“Scribd doing 43M revenue this year??” was the subject line of an email sent to me last week, along with a link to this photo, taken in Scribd’s San Francisco offices, showing a list of “important stuff” on a whiteboard. Our tipster must not have read the whole list, though, because I was immediately suspicious.
The items on the list, as best I can read them:
Important Stuff
- 2009 revenue: $43 million
- From store: $39 million, revenue/doc: $11.77
- Docs uploaded per day: 1.95 million
- Killer feature of 2010: include video in documents
- Don’t forget to sign acquisition deal with ebay next week
- Call back Arnold Schwarzenegger
- Install waterslide in office
The chart also shows a graph showing profit hitting $1 billion.
The first thing I did, of course, was call the phone number (it’s busy/disconnected). Then I emailed Scribd CEO Trip Adler to ask if the photo was actually taken in their office, and what the story behind it was. His reply: “I just put that stuff up on the whiteboard as a joke. At the time we joked that TechCrunch or some other bloggers would somehow pick it up, and it’s pretty funny that that’s what actually happened. If you want to write a post on it, you can try to guess what information is actually real. Oh, and if you can’t read the last one, it is “install waterslide in office”. Haha.”
Mission accomplished. But remember, we have spies everywhere, Trip. Oh, and call Arnold back.