Let’s talk about the most trending website Quora, that has answers to all your questions! Or you could say, allows you to answer the questions!
Quora is a question and answer website, where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users! The website was launched in 2009 and a year after its launch, Quora received an enormous funding from Benchmark Capital, worth $ 11 million. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California. By the end of 2011, Quora received half a million users.
In the year 2009, when people were often baffled about finding answers on the internet, that’s when Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever came up with a fascinating idea! These two young lads happen to be ex employees of Facebook. Post their exit from the firm, Adam and Charlie developed an idea and implemented the same into a website now famously known as Quora. The two co founders of Quora, met each other in the premises of Facebook.
About the Co founders!
Adam D’Angelo and the brains behind the social media giant Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, happen to be school friends! They went to the same school Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school in New Hampshire. Their bond was strong and they were great buddies! In 2004, Zuckerberg appointed Adam as the Vice President (VP) of Engineering at Facebook, which was startup back then. Later, in 2008 Adam was promoted to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Facebook.
Speaking about Charlie, here’s how it all started! In the year 2006, Charlie got an email from Facebook, regarding the position of a software engineering manager. At first, Charlie ignored the mail. Later, he changed his mind and accepted the offer. He worked for Amazon before joining Facebook.
How did the Co founders collide?
However, It was on the Facebook campus, where the two , Adam and Charlie would meet and have intellectual conversations. Over the course of time, Adam and Cheever became best friends! They exchanged ideas and thought of setting up a firm that would make it easier for people to share their knowledge, thoughts and opinions.
Later in 2008, both the intellectuals decided to leave Facebook to create their own startup. Quora was derived from Quorum, meaning a group of people coming together to reach a consensus! In the year 2009, the Quora website was launched. It took around one year to develop the company. Initially, Quora was compared to the search engine giant, Google. However, people recognized the differences between the two! Google is algorithmic focused whereas, Quora depends on knowledge from people! Even though, Quora is similar to Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Answers.com, yet works completely in a different way! Real names of the users are mandatory and you need to login to use Quora, either via your Facebook, Google account or Quora account as well.
Adam D’angelo explains, When you look at Google, its job is to find you the perfect web page. There are a lot of cases when you want to know something and a list of websites isn’t ideal. For example, If you’re looking for an overview, Wikipedia usually has a good, edited aggregation of content. So one way of solving these cases is to pull all of this information out of people’s heads and get it into a useful format that can be shared.
Following its success, in January 2013, Quora launched a blogging platform allowing it’s users to post non answer content on their profiles such as images and other relevant stuff. In April 2014, Quora raised $ 80 million from Tiger Global Management. With each passing year, Quora received several fundings and even investors! In 2017, Quora raised $ 85 million in a series at $ 1.8 billion valuations with Collaborative Fund and Y Combinator! Recently, Quora was also launched in several languages including Hindi, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese,Portuguese, French and Indonesian.
Keeping this in mind, what we learn from Quora is, an idea can change your life, literally!
