Great vision, poor leadership - Anonymous employee Scribd Inc. Employee Review

2.0
Sep 21, 2011
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

talented, smart people fun environment good compensation

Cons

poor leadership and communication lack of involvement from the board or adult supervision

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Scribd Inc. Response
12y
Although this review was written several years ago, I feel it is important to respond for people who are reading this now and are wondering what it says about Scribd. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ While I don't know who wrote this, I am not surprised that someone who worked at Scribd in 2011 would have written this. At that time, Scribd was struggling to find a viable product and business model. As we tried different ideas looking for the future of Scribd, our strategy changed frequently, leading to turmoil and confusion internally. Products were launched, then yanked from the marketplace when they didn't perform. Not surprisingly, we lost several good people, one of whom may have written this review. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ As one of Scribd's co-founders, I take personal responsibility for the clumsy way we handled this time in Scribd's history, and I do not blame people who were there for their harsh criticism, which is warranted. Pivoting a 50 person company is a difficult task for any management team, but that is no excuse: we could have done it better and have learned a lot from our mistakes. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ What I can say is that not long after this review was written, Scribd found its true vision: a scalable model that would power our business profitably ever after, a product consumers love, and a mission which we can all be genuinely excited to work on. Since we began building "The World's Digital Library" over two years ago, our strategy has not changed once, and the company is infinitely more stable and enjoyable to work for. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ I sincerely believe that if this individual had stayed around to see Scribd pull out of its rough time period and into its current renassaisance, they would tell you the same thing. It is our loss that they left before they had a chance to see the turnaround. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

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Pros

good culture, great work and highly recommended, remote first

Cons

no annual stock grants or refereshers. It is once in two year thing.

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5.0
Aug 18, 2025
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Pros

- Competitive Salary & Benefits for a tech company of its size. - A great people team that truly actually tries to make the company a more fun and supportive place to work. - Fun offsites / onsites for team building. - Solid work-life balance, generally flexible. - Bonus structure (if you qualify) is very generous. - Work feels meaningful, you get to work on a product that helps people learn and develop every day. - Lots of internal promotions (depending on your team) - The work really never gets boring, it is fast-paced but not chaotic, like some earlier stage startups can be. Scribd has been around for awhile and is well-structured internally. - Not reliant on funding any longer which takes off a lot of stress.

Cons

- The audiobook space is tough to crack, and a lot of effort has gone into projects that haven’t quite materialized. - User acquisition is very reliant on SEO, which results in volatility often out of anyone’s control. - There could be more transparency on when people leave or get let go, often times you don’t know someone is gone until you go to message them and they are de-activated. - The annual raises could use some flexibility, 2% doesn’t keep up with inflation these days. - Growth has been lagging, which can put a lot of stress on everyone.

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