCrunch.
  12. ^ Josh Ong (January 29, 2014). "Scribd takes aim at Amazon by bringing its subscription ebook app to the Kindle Fire". The Next Web.
  13. ^ Julie Bosman (October 1, 2013). "HarperCollins Joins Scribd in E-Book Subscription Plan". The New York Times.
  14. ^ Angela Chen (February 18, 2014). "What Your iPad Knows About You". The Wall Street Journal.
  15. ^ About Us. Scribd.
  16. ^ Cade Metz (6 May 2010). "50 million user Scribd scraps Flash for HTML5". The Register.
  17. ^ Harry McCracken (May 7, 2010). "Scribd Ditches Flash in Favor of HTML5". PC World.
  18. ^ Michael Calore (May 10, 2010). "Scribd ditches Flash for HTML5". Wired. Archived from the original on March 31, 2014.
  19. ^ a b Erick Schonfeld (December 21, 2011). "Scribd Protests SOPA By Making A Billion Pages On The Web Disappear".
  20. ^ "Wikipedia and Other Sites Shut Down in Protest of SOPA and PIPA". Fox News Insider. January 18, 2012. Archived from the original on December 25, 2012.
  21. ^ J. O'Dell (December 21, 2011). "Scribd is disappearing word by word, page by page, thanks to SOPA". VentureBeat.
  22. ^ "Friedman Says Scribd Opposes Anti-Online Piracy Bill". The Washington Post. December 23, 2011.
  23. ^ Jon Brodkin (January 18, 2012). "Protesting SOPA: how to make your voice heard". ArsTechnica.
  24. ^ Hayley Tsukayama (December 21, 2011). "Scribd protests SOPA with disappearing act". The Washington Post.
  25. ^ Bill Killed: SOPA death celebrated as Congress recalls anti-piracy acts. Russian Times. January 19, 2012.
  26. ^ David Thier (January 20, 2012). "SOPA Got Stopped: Stop Online Piracy Bill Actually Dead". Forbes.
  27. ^ Jared Friedman. AngelList.
  28. ^ Ryan Lawler (April 2, 2013). "YC-Backed Vayable Launches Destinations To Crowdsource Interesting Things To Do In Cities Around The World". TechCrunch.
  29. ^ Jerry Yang (July 30, 2013). "Grid, An App That Helps You Organize Ideas And Projects, Announces A Seed Round From Jerry Yang, Phil Libin And Others". TechCrunch.
  30. ^ Sarah Perez (March 26, 2012). "Design Community Colourlovers Acquires Forrst". TechCrunch.
  31. ^ "Welcome Jared!". Y Combinator Posthaven. Retrieved 2015-10-08.
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