Quora

Founder/s: Adam D’Angelo, Charlie Cheever
Key people: Xavier Amatriain (VP Engineering), David Cole (Product Design Manager), Nikhil Dandekar (Engineering Manager), Nikhil Garg (Engineering Manager), Sandeep Goyal (Software Engineer) and Adam D’Angelo (CEO)
Number of employees: 101 – 250

Quora is a question-and-answer website created, edited, and organized by its owners. It was founded in 2009 and is based in Palo Alto, California.

History

Quora was co-founded by two former Facebook employees, Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever. D’Angelo resigned from his position at Facebook in January 2010 to create Quora. He said that he and Cheever were inspired to create Quora because “we thought that Q & A is one of those areas on the internet where there are a lot of sites, but no one had come along and built something that was really good yet.”

Quora’s base of users grew quickly, beginnning with spikes in December 2010. As of April 2017, Quora claimed to have 190 million monthly unique visitors, up from 100 million a year earlier.

In June 2011, Quora redesigned its website, in order to make information discovery and navigation easier. Quora released an official iPhone app on September 29, 2011, followed by an Android app on September 5, 2012.

In September 2012, Quora announced that co-founder Charlie Cheever was stepping back from a day-to-day role at the firm, although he would continue in an advisory role.

In January 2013, Quora launched a blogging platform.

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 usage metrics had tripled relative to the same time in the prior year. In November 2013, Quora introduced a feature called Stats to allow ll Quora users to see summary and detailed statistics regarding how many people had viewed, upvoted, followed, and shared their questions and answers. TechCrunch reported that, although Quora had no immediate plans for monetization, they believed that search ads would likely be their eventual source of revenue.

In April 2014, it was announced that Quora was raising $80 million from Tiger Global at a reported $900 million valuation. Quora was also one of the members of the Summer 2014 Y Combinator batch.

In March 2016, Quora acquired Parlio online community website. In April of that year, the company also began a limited rollout of advertising on the site.

In October 2016, Quora launched Quora en español to the public. Following this announcement in early 2017, a beta of Quora in French was announced. According to this last announcement, the next languages Quora will be available in are German and Italian.

In April 2017, Quora was reported to have received Series D funding, giving it a valuation of $1.8 billion.