Talented people, wasted opportunities due to mis-management - Anonymous employee Scribd Inc. Employee Review

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. (Note: I left the same response on the prior review, as the review is almost identical). ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 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. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━