It seems pretty obvious why they raised so much -- I don't get the confusion. They're settling in for the long haul. Remember: these dudes are already rich from their Facebook days. They wouldn't even be doing this if they didn't truly want to.
They raised $50 million so they can keep going on this project until it's solved, which may take 5+ years. The financial resources issue has been solved. It's what most anyone who's truly dedicated would like to be able to do. They just happen to be in the position to do it.
I don't think anyone is confused why a team raised money. I think every startup out there is going to take as much as they can for as long as they can.
The confusion is what the VC's saw in Quora which would warrant giving them so much (at such a high valuation).
It seemed to me that the fundraising is mostly to make a bunch of noise. When your company is growing by leaps and bounds, and the only limiting factor is that you're cash-strapped, a round of this size makes sense - not with the numbers/usage Quora currently has. Most of the reasoning that Adam mentions seem rather frail. Doing a funding round just to post a better-than-you valuation isn't what they should be focused on at the moment.
Ummm, no. D'Angelo put $20 mil in his own company so it's just $30mil, unless I read wrong. That $30mil is nothing, Thiel is making over $2 Billion on FB so this is just some crumbs as a thank you and "just in case."
"With only around 20-30k daily active users, it certainly wasn't money raised based on user adoption".
I wish people would stop throwing AppData figures out as if they're fact, they're not. Dustin Curtis has no clue as to how many daily active users Quora has (no one does), but rather how many daily active users who so happen to have connected their Facebook account.
It's not a good indicator of success, and Facebook (and in turn AppData) has proven to be incredibly inaccurate as of late in regards to user numbers.
The bigger thing is not what fraction of Quora users use facebook logins, but how much of Quora's traffic is from search results by non-logged-in users (who may be new to the site).
I think Quora would be fine with 20-30k active users with accounts, creating questions/answers/comments. They've rolled out features (Credits, and requiring Credits to promote questions) which imply having a large number of people asking poor questions and giving poor answers is something they're actively trying to avoid.
Yet, if someone like Keith Rabois or Harj Taggar answers something within his field of expertise on Quora, it gets great search placement, AND often ends up syndicated to Forbes, etc.
"Quora as a replacement for blogging, by high value individuals" is the thing to look out for, not huge daily active user counts. With great content, search traffic will follow, and then there will be some way to monetize.
Not every social network has to be peer to peer. If I got to watch a community of great physics experts (Quora actually has some very strong engineering expertise in mech/nuclear, surprisingly) interact, and then pay to ask specific questions, I'd be quite happy. Either pay cash, or pay with answering IT, banking, war zone, etc. questions asked by those physics experts.
Thank you, this cannot be said enough. About AppData, ComScore, Compete, or any other public traffic estimator.
I love AppData to pieces, it's fantastically useful and I hit it pretty much every day--but it doesn't actually even match Facebook's data sometimes and Facebook logins are only one of Quora's supported login types, so one could extrapolate that there are at least that many users but in no way could you say that's even close to the topline (you might guess it's 2/3 of it, but it'd still be a SWAG).
Quora is the epitome of Silicon Valley group think. You think the site's big if you live in the valley. Leave and no one's heard of it.
This is bubblicious.
Anyway if anyone from Quora is reading this: your site has become a terrible experience for those with a small screen because the top quarter is dominated by your floating top bar.
That's precisely the point. Silicon Valley is saturated by a bazillion products, so the audience here is extremely discerning. Most people will try most things, but to gain critical mass like that within Silicon Valley is very, very difficult.
Empirically, there's a very good chance that a product with critical mass here will tend to spread like wild fire to the rest of the world (and I suspect Peter Thiel has much better data on that than you do). Since the purpose of investment is to buy low and sell high (and the purpose of early stage investment is to buy very low and sell very high), putting money into Quora is as good an early bet as one could hope for.
Anecdote for: when I joined Quora, almost everyone there was from the Valley, which got a bit annoying sometimes, as the default assumption was that you were in California. Eg I asked "What's the best way for a British graduate to break into China's tech industry?" I had 2 or 3 answers on the lines of "don't, stay in Silicon Valley for now". I've never been to SV.
Anecdote against: that seems to have died down now, and there's tons of smart people from all over. It's probably one of the best forums I've found for discussing startups in China; Andy Mok, Paul Delinger, Kaiser Kuo, heck even Da Shan are on there.
quora has about 650k questions in total, most of which are unanswered and in general ignored. my estimate of answered questions puts it at 80-90k.
as for user-base, the churn rate is huge with the majority of users following 2-3 topics before leaving the site forever. there is subset of users who generate all the content and value of the site.
lets look at some numbers:
Yishan Wong: Answers 1457, Question 760
Jeff Hammerbacher: Questions 1092, Answers 1041
Jan Mixon: Questions 802, Answers 4101
Michael Wolfe: Questions 9, Answers 1088
Mark-Hughes-1: Answers 1294, Questions 48
power-laws ahoy.
it's good source of info on startups and the tech scene, which makes it more like a popular discussion forum
than a social network. I don't see this growing to millions
of active users unless it tries to take on Yahoo! Answers.
i believe the quora team acknowledges this, and with the introduction of boards they're trying to redefine the site to be some kind of textual pinterest.
this sounded quite pessimistic, it's actually the site i visit the most and i hope they continue to grow without
comprising on the quality.
Always remember that most of the content on sites involving "user participation" are heavily influenced by a small minority of people (Digg, Reddit, etc) I assume the same holds for Quora.
Take FB out and Thiel has a horrible investment record. In case people missed, he has a horrible investment record. A coin toss would be better than his choices, let alone low cost index funds. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-12/clarium-hedge-fund-...
Perhaps I'm confusing Quora with another site, but isn't this the one that throws up a sort of registration wall when you follow a link there? Doesn't happen now when I try, but I'm sure it has in the recent past.
Millions of dollars are being sunk into this site? Why?
Quora is amazing. I don't know if they'll disrupt Google or Wikipedia but the quality of the content there is light years ahead of any similar site. You post a legal question and get a bunch of lawyers competing to give you the best answer. Post a question about the early days of Facebook and get 12 early employees all competing to give you the best answer. You post a question about the cops and get amazing answers like this from police officers:
Join the site and poke around a bit if you still don't understand. It's like HN. Why is HN so awesome? Because the caliber of people posting here is off-the-charts relative to every similar site. Same with Quora.
Quora explains using AWS for "everything" here: http://www.quora.com/What-stack-does-Quora-run-on-EC2, but they don't say how many of what. Their traffic is a secret too, despite what the article tries to assume of AppData, but I'm curious why it is believed that running application servers and their databases/cache is economical. Does Quora really see a huge flux in activity and inactivity?
I would not be so quick to judge the valuation. We have only one side of the story, and that side, the reporters, has proven to only care about their own page views. The founder putting $20M of his own money is a strong indication that the team believes there is real value in Quora. Until we get statistics from the team, we should hold out on most comments regarding the valuation.
This number is based on users logging in through FB connect only. From the Techcrunch story:
"According to AppData, 20K daily active users and 180K monthly active users log into Quora through Facebook Connect — Bear in mind that this is a small fraction of its total number of users, which Cheever and D’Angelo famously never reveal."
Yes, it does seem kind of low when you look at the activity compared to other sites like Stack Exchange sites. However, something I've noticed is the higher percentage of well known people answering questions on Quora. I could see them making a play for increased participation among well connected or high expertise individuals and focusing more on the quality of content rather than quantity. It would certainly be an interesting avenue to exploit should they choose to.
It's fair for a blogger to raise questions and not provide answers. But I'd be very interested to hear dcurtis's personal opinion on this. Why did they raise so much money?
Funding is cyclic, going through ups (now, unquestionably) and downs (2008/09 for instance). I'm nothing of an expert, but the alternative approach of raising funding to last not-that-many months to develop further and likely not yet 'be there' seems unwise.
"We intend to use some of this funding as a cushion in case of macroeconomic changes. More than half our series A funds from two years ago are actually still in our bank account today. We could have waited longer to raise this round, but we wanted to extend our runway."
[+] [-] staunch|14 years ago|reply
They raised $50 million so they can keep going on this project until it's solved, which may take 5+ years. The financial resources issue has been solved. It's what most anyone who's truly dedicated would like to be able to do. They just happen to be in the position to do it.
[+] [-] mikeryan|14 years ago|reply
The confusion is what the VC's saw in Quora which would warrant giving them so much (at such a high valuation).
[+] [-] antidaily|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badusername|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loverobots|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olivercameron|14 years ago|reply
I wish people would stop throwing AppData figures out as if they're fact, they're not. Dustin Curtis has no clue as to how many daily active users Quora has (no one does), but rather how many daily active users who so happen to have connected their Facebook account.
It's not a good indicator of success, and Facebook (and in turn AppData) has proven to be incredibly inaccurate as of late in regards to user numbers.
[+] [-] rdl|14 years ago|reply
I think Quora would be fine with 20-30k active users with accounts, creating questions/answers/comments. They've rolled out features (Credits, and requiring Credits to promote questions) which imply having a large number of people asking poor questions and giving poor answers is something they're actively trying to avoid.
Yet, if someone like Keith Rabois or Harj Taggar answers something within his field of expertise on Quora, it gets great search placement, AND often ends up syndicated to Forbes, etc.
"Quora as a replacement for blogging, by high value individuals" is the thing to look out for, not huge daily active user counts. With great content, search traffic will follow, and then there will be some way to monetize.
Not every social network has to be peer to peer. If I got to watch a community of great physics experts (Quora actually has some very strong engineering expertise in mech/nuclear, surprisingly) interact, and then pay to ask specific questions, I'd be quite happy. Either pay cash, or pay with answering IT, banking, war zone, etc. questions asked by those physics experts.
[+] [-] dcurtis|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jen_h|14 years ago|reply
I love AppData to pieces, it's fantastically useful and I hit it pretty much every day--but it doesn't actually even match Facebook's data sometimes and Facebook logins are only one of Quora's supported login types, so one could extrapolate that there are at least that many users but in no way could you say that's even close to the topline (you might guess it's 2/3 of it, but it'd still be a SWAG).
[+] [-] sanxiyn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventureful|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redwood|14 years ago|reply
This is bubblicious.
Anyway if anyone from Quora is reading this: your site has become a terrible experience for those with a small screen because the top quarter is dominated by your floating top bar.
[+] [-] coffeemug|14 years ago|reply
Empirically, there's a very good chance that a product with critical mass here will tend to spread like wild fire to the rest of the world (and I suspect Peter Thiel has much better data on that than you do). Since the purpose of investment is to buy low and sell high (and the purpose of early stage investment is to buy very low and sell very high), putting money into Quora is as good an early bet as one could hope for.
[+] [-] IsaacL|14 years ago|reply
Anecdote for: when I joined Quora, almost everyone there was from the Valley, which got a bit annoying sometimes, as the default assumption was that you were in California. Eg I asked "What's the best way for a British graduate to break into China's tech industry?" I had 2 or 3 answers on the lines of "don't, stay in Silicon Valley for now". I've never been to SV.
Anecdote against: that seems to have died down now, and there's tons of smart people from all over. It's probably one of the best forums I've found for discussing startups in China; Andy Mok, Paul Delinger, Kaiser Kuo, heck even Da Shan are on there.
[+] [-] 10x|14 years ago|reply
as for user-base, the churn rate is huge with the majority of users following 2-3 topics before leaving the site forever. there is subset of users who generate all the content and value of the site.
lets look at some numbers:
Yishan Wong: Answers 1457, Question 760 Jeff Hammerbacher: Questions 1092, Answers 1041 Jan Mixon: Questions 802, Answers 4101 Michael Wolfe: Questions 9, Answers 1088 Mark-Hughes-1: Answers 1294, Questions 48
power-laws ahoy.
it's good source of info on startups and the tech scene, which makes it more like a popular discussion forum than a social network. I don't see this growing to millions of active users unless it tries to take on Yahoo! Answers.
i believe the quora team acknowledges this, and with the introduction of boards they're trying to redefine the site to be some kind of textual pinterest.
this sounded quite pessimistic, it's actually the site i visit the most and i hope they continue to grow without comprising on the quality.
[+] [-] HaloZero|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevenj|14 years ago|reply
Does that mean the Founders Fund wasn't interested?
Is it common for a VC (especially a prominent one) to invest their personal money into startups, as oppose to their fund's money?
[+] [-] jdunck|14 years ago|reply
This might help: http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2010/08/vc-insanity-economics...
[+] [-] wang2bo2|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loverobots|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrsteveman1|14 years ago|reply
Millions of dollars are being sunk into this site? Why?
[+] [-] wilfra|14 years ago|reply
http://www.quora.com/Crime/What-should-you-do-if-someone-put...
Join the site and poke around a bit if you still don't understand. It's like HN. Why is HN so awesome? Because the caliber of people posting here is off-the-charts relative to every similar site. Same with Quora.
[+] [-] thezilch|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rokhayakebe|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brevityness|14 years ago|reply
That seems rather...low for a $400 million valuation.
[+] [-] flyt|14 years ago|reply
"According to AppData, 20K daily active users and 180K monthly active users log into Quora through Facebook Connect — Bear in mind that this is a small fraction of its total number of users, which Cheever and D’Angelo famously never reveal."
[+] [-] oacgnol|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ericmsimons|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] wilfra|14 years ago|reply
"We intend to use some of this funding as a cushion in case of macroeconomic changes. More than half our series A funds from two years ago are actually still in our bank account today. We could have waited longer to raise this round, but we wanted to extend our runway."
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