Oct 27, 2008 12:20 PM
1,578
Enter your username and password.
San Francisco, 12:26 PM
Tue Feb 9
56 posts in the last 24 hours
I've always thought Scribd, the online document-posting startup, was set up mostly so its investors had an excuse to throw parties. They may not have that excuse much longer, if FuckedStartup's report that Scribd is running out of money is accurate. At a time when any number of startups are running out of money, why fret about Scribd's bank-account balance? Because Scribd was manufactured in angel investor Paul Graham's Y Combinator startup factory.
Graham, who sold a company to Yahoo in the '90s, had become microfamous for Y Combinator, which provided both a social club and seed-stage funding. The summer (and winter) camp for young entrepeneurs spun off any number of companies, which then got venture-capital financing, and then a quick exit courtesy of Google or Yahoo's shareholders.
In the bubbly years when Yahoo and Google were snapping up startups freely, Y Combinator's offspring thrived, or appeared to thrive. Got an online PowerPoint clone? Google will buy it! Graham still seems to be living in his someone-will-buy-it dreamland; he recently proposed that companies hire "chief acquisition officers," to specialize in consuming the fare he dishes out. But the giants of the Web have put acquisitions on hold, and few others are stepping up to the plate.
Is Scribd, once described as Graham's "greatest success," in trouble? We don't know that for sure. We do know that hiring 20 people to create software that lets people post PDF documents to the Web always seemed silly. Having a cocky 20something Harvard grad as CEO may work for Facebook, but we don't think Trip Adler is the next Mark Zuckerberg. But Scribd itself isn't the real story. It's whether Paul Graham's magical startup machine is grinding to a halt.
Contact information for this author is not available.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
Start a new discussion