Jared Friedman

Jared Friedman 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, Goldbely, 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

External links

• Jared Friedman on Twitter