This article was taken from the April 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
**Q: How did a knowledge database become the hottest website of the year?
A: By having Dennis Crowley, Daniel Ek and Craig Newmark as its contributors.**
On January 20 this year, Google announced that Larry Page would be replacing Eric Schmidt as CEO. It was the week's big tech story, possibly one of the biggest of the year, and it needed explanation. Within the hour, a user had put the question to the information-sharing website Quora: "What are some possible reasons that Google replaced Eric Schmidt with Larry Page as CEO?"
Minutes later, a former Google employee posted a detailed answer that included: "This has been a long time coming and not really that big a leap to make if you've been on the inside... This is a matter of pride and legacy for him [Page], so he's going to keep Google's long-term interests in mind in a way that few outside CEOs would be able to do; he's emotionally invested in a way that only he and Sergey [Brin] can be."
Not all the responses were so boosterish. "If you want to be competitive with Facebook," one answer posited, "it is better for your organisation to be run by someone who thinks like [Facebook's] Mark Zuckerberg instead of someone who thinks like Mark Zuckerberg's uncle." A response from Venkatesh Rao, a tech insider, suggested that in the past few years Google had succumbed to "hubris" and an irrational over-faith in data crunching and information organising. He wrote: "Google is like the geeky kid who's far too logical for his/her own good. To succeed at social, you have to be illogical, insane and delusional in clever ways."
But Quora itself flies in the face of that assumption. The site may be less than a year old, but it's already occupying rare mental real estate at the front of Silicon Valley's consciousness. Compared with other social-based startups that have succeeded because they understood the infinite distractibility of crowds, Quora operates under a more logical premise: people need answers to questions, intelligently stated, from sources they can trust.
Jaws dropped in October when Netflix CEO Reed Hastings stopped by Quora to say his company spends between $500 million and $600 million a year on postage. It was the third question he'd answered that week. On January 4, Twitter cofounder Evan Williams gave a detailed answer to "What is the process involved in launching a startup at SXSW?" Ten days later, Steve Case, former chairman and CEO of AOL, gave an essay-length answer to "What factors led to the bursting of the internet bubble in the late 90s?" That followed several answers he'd given about the failure of his company, including one written two weeks earlier where he stated: "As Edison noted a century ago, vision without execution is hallucination.
That, sadly, is the AOL/ Time Warner merger in a nutshell."
With its formula of insider information swirling in an intelligent, curated, elegantly designed environment that also contains a strong social-networking component, Quora represents the fever dream of the contemporary thinking person's web. If you want to know what Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz thinks of The Social Network, just ask, and Moskovitz will respond. If you want to know why Andreessen Horowitz invested in Instagram, pose the question, and you'll get an answer from the investor, and also the company's CEO, within days, if not hours. If you want to know why Jonathan Abrams lost control of Friendster, Abrams has plenty of time now to answer back on Quora. At times, the site seems like the ultimate tech-industry water cooler, or the world's most awesome conference call. "It doesn't feel like Yahoo! Answers or WikiAnswers -- it feels like Silicon Valley Answers," says internet entrepreneur and blogger Jason Calacanis. "I think that's their big innovation: you don't see anything you wouldn't be interested in."
Others go further, talking about Quora as a culturally transformative technology, which suggests its own question: why?
The company's main office occupies about 110m2 on the second storey of a block-length mission-style building in downtown Palo Alto, California, though there are also unadorned meeting rooms on an upper floor. It looks and smells like a hall of residence, or a bachelor pad, or, at the very least, a lived-in university computer lab: all industrial-grade carpet, bikes against the walls and cartons of marginally healthy foodstuffs A box of baking soda on the window doesn't come close to counteracting the olfactory effects of exposed gym shoes and bedroom slippers. Decorations are minimal, brought in by the company's 16 employees, almost all of whom are under 30 years old, to put next to their computer workstations: stuffed pandas, Uglydolls, the board game Risk and various sports banners. The walls bear movie posters for Hackers ("Their crime is curiosity") and Jet Li's Fearless, but most of the wall space is taken up by flow charts, equations and to-do lists. It's a room for a dedicated cadre of brilliant geeks carefully performing no-nonsense, grind-it-out programming work. There's no table football or other signs of frivolity. If Quora is an exemplar of the latest Silicon Valley boom, then this boom is hardly being typified by wretched excess.
By the window, an HD TV, wall-mounted on its side, shows currently active users, a Twitter feed that mentions Quora, and new questions: "What are the most interesting stealth startups in Israel?" "What's the next big innovation in web interface design?" "What are some ways to inspire girls to embrace technology?" A poster-sized photo of Quorra, the smoking-hot character played by Olivia Wilde in Tron: Legacy, sits off to the side of the water cooler. It's been a busy month in Quora-land. No one has had the time to hang it up yet.
Quora sprang from the minds of Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever, two young IT geniuses who met, like so many industry up-and-comers, working at Facebook. D'Angelo started there out of Caltech in 2006, and later was part of a team that hired Cheever away from Amazon.
But they dreamt of making their own mark. D'Angelo says the company started with "a high-level idea" that "there's all this knowledge that's not on the internet and is either in people's heads, or scattered and not very well organised. We definitely saw a gap.
We're trying to have a fresh start at looking at how we can get information on to the internet. What's the ideal system for that?
How can we enable that?"
So much of what's on the internet, D'Angelo says, "is frivolous or silly and not what most people spend their lives pursuing.
Getting better at stuff, learning, accumulating knowledge. It just didn't seem like there was a great way to share it all." Cheever says that when he worked on the Facebook application programming interface (API), people would ask him questions on the forums. He had to filter out which questions were important and then answer them on his personal blog. But there was no guarantee that anyone would see the answers in the long term. Like so much else online, it would get lost in the stream. He and D'Angelo saw Quora as a way to fix this problem. "A lot of people don't want all the window dressing of becoming a blogger," he says. "Some people want to share information because they're a former Olympic luge coach, or a lawyer or a doctor or someone who lives in a town and who's accumulated a ton of knowledge about which gas station is the best place to go if you have a flat tyre, or where you should eat with your kids on a Sunday when a lot of places are closed. If we can provide them with the audience and the space and the identity and the feedback and all these other things, that seems like something that's missing."
In April 2009, D'Angelo and Cheever rented the smallest office they could find in Palo Alto, and began pounding out the code that would later become Quora. Soon after, they hired Rebekah Cox, a designer whom they'd known at Facebook, to help them. By the autumn they'd hired an engineer. The four of them slogged away at the site in their rental closet, with no room to do anything but build a back end. "It was horrible, but it was also awesome," Cox says. "We just sat there at our desks and talked through a bunch of things.
And we made it really complicated and then we made it really simple, and then we made it really complicated, and then we ended up at this simple thing."
Quora launched in January 2010 with a user base largely composed of D'Angelo's and Cheever's college and high-school friends, meaning there was a lot of early Quora information on the best places to eat in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Cheever was raised. But they also built a feature into the site whereby users could invite people, and soon their friends from Facebook were summoning people from other startups, and other entrepreneurs.
D'Angelo says this wasn't the initial plan, but "in retrospect you can explain it. People in Silicon Valley and startups like to try out new things." He adds, "If you're looking for knowledge about engineering, people took courses in college, and there are books.
The information doesn't change very quickly. But all this information about startups changes very quickly and there aren't very good courses on it. So there was a lot of demand for the information."
Detailed histories of relatively new companies such as PayPal were very popular early on, Cheever says. "That stuff hadn't really been written down yet. It might have faded into the sands of time." Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, who already has several thousand followers on Quora, says: "It's a nice, structured way to tell the story of how we got started to folks looking for advice."
Investment followed quickly and easily. In March 2010, Benchmark Capital gave $11 million to Quora while the site was still in beta, referring to it as "kind of like Wikipedia". "This is the long tail of information," D'Angelo says. "We were able to raise money on good terms because of the tech economy. So we've got enough money to keep going for quite a while before we need to worry about it again."
As the site expanded, Cheever and D'Angelo started to see that it could even be considered a public utility of sorts, albeit one with a still limited audience. It seemed to be democratising the concept of helpful advice. Cheever says: "If someone asks, 'Could I have coffee with you and get some advice?', I'll do it as a favour sometimes. But if it's just going to help them and going to fly off into the ether after that, it's not a great use of my time compared to spending about the same amount of time writing something up and knowing that it's going to be around for future people. I can point people to it."
The web is littered with firstgeneration Q&A sites such as Yahoo! Answers and Answers.com, but those addresses feel impersonal, messy, spammy and disorganised. Though there's plenty of valuable information and advice to be found on them, they're clumsy to navigate and it's extremely hard to figure out who's answering the questions and if those answers are reliable. This represents Quora's opportunity. Unlike the other Q&A sites, it contains a socialnetworking component. Except when the information given is extremely personal or sensitive, you know who's responding to your questions, and you can judge their answers accordingly. "So far the quality has stayed pretty high because of the voting and moderating that's gone on and because we know the real identities of people who are answering," says popular blogger Robert Scoble, who joined Quora after someone posted on the site the question: "Why isn't Robert Scoble on Quora?" "That's a huge difference from sites like Answers. com or Yahoo! Answers," he says.
D'Angelo says: "Before Google, there were all these search engines, and even though they were just OK, there were still a lot of people using them, and it showed that there was demand. We hope that we can be that for the knowledge-sharing space. There are all these people sharing knowledge on the internet, but it's kind of a mess."
Quora faced its first big challenge just after Christmas 2010, when the traffic shot up on the back of buzz spreading across the social networks. The site broke in a huge way. D'Angelo says that they had prepared for a doubling of traffic, but what happened went way beyond what they'd anticiapted, and then there was another enormous spike during the first few days of 2011. According to web-traffic monitoring site, Alexa.com, Quora was responsible for over 0.3 per cent of global internet traffic -- a huge amount, though this has since shrunk to less than 0.1 per cent. "It was the worst timing ever," Cheever says. "Two-thirds of the people were scattered around the country for the holidays. Sorry, Mum and Dad, I'm gonna be up on the third floor on the internet, and I'm gonna miss dinner."
Suddenly, the site had more information, and more users, than it could control. In a post on Quora called "Scaling up", Cheever addressed the situation, saying that he and everyone at the site was working hard to let users know how to phrase their questions intelligently. As he put it, they'd be "educating new users upfront so that new content coming into the system requires less attention to get in line with Quora policies and guidelines, doing more to identify content which probably doesn't need a human to look at it, empowering more people to make the first assessments about which content is good, and giving the people who keep quality up on Quora the ability to focus their efforts on the parts of Quora that they care about... We believe that there is some wisdom in crowds."
But this could still end up being a problem for Quora, says entrepreneur, LeWeb organiser and Quora user Loic Le Meur, especially if the "cool guys from Silicon Valley move on and start answering questions somewhere else". Le Meur says the site will grow and remain a success only if it keeps its curation and contributor-quality levels high.
Other Quora users have begun to talk about the site almost evangelically. "Quora is going to be one of the foundational internet brands of the new decade," says Shervin Pishevar, a tech investor and entrepreneur, who's asked 100 questions on the site and answered 57 since he joined last year. "It will change the way we seek answers to questions and democratise the process of asking those questions of almost anyone regardless of status and influence. Quora will change the way we blog, the way we search and the rate of human-knowledge distribution."
Already, Quora's knowledge base has spread beyond the tech world. It contains tips on farming, curling and living in Romania.
The number of possible informed opinions is as limitless as human endeavour. "It's a clean slate," Foursquare's Dennis Crowley says. "They can do anything they want and the users will go along for the ride." If you want to know why the sky is blue, you might as well use Quora to ask a PhD candidate at MIT.
D'Angelo and Cheever say they have no greater ambitions than improving the site. "We don't have revenue," Cheever says. "But if you pull something valuable out of people's heads, there's a business opportunity." "We're not too concerned with growth," D'Angelo adds. "It grows faster than we can keep up with sometimes. We're mainly just concerned with keeping quality really high as the site grows."
And there won't be any of the usual tech-conference glad-handing that often accompanies startups. "That's not a useful way to find people," D'Angelo says. "Our audience is not really people who go to conferences. It's people who like to spend a lot of time on the internet and share knowledge." Cheever says: "We're trying to reach librarians."
Have they been successful? Well, in early January, a user asked: "Why do some libraries use the Dewey Decimal System and others the Library of Congress System?" By the end of the week, the responses included one that gave the answer in four detailed paragraphs, the gist being: "the classification system a library uses depends on its collection, not how big or small it is".
A quick look at the user's profile showed that she worked as a university librarian in Ohio. These are the sorts of intangibles that will make Quora work in the end, D'Angelo says. Users specialise in particular kinds of information, idiosyncratic knowledge that can't always be classified. "You think about a phone book," he says. " It has everyone's name and their number. You can find these databases online, where there's a table and everything lines up. We're about everything that doesn't fit into a structure."
WHAT OTHER Q&A SITES HAVE LAUNCHED?\1. Ask Jeeves and Answers.com have recognised questions in queries since 1996 but the community-built Q&A trend didn't emerge until later. Allexperts.com, founded in 1998, claims to be the first to feature it but the model became mainstream only in 2003 with the arrival of Answerbag.com.
This gained a small but devoted following using profiles and an answer-ranking model later emulated by Yahoo! The brainchild of entrepreneur Joel Downs, the site was quick to adapt to social networking, releasing a public API in 2007 for website integration. \2. Yahoo! Answers launched in July 2005 and quickly became the biggest collaborative Q&A site, with 204 million users worldwide by November 2010. It allowed users to earn points for answering questions, and let askers bestow the "best answer" crown on their favourite. Its popularity attracted online appearances by celebrities and politicians, including Barack Obama, Leonardo DiCaprio and Stephen Hawking. Despite its popularity, the site has been accused of providing low-quality answers and attracting spammers. \3. Last July, Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook Questions.
Similar to wall posts, they differ in that they are available to, and can be answered by, any of the site's 500 million-plus users.
Given the close ties between Quora and Facebook (Quora's core team worked at Facebook, and Charlie Cheever headed the development of Facebook Connect, a service integral to Quora's sign-up service), the announcement wasn't surprising. Questions is currently available to only a select few Facebook users in the US; a full US roll-out is expected early this year.
WHAT ARE QUORA'S BEST ANSWERS?\1. What's your email signature? Daniel Ek, founder and CEO of Spotify:
----------Daniel Ek CEO Spotify. Sent from my Crackberry. Please overlook any speeeellling errors, as I am typically using this device when en route to a meeting, multitasking or can't sleep (but extremely exhausted). \2. How much did it cost AOL to distribute all those CDs back in the 90s? Steve Case, cofounder and former chief executive of AOL:
Our target was to spend ten per cent of lifetime revenue to get a subscriber. The average "life" revenue was about $350, so we spent about $35 each. \3. What does Dustin Moskovitz think of the Facebook movie? Dustin Moskovitz, cofounder of Facebook:
We worked a lot and stressed out; the version in the trailer seems more exciting. I remember we drank ourselves silly and had a lot of sex with co-eds. \4. What are the cleverest hip-hop one-liners of all time?
Dennis Crowley, cofounder and CEO of Foursquare:
"What'choo think I rap for, to push a fucking Rav 4?" -- Kanye West "Got more rhymes than Victoria's got secrets"- Beastie Boys \5. What is the best dim sum restaurant in San Francisco to go to with children? Evan Williams, cofounder of Twitter:
I don't know if it's the "best" but Yank Sing in Rincon Center is great and accommodates kids. It's huge and loud. And the dim sum is great.
Neal Pollack wrote about Tron in 01.11. Ask your own questions at Quora.com
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
