Scribd started out with an inspired, stripped-down business plan: "a YouTube for documents." That sounds like a niche, doesn't it?
But that was five years ago; $25 million in venture capital funding ago.
Since then, this San Francisco start-up, led by Trip Adler (right), has expanded on that simple mission by adding all sorts of trendy social and interactive features. They've re-branded themselves as "the largest website for social publishing and reading." On their What is Scribd slide show, documents with wings flit from Facebook, to Twitter, to Google.
The result: today Scribd is... still a YouTube for documents.
It's good for that. Early users included candidate Barack Obama, who posted campaign documents.
But Scribd has higher ambitions. In 2009, for example, it launched an online store and struck deals with O'Reilly and Simon & Schuster. (The initial S&S "Featured Titles" included "sTORI Telling" by Tori Spelling. Who reads that, in any format?)
