The Mystery Behind Quora: Digging in with Co-Founder Adam D’Angelo

The current tech startup darling of Silicon Valley, Quora, was co-founded by two computer science majors – Adam D’Angelo, former CTO of Facebook, and Charlie Cheever, who worked at Facebook as well as Amazon.com. D’Angelo said they founded Quora because “we thought that Q & A is one of those areas on the internet where there are a lot of sites, but no one had come along and built something that was really good yet.”

Right now, the most active users are in Silicon Valley, followed by New York City. Popular topics include technology, local area topics, and travel. Content is removed if it doesn’t meet Quora’s guidelines, and unanswered questions remain on the site until someone responds. “The topics that are popular typically reflect the kinds of information that people are looking for. We think there’s a lot of knowledge that is still in people’s heads that hasn’t really been written down on the internet in a useful format yet,” said D’Angelo. “Quora tends to do better in topics where the information can’t just be structured and put into a table or a database very easily. Something like travel works pretty well because there are sites that have hotel reviews, but if you want to know the best beaches to go to if you’re visiting a certain island, that’s not a very standardized piece of information.”

The biggest barrier I see with a site like Quora is trust and how a user can identify a high quality answer. “For us, high quality means the question is answered as well as possible and is accurate,” said D’Angelo. Like other social networking sites, Quora allows users to follow one another and provide a short bio to prove why they are qualified to write about a particular topic. “We try to give people as much information as we can to let them see why they might want to trust the answer. Next to each answer, we show the user who wrote the answer,” noted D’Angelo. “The votes help a lot with that. You can see which other users voted for that answer, which kind of means they’re standing behind that answer.” On the homepage, users can view answers written by people they are following and can vote on those answers. Users can also vote on the answer that was most helpful to them.

The layout of the site is very similar to Facebook and Twitter, which D’Angelo believes is intentional. “I think if you see similarities to Facebook, a lot of it has to do with the fact that we’re both building products that people use with their friends. If you’re trying to build a product like that, there are a lot of decisions and tradeoffs you have to make, and you end up making them the same way,” said D’Angelo.

What differentiates Quora from apparent competitors Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers is that users must provide their real names to both ask and answer questions. “We’re focused on getting really high quality answers, and we’re really just trying to build a high quality knowledge base over time. People contribute to that by adding whatever knowledge they have and things they know about better than other people,” said D’Angelo. Users can vote on the answer they believe is best and search for questions before they ask one. According to D’Angelo, “we try hard to avoid duplicate questions. If you’re someone who’s going to come along and write an answer, we want there to be only one place for you to write that answer.”

Quora, which raised $11 million in VC funding from Benchmark Capital last spring, does not currently have a revenue model. D’Angelo said “At some point we’re going to put more time into figuring out what it will be. I think there’s a good chance that some component of it might end up being advertising, but we’re going to just try different things and see what works.” Quora also plans to launch a mobile app once it has more control over its rapid growth. The site launched to the public in June and doesn’t disclose its user numbers.

Right now, Quora seems to be most beneficial to the technology and startup community.  D’Angelo said, “If you’re starting a company that’s somewhere outside of Silicon Valley, you used to be at a pretty big disadvantage because you didn’t get access to the same information. Quora has made it easier to run a startup and get information about startups because there is so much high quality information on there.”

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