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When we were using the word “humankind”, we were writing an extreme interesting review about Tawkon and we think todays it’s the right time to use it again, for Quora. Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever founded Quora in 2009 and launched the website a year later to rethink the way Q&A websites were built all over again. When they asked us if Quora was the next Google, we replied saying that Quora was mostly likely going to be the next Wikipedia.
In fact, Quora is nowadays the second largest “database” of shared knowledge on the internet. The two founders were trying to make Wikipedia more social and personal by not forgetting the value behind an answer. What they wanted to achieve was a social filter in order to retain the best answers with the best questions. After five years, even though Quora is still in english mode only and Charlie Cheever has left the company, we can say they have partially achieved it.
The big news is that Quora has raised in a series C round $80M at a $900M valuation. In the last four years, Quora has gone through three venture rounds, raising $141M in total. As Adam D’Angelo, the Founder and CEO, has reported, Quora still had half of the money raised in its second round. The reason why they raised a third round is because they saw an interest from Tiger Global and the ability to build the basis for a product that will be available forever.
What Quora is looking for is independence and permanence. The company doesn’t want to end up being acquired by one of the big players, for financial issues, and they don’t even want to build a product for a lifetime. Quora aims to be the second or first database of knowledge on the internet for the next thousand years.
Even though they haven’t released numbers regarding their traffic, it’s not what Quora is looking at. For them, it’s more important to have a good question with a great answer than receiving one thousand visits. They are not looking at who they are attracting, but at the quality of what they are trying to build. From a certain degree, if they keep the quality high, they might even overtake Wikipedia, which is not personal and specific to people’s needs.
Another issue that Quora is facing is profitability. Although the company has raised $141M, they haven’t seen a single dollar in the bank coming from the product they are building. If they want to reach their second aim, permanence, they will have to figure out how to start generating revenues from the website. However, it is still something less important than the value that users are adding every day. That’s why we shouldn’t expect anything with the aim to make money in the next few years, because, at the moment, it’s not what they are focusing on.
The first aim is independence, but how can a company be independent if there are investors involved? A truly independent company is Wikipedia that has never raised money and always asked for donations. In this way, they have been able to keep the quality of the product high and they haven’t relied on external investors that might influence the way the product is built. At some point, those investors will start knocking at Quora’s doors asking for something back.
The company doesn’t seem to be in a position to start asking for donations in the future. That’s why we thought that credits were a first step toward a possible monetisation, but even then if they started letting users pay for knowledge the whole experience would have been destroyed. On the other hand, it’s good to have the system of giving back and getting rewarded with credits that the user can spend in order to receive knowledge from other people.
Quora has become the best resource for direct and prompt answers regarding the problems we face everyday. It’s noble to see how this company is taking care of what knowledge means in the web 2.0, but it’s also true that Adam D’Angelo had to find a “toy” to play with, since the shares he holds in Facebook are going to provide money for him and his next forty generations. This also means that Adam is building Quora because he really believes in it and not to make a profit out of it. He’s not looking for money, but for making the human experience richer through the power of the internet.
