Jared Friedman (born 1984) is an American entrepreneur and angel investor. He is a partner at Y Combinator in San Francisco, where he invests in and helps startups.^[1] Previously, Jared was the co-founder and CTO at Scribd, a digital library and document-sharing platform, which has 80 million users.^[2][3]

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.^[4][5][6][7] In 2008, Scribd ranked as one of the top 20 social media sites according to Comscore.^[8] In June 2009, Scribd launched Scribd Store,^[9] and shortly thereafter closed a deal with Simon & Schuster to sell ebooks on Scribd.^[10] In 2012, the company became profitable.^[11]

In October 2013, Scribd launched a subscription ebook service, and signed a deal with HarperCollins to make their backlist books available on Scribd.^{[7][12][13][14]} Scribd currently has more than 300,000 titles from 1,000 publishers in its book subscription service.^[15][16]

As CTO,^[17] Friedman led one of the earliest and largest site-wide transitions of Adobe Flash to HTML5.^[18][19][20] 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.^{[21][22][23][24][25][26]} 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.^[21] Three days later, SOPA was postponed, which press outlets reported as the "death" of the bill.^[27]

Friedman is also an angel investor. His investments and advisory positions include: Parse (company), Swiftype, Creative Market, Vayable, MuckerLab, FundersClub, Goldbelly, Instacart, JamLegend, Rickshaw, Madison Reed, Marco Polo, Colourlovers, Copyin, and Appszoom.^{[28][29][30][31]}

Friedman became the 16th full-time partner at Y Combinator in October 2015.^[32]

• Named to TIME’s list of tech pioneers of 2010^[2]