
Quora collects $80 million in funding - tweakz
http://www.cnet.com/news/quora-collects-80-million-in-funding/
======
hitchhiker999
I have a q&a site with 4 million visitors a month - an ESL learning site. We
have 2 employees, total cost <1 million :D - 1 million, even saying that makes
me laugh. Completely coded by us from the ground up. This says
[https://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/](https://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/)
they have only a million visitors a month??? - I'm guessing that must be
wrong.

My question: What in pickled f*s are these people doing with 80 million on a
Q&A site? How far out of the reach of reality is this industry?

~~~
fidotron
I've wondered along these lines too. There is clearly something else going on
in the VC business beyond strictly evaluating company value based on ability
to generate it directly. One factor I'll project (since I can't tell where
you're based) is that companies with proven engineering staff in the Bay Area
get a boost in inherent value just from acquihire potential. Bonus points for
famous and connected founders, as Quora has.

Bay Area VC activity looks a lot like Wall Street to me, with the same
disconnect between price and value happening.

~~~
pbreit
Not sure how you define value but Quora is creating quite a lot of it.

~~~
wankerrific
Oh look more value:

[http://www.quora.com/Family/I-caught-my-younger-brother-
watc...](http://www.quora.com/Family/I-caught-my-younger-brother-watching-me-
bathing-How-do-I-deal-with-it)

[http://www.quora.com/How-does-a-sixteen-year-old-get-a-
girlf...](http://www.quora.com/How-does-a-sixteen-year-old-get-a-girlfriend)

Look - I don't care if Quora wants to spam my inbox with link bait in order to
generate AU and page views, but they could at least not try to take the high
road and pretend to be anything more than the lowest common denominator, no-
business-model, spam factory that they are.

------
yalogin
Can someone explain how there a place for Quora? The only niche I can think of
is generic technical advise.

Stackoverflow answers all the tech questions but they are overly pedantic to
the point of ridiculous when it comes to generic tech questions.

Hackernews should have been the correct place for generic tech advise but we
don't see questions of that nature here. May be as far as tech advise goes
people from startups would rather write blog posts and get some credibility
for their companies rather than contribute anonymously.

So how is Quora relevant or can be? On top of that they only show you one
question. So that boggles my mind as to why it can become popular if its gated
to begin with.

~~~
pmorici
"Hackernews should have been the correct place for generic tech advise but we
don't see questions of that nature here."

In my experience HN isn't a great place to ask questions like that, at least
not any more. I tried to post an "Ask HN" question about pricing hardware and
working with re-sellers the other day. First, under a newly created account so
I could share more details; that submission was immediately killed I assume as
a preventative measure against spam. So then I posted a much more generic
version asking the same question under my typical username it floated to the
bottom of the new page w/o getting any votes or responses. So I went over to
Quora posted the same thing anonymously and had a reasonable answer and
pointers to things to read up on in a couple hours. I like HN and have been
reading it regularly for years but it isn't a replacement for Quora

~~~
yalogin
Its a shame. This is exactly the group of people that could guide you in the
correct direction. But I guess that is a lot to share for companies. I for one
would have loved to see answers to that question myself. Did you post it on
Quora and did you get any responses there? If so can you paste the link here?

~~~
pmorici
Yes, [http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-important-things-to-
keep-...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-important-things-to-keep-in-mind-
when-negotiating-relationships-with-re-sellers)

The gist of the answer was your relationship with a reseller should be one of
mutual respect and shared success and typical discounts to a reseller should
in the 20-25% range on the low end for an established product and perhaps as
high as 40% if the re-seller will invest a lot in marketing and commit to
buying very large quantities upfront.

------
orky56
From personal experience, Quora started off really hot. Many influential tech
people were answering very basic questions with highly impactful answers. It
really was an honest look into how some great minds think. Peer voting really
separated the noise and allowed smart contributors to rise up through the
answers.

And then, the content got dry. It was the same questions with relatively
similar answers. The newsfeed became more about showcasing content from months
or even years ago to make it look more fresh. It really became a brand
recognition and marketing tool to allow individuals to answer any industry-
related question with their product/service/company in the context.

And then, posts came about. It made sense that authors would want to
contribute their own insights without it being an answer to an already posed
question. However, new sites like Medium, Svbtle, and Posthaven are much
better tools for this although they each have their own content niche. Quora
has become a redundant tool where people repost their blogs.

So where does that leave Quora? They have always had an issue going past the
iron curtain of Silicon Valley. It's been difficult for them to engage the
average, non-techie consumer. Even if they don't care about this demographic,
it will be hard for them to sustain growth among techies. They must be quickly
approaching a ceiling for unique users so then they must capitalize on
engagement and retention. I'm curious how they decide to go about this.

~~~
davedx
I missed the early Quora. By the time I stumbled onto it it resembled a
"modern" Experts Exchange.

~~~
orky56
It really felt like a televised red carpet even for an awards show. You get a
chance to see all the celebrities and connect with them in the moment. In SV,
it's more about becoming them through learnings rather than dreaming about
being them through spectating.

------
feintruled
Quora seems to have taken a strange turn recently - their email digest is full
of creepy racial questions like "do white girls find Indian men disgusting?"
and "do Asian men mind if Asian girls date white men?"

I guess you can't stop such questions being asked, but they frequently appear
as the top question in the digest and thus in the subject line. I deregistered
off the back of that. (Come to think of it, not sure exactly when I registered
in the first place!)

~~~
seizethecheese
I just scanned some updates in my inbox and none had anything like this.
What's going on is that these updates are custom for each user, so either you
haven't used the site and are getting the least common denominator, or for
some reason you've lead Quora to believe that you're interested in such
questions.

~~~
feintruled
Well, that's interesting, and even more concerning if somehow a site has
profiled me to think I have an interest in such things! I haven't used the
site very much though, so perhaps it is the lowest common denominator.

------
adventured
Am I the only one that suspects Quora's future is more likely to be similar to
an About.com (to be sold off for $300m in the future when a great business
fails to materialize) than a Wikipedia? It seems like they latched on to the
Q&A space originally when it was hot, and are now pivoting because competing
with Answers.com et al. has a lot less of a runway than they previously
expected.

~~~
josh-wrale
My guess is that Yahoo will buy it in a broad "upgrade" to Yahoo Answers.

------
leobabauta
I also really dislike their model of making you sign in to see more than one
answer. Annoying your potential users is a bad policy.

~~~
rokhayakebe
I had a content site from January 2011 until September 2013. From the first
day until June 2013 I had less than 100 sign ups. Then I forced people to
enter their email before the opaque screen is removed to allow click-through.
The result: 8000+ emails from June to September..... Then I accidentally
deleted my database (without backup).

------
zxcvvcxz
>Founded in 2009 by former Facebook engineers, Quora is a revenue-less,
question-and-answer service with 500,000 topics and an unknown number of
users.

>Quora has now collected more than $140 million in funding from investors.

How could this possibly end well for the investors?

EDIT - besides a FB acquisition.

~~~
sireat
No, it is brilliant (in the SV way) that they have no revenue. The sky is the
limit and you can get funded for pretty much any amount.

Seriously, if they had been actually monetizing, they would not be able to
collect the funding.

There was that photo site a few months back which closed much discussed on HN.
The problem with them was that they actually tried to make money and thus VCs
could see that they would not be the big hit needed.

I am only half-kidding with this.

------
dchuk
Good, maybe they can spend some of that on fixing their god awful UX.

------
golergka
I didn't follow them for a while; but that's curious: what happened in the
middle of 2013?

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/w68v2r2a3xq4c6c/%D0%A1%D0%BA%D1%80...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/w68v2r2a3xq4c6c/%D0%A1%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%88%D0%BE%D1%82%202014-04-09%2018.36.44.png)

~~~
andyjohnson0
_" Quora launched full text search of questions and answers on its website on
March 20, 2013, and extended the feature to mobile devices in late May 2013.
It also announced in May 2013 that all its metrics had grown 3X relative to
the same time last year."_ [1]

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#History](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#History)

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username223
Given that Demand Media is valued over a billion, $80 million to a low-rent
content farm seems reasonable.

------
allsystemsgo
Wasn't there some sort of issue where they were mining user data without our
consent? Many of us were having to send emails directly to Quora support
requesting that our accounts be deleted.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#Privacy_concerns](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#Privacy_concerns)

------
Jedd
Jesus Christ Silicon Valley[1] did a beautiful breakdown of the lunacy of
Quora a year ago.

JCSV's style isn't for everyone (much sarcasm, so profanity, very rude) but
he/she makes some compelling points

    
    
      "Quora has raised $61 million dollars for this life-altering
      question-and-answer-cum-blogging site. Let’s break that down
      a bit: SpaceX, a company that sends rockets into motherfucking
      space, has raised $230 million and employs more than 3000 people
      (source: the world’s second-best source for knowledge). Quora,
      which lets you ask other people questions on the computer, has
      raised more than a quarter of that amount and employs 50
      individuals."
    

[1]
[http://jesuschristsiliconvalley.tumblr.com/post/48962035819/...](http://jesuschristsiliconvalley.tumblr.com/post/48962035819/quoraquoraquora)

------
rrrazdan
My experience with Quora has been pretty bad, but that has mostly to do with
my topic selection and network being Indian.

Quora got popular in India because of widespread adoption in IIT circles, who
by virtue of being influencers spread it across India. So much so that, I saw
a statistic which said that most visits on Quora are from India.

However for me what that has meant is that a rash of new registrants have
appeared who have destroyed any topic related to my alma mater and India.

EDIT - Also shouldn't this 'Indian Invasion' have had an effect on the
valuation?

EDIT - I am also an Indian and mean no disrespect. But the fact is that one of
the side effects of Quora getting popular so fast is that it is often the
first Internet forum for many students. I know it because I have talked to
them. And that ends up in usual newbie mistakes.

~~~
RivieraKid
That's basically what I'm thinking. The demographic is becoming more and more
Indian, which drives away Westerners, who are the people Quora can make money
on.

------
mbesto
My thoughts on the success of Quora are consistent with that of Joel Spolsky's
take on cultural anthropology:
[http://vimeo.com/37309773](http://vimeo.com/37309773)

Watch from 9:30 on. _" The idea of Stack Overflow is to attract anyone who is
an expert programmer and repel anyone who's not"_

My prediction - Google/Facebook (someone in that arena) will buy Quora.

~~~
taybin
Isn't Stack Overflow the opposite of that though?

~~~
hadoukenio
That's the problem with gamifying something. Eventually you'll get people who
are only there for karma. The other day I found an incorrect answer that was
chosen, but directly below it was the correct answer. The kicker? The OP
commented on the correct answer saying that his was correct but the guy other
guy had less karma than him and "needed it". WTF.

These days, you really have to take Stack Overflow answers with a grain of
salt.

------
startupranks
Likely worth $800MM given typical late stage funding multiples. #54 on
www.thestartup100.com and notably most valuable company without any revenue.

~~~
startupranks
Update Techcrunch is now reporting the valuation at $900MM.

~~~
ulfw
Just make it 9 Billion. Seems the way the valley goes these days.

~~~
rezistik
I just want to take everyone in the Valley aside and sit them down, look into
the crowd and calmly say "Hey guys, if we could please stop overvaluing every
company that manages to set up a simple CRUD site with no revenue model, that
would be great. Let's do ourselves a favor and not re-do the DotCom bubble.
Thanks all and have a good night."

~~~
ulfw
I think it's too late for that. We obviously are redoing said bubble. Just
hope it won't burst as violently again. 2001 sucked.

------
droogie
My Quora experience has been a sad one. I created an account just to be able
to see answers to a question I was interested in. Then I tried to delete my
account and their account removal policy stated that you have to send them an
email for them to delete your account. Really, who still does that in 2014.

------
gagaga
What would happen if we valued forums the way we value tech sites? What would
SomethingAwful's valuation be in today's tech world when it had the engagement
and content creation power it held in the early 2000s ?

To me, Quora is really nothing more than a glorified forum.

------
m52go
I love the service, but it's about time Quora tested ways to monetize its
site.

------
buzaga41
"Now, you folks better give me my damn acquisition, understood!?" \- VC

------
Im_Talking
Who the fuck cares?

Do your own startup, bootstrap it, answer to no one, feel the freedom to
innovate as you see fit, eliminate the politics, remain true to your own
calling. Fuck the VCs... fuck'm in the ass.

