
Quora's $50 million - kreutz
http://dcurt.is/quoras-50-million
======
staunch
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.

~~~
mikeryan
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).

~~~
wpietri
Quora is creating a giant collection of well-indexed, compelling bits of
content in a format that Google finds delicious. They're already in the top
1000 sites and have been rising steadily. And they're doing it in a way that
users are doing most of the work.

The obvious comparison is Wikipedia. Whether or not they'll get to that level
I can't say, but it's not crazy to suggest that they will, and if they do
they'll be worth a lot more than $500m. And even if they don't, they'll have a
lot of users, a lot of pageviews, a smart staff, and a solid technology
platform. Odds are good they'll find _something_ to do.

~~~
riffraff
out of curiosity, what is the data backing the "in the top 1000 sites"
assumption?

I can see alexa reports that for example, but I am still trying to understand
what smart people use for traffic estimations.

~~~
jerf
If I'm manipulating the statistics in my head properly, even with a skewed
sample, Alexa stats should converge on the truth as you go higher in the
ranking, because the distribution of web site accesses is very skewed towards
the top websites, which should have the effect of limiting the error as you
get closer to #1. If Alexa says a site is well within the top 1000 (as opposed
to just on the border, and Alexa shows them at 771), I'd accept that as strong
evidence.

------
olivercameron
"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.

~~~
rdl
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.

~~~
inthewoods
"With great content, search traffic will follow, and then there will be some
way to monetize."

I went through the first dot.com bubble - and I heard a lot of sentences like
that. Not saying that Quora isn't valuable, or that it isn't possible to
monetize, but the whole build-traffic-and-we'll-figure-it-out-later gives me
'Nam flashbacks.

I used to do a lot at Quora - but the more I thought about it, the more I
figured that not getting paid for giving up my knowledge was a bad idea. I
find it most useful for discussions/information on start-ups.

All being said, they have a lot of talented people working there and a lot of
great data - someone will buy them if they can't figure out how to make it
work financially.

------
redwood
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.

~~~
coffeemug
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.

~~~
redwood
I disagree tho that doesn't mean Quora won't be successful. It's just not
realistic to think SV is representative of most populations. It's a very tech-
heavy population which is not necessarily what the masses are looking for.
Quora could be a dominant Q&A site for tech issues... and perhaps that's worth
the big money (I just doubt it).

------
10x
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.

~~~
HaloZero
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.

~~~
10x
re user engagement the "threshold" for submitting a funny picture or pun
anonymously is much lower than writing a well-written answer in your full
name.

------
stevenj
I found it interesting that Peter Thiel invested his own personal money into
it.

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?

~~~
loverobots
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-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-12/clarium-hedge-fund-
shrinks-90-as-thiel-has-third-losing-year.html)

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, but you shouldn't take facebook out.

The whole point of investing like this is that a home-run can offset a large
number of failures / also rans.

The Wright brothers have a horrible record of making things fly if you removed
the flights made at Kitty Hawk.

~~~
loverobots
Yes and no. I think he just gave a $500K check from his own funds so others
will not see a cut of that, just losses from his other investments. But yeah,
he made money for himself gambling /investing /a combo or whatever. However,
not even his FB lottery win can get his record out of the hole.

He is connected, famous and rich so he can afford to and can pick the early
stage companies to through a bit of money at, hoping a few strike. But,
there's a difference between billion dollar sized funds and angel ones.

------
mrsteveman1
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?

~~~
wilfra
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:

[http://www.quora.com/Crime/What-should-you-do-if-someone-
put...](http://www.quora.com/Crime/What-should-you-do-if-someone-puts-a-gun-
to-your-head)

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.

~~~
IsaacL
It's _better_ than HN. I like HN, but after using it for a few years I noticed
something wrong with the comments here that I couldn't quite articulate. Then
I saw Quora, which showed me just how good a discussion community could be.

------
thezilch
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?

------
rokhayakebe
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.

------
brevityness
"20-30k daily active users."

That seems rather...low for a $400 million valuation.

~~~
flyt
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."

------
hooande
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?

------
ericmsimons
Is it possible they raised this to ensure they didn't die in the event of a
bubble?

~~~
46Bit
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.

------
demoo
Where is the money to be made?

------
spiritplumber
I thought ENCOM was worth more than 50M.

