Firstly, is there any chance we can have a story without someone using the word "bubble"? This is not evidence of a bubble. More to the point, it's a boring prediction because it doesn't add anything. Some years from now we may well be in a bubble and the person who happens to be right that day will say "See? I said we were in a bubble" and the previous 1000 days of being wrong will be summarily ignored.
Basically it's pointless.
As for Quora, I stand by my original assessment: I don't see this going mainstream. Q&A seems to be something that works well for particular verticals (eg programming aka Stackoverflow) but doesn't seem to be a general purpose or widespread tool. This is in part cultural (eg I believe Q&A is very big in Korea).
I see this more as "bubble thinking" and in this context "bubble" has nothing to do with valuation but more that the people who use and value Quora live inside a bubble. That bubble is the Valley. VCs and Valleywags only know other VCs and Valleywags and all of those people use Quora so they make the mistake of thinking it's far larger than it actually is.
Quora does not have the mainstream breakout appeal that, say, Pinterest or Instagram does and honestly I don't think it ever will (you can quote me on that). Neither does (or will) Stackexchange.
That's not to say either won't exit for 9-10 digits but that's another story entirely.
Quora has done a fantastic job of marketing itself to VCs/Valleywags but I see Q&A much like I do Foursquare and the whole check-in thing. It's a (to borrow a Mark Suster term) FNAC (feature not a company).
IMHO Quora will suffer the same fate every social/curation site does: eternal September. If it ever does grow massively the influx of new people will change the site and those early adopters people like to follow now will move on to the next thing. It's Slashdot, Digg, etc all over again.
I may be (read: am) biased, but I don't think there is (currently) any finer system in the world for technical, more-or-less-science-based Q&A than Stack Exchange.
So the open question is, how many technical, mostly-science based topics exist that work on the Stack Exchange Q&A engine -- and how large can they become? Many have been tried, some are working; see the statistics at http://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#traffic
At the very least, Stack Exchange produced Stack Overflow, which is already absolutely enormous, growing like crazy, and well on its way to becoming the Wikipedia of programming. We can't really say that about Quora for any topic, can we? Will Stack Exchange ever recreate that level of success on any other topic? I don't know. I suppose you could plot growth curves of the various sub-sites and estimate how long it'd take for them to reach the size of Stack Overflow.
And also watch out for Branch.com - it takes Quora model of "Experts Q&A" to "Invite-only Experts talking on a roundtable". Potentially disruptive as it plays on psychology of "exclusiveness" - Evan and Biz stone are betting on it via Obvious Corp.
If Quora got the adoption that Yahoo answers did, it would end up with answers like Yahoo answers has and similarly talented engineers. The only way Facebook holds onto their talent is that the idiots typically don't make friends with the rest of us. Even reddit looks childish these days.
Front page reddit is pretty awful with the exception of /r/askscience (and well, honestly, I subscribe to /r/aww because I love looking at pictures of cute animals), but reddit is actually REALLY great if you find a couple of high traffic subreddits that don't hit the front page and turn off all the default subscriptions. I just wish they'd let subreddits arrange some sort of feeder model amongst themselves. (So stuff posted in /r/haskell could bubble up to /r/coding with sufficient upvotes, for example). That subreddits are siloed is the biggest technical problem.
The front page just has the lowest common denominator problem.
I view quora as a highend QA website that connects me to experts. I have access to people with deep understandsings of technology, business, science, lingustics and culuture all while being "peer reviewed". I dont think the lower class and noneducated will flock to it, but it would be invaluable to anyone in the knowledge economy.
> I view quora as a highend QA website that connects me to experts.
I've thought of Quora as having everybody except experts on it. Here are the first five questions I see on Quora's quantitative finance page:
1. Who (companies or individuals) are some well-respected recruiters in quantitative finance?
2. What metrics do you use to figure out if a commodity is undervalued or overvalued?
3. For a fresh maths/stats PhD, are there any advantages to starting a career in an investment bank instead of a hedge fund?
4. What is the purpose of Financial Engineering?
5. What is the most common topic beginners struggle with when it comes to Computational Finance?
Now here are the first five I see on StackExchange's quantitative finance page:
1. Nelson-Siegel model is not arbitrage-free
2. Autocorrelation and Markov Regime-Switching
3. What are some examples of non-financial risks and contingency plans?
4. Is it ever possible that---because of illiquidity---exercising an out-of-the-money option is better than directly buying the stock?
5. What's the best way to test/validate an interest rate lattice model
Only one of these sites has experts on it. (Full disclosure: I'm a moderator on the Quant SE site. It took a lot of work to get that board up to expert level. I don't see the same kind of effort applied from Quora.)
I think what happens with Quora is that experts answer questions in their own field, but they don't ask them. So the questions may seem elementary, while the answers are not.
this is what's so creepy about the place. why does class need to come into it? class has never been an issue with hn - even in its better days - yet it's become something core to quora.
Probably means highbrow rather than class level - you can be lower class and still appreciate high culture. Though I personally don't get Quora - unless it's some sort of faux research department for one of the big tech companies (i.e. destined to be purchased).
I had the same impression, which is some of what drove me away from it. I'm okay with meritocracies, which StackExchange seems closer to, and is especially the case with e.g. math forums, but Quora seemed to be much more class-based, where there were lots of people without any particularly strong skills who were part of the "elite" community due to wealth/lineage or something.
More problematic, though, was that there was increasingly a lot of "soft spam", answers that were more somebody promoting their tangentially related startup or book than actual answers. I'm not even against relevant self-promotion, but it feels like it's more of a problem at Quora than here; HNers tend to stick to more relevant self-promotion, and there's stricter community policing on popping into a thread with a pile of buzzwords and a link to your webinar that's sort of vaguely related to the thread's topic.
I see a lot of potential for the "lower class and noneducated" in the Q&A space. Questions about relationships and social issues often cannot be answered by merely browsing websites. Everyone views their own situation as being unique. People love giving advice on these issues, even if the right answers aren't black and white.
>Some years from now we may well be in a bubble and (...) the previous 1000 days of being wrong will be summarily ignored.
I might be misreading you, but it seems you don't think a bubble can last for 1000 days. It did in the 90's. I think your kind of attitude leads people who cry 'Bubble!' to say, after 1000 days, 'Um, I guess I was wrong. Damn, being wrong just cost me a 10x return on my investments I wasn't making. I better start investing before I lose even more!'
I literally remember reading a comment from someone in the late 90's 'Not buying a house 3 years ago has cost me 400,000.'
Well, in retrospect, no it didn't, it was just a bubble.
The protection against a bubble isn't waiting until it's a long, well-established bubble: the protection against a bubble is having lots of sales and lots of cash stored away. If you're punished too much after a bubble-pop in your valuation (get priced at a tiny price per earnings) great: you can now buy back your shares and mint money by selling them again when your price to earnings is something reasonable.
on the other hand, if you don't have sales, your price to earnings is infinite. Then it's not the bubble you should be worried about, it's getting customers.
Can anyone explain why Quora would garner such a high valuation? I have a hard time believing its revenue based so is it seen as an acquisition target?
I simply do not see #4 happening. Hell, at this rate I'm willing to bet that StackExchange, itself a rather niche site (or network of sites) has higher activity than Quora.
I don't know a single person outside the (somewhat incestuous) startup industry that uses Quora. In fact, I do not know a single person outside the tech industry who knows about Quora.
Claims that Quora has achieved good traction are, to be polite, overly generous, but more frankly, bullshit.
They have a reasonable diversity of backgrounds (it feels about on par with Reddit or MeFi in that regard) which leads me to think it's not entirely a tech industry phenom.
Also: they have an interesting strategy of courting mainstream media distribution; there's a "Quora" section on Slate now, for instance. They could keep doing that.
9 figure valuation? No clue. Valley numbers, agreed. Just saying.
Slate is more mainstream than HN, but not mainstream. Forbes is a better example of mainstream reach, but also the risk: the Forbes audience is not a quality content crowd, it's an infotainment filler crowd, and infotainment is cheap these days.
Yahoo Answers tried to be the One Q&A Site to Rule Them All. I don't personally consider Quora to be a general purpose Q&A site.
Its possible that they launched as a general purpose Q&A site and then they may have switched when it seemed prudent. Or its possible that they may still be trying to be a general purpose Q&A site, but in that case their branding doesnt match their ambition.
Having #1 and #2 are good for attracting the proverbial greater fools to take it off your hands. Also add #5 - use and/or answers by people the main stream public has heard of. Some more of those, particularly celebrities, politicians, entertainers saying sh*t, could have this become so mainstream that their answers will be quoted on the Nightly News.
So it becomes a complain and explain platform like twitter.
Because people using Quora think very highly of themselves, and when you have all these people that all think very highly of themselves and each other concentrated in a single place, then they all think this is a very special and valuable place indeed.
This would not mean much in general, but I am willing to bet that most of those Quora investors are also Quora users so they suffer the delusion too.
Oh, Quora the product hardly matters. This is just a simple case of proven founders being able to raise whatever money they want.
Sure, Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever didn't actually start Facebook, but they came as close as anyone can be short of actually being Mark Zuckerberg.
I'm not buying that. I can understand that driving an inflated seed or A round, but at this point I would expect to see something more fundamental in the valuation.
Inflated rounds tend to build on each other because no one wants to take a down round and as long as their is forward progress there should always be more value in the business than six months ago.
Ok I know the word bubble is overuse but I think we are in a bubble. I know the market choose « the right price » for any project. We have seen this movie before:The housing market. Money was “easy” to get for almost anyone without checking those fundamentals. The main idea was simple prices cannot go down.
Now back here, the idea is simple someone somewhere is going to pay $400M or more in a near future....
what's the plan B put ads again? Paid questions?
I'm just trying to understand how people can come up with valuations like that …. I just don't get it ...
Wow, can we spell "bubble" yet? This is definitely a 100% bubble-based valuation. Don't get me wrong, I don't think Quora is a completely worthless company, but unless they have some incredibly magic sauce they haven't showed us yet, I can't possibly see how they'll get that much revenue ever.
In fact, a simple check would do: let them show how much they made last year, projected growth for this year, and we can start talking about anything beyond a $10m valuation.
Or Quora ignores dguaraglia's requests, continues their success (however you - or they - wish to measure it) as a private company and watches Hacker News whip itself into a frenzy about the financing climate?
Although that's the most likely answer, it's also the stupid thing to do. And by 'stupid' I mean it in the "because of things like this, all of us will get fucked in the long term, even the short-term winners" sense.
I just hate this idea that you can create a company without any kind of realistic approach to making money, value it at in millions without any kind of basis and hope some rich (and dumb) buyer bites. It's opportunistic at best and dishonest at worst.
It makes everyone in the milieu look like he's trying to pull this stunt, although there are plenty of honest (and profitable) companies out there not getting millions in investment because they don't try to sell something shiny.
I actually struggle to think of many other b2c companies who are equally as useful and yet also fun to use. It's like Google Search (useful) combined with Tumblr (fun.)
I been an advocate of conservative valuations but, in this case, I highly agree with the number proposed.
Quora is much better than all its comparable companies (eHow, Mahalo, etc...) in every possible sense: community, technology, founding team, etc. Traffic is very strong, it displays strong social integration tools and has managed grow very impressively.
On a side note, I expect Quora to move into the mainstream with much less friction than Reddit or Askolo. Being more design and experience oriented, Quora has the upper hand here. I hope Quora's team realizes and exceeds this valuation.
Aren't quora and "mainstream" at odds though? Quora is about quality questions, the majority of mainstream people that would use a Q&A site are the sort of people that use(d) Yahoo Answers, the sort of questions that you want to exist for long enough to get a reply but once they have been replied they hold absolutely no value to anyone.
How can Quora "go mainstream" and avoid this problem?
The simple answer is that you redefine mainstream. Mainstream doesn't mean that everyone uses it like Facebook, but instead that "everyone" uses it just like "everyone" uses shopify or github.
Quora goes mainstream when a certain elite, much like the Salons of Paris, gather there. Academics, Business, Cultural, Medical, Scientific and Technology elite all show up.
I do not think Quora is better than eHow. I have learned many valuable things on eHow, such as how to poach an egg. I have learned a lot of more complex and interesting things on reddit AMA's, such as how various businesses actually work. I have yet to learn anything on Quora. Every post I have read on Quora, aside from being long and pompous, qualified and generalized everything so thoroughly that it completely failed to impart any information.
Clearly you did not read the answer detailing nearly every instrument in a plane cockpit, or "What are the most mind-blowing facts?" In fact, clearly you have not used Quora.
We really like Quora. It has an active community, made up of a wide range of experts giving really great answers. The Quora valuation sounds high but the wealth of knowledge, number of users and available intelligence must be of value to some investors.
We have written an article (still to be published) on these expert Q&A sites. Stack Exchange, Quora, Askolo, Sprouter, Reddit plus more are delving into matching questions with answers.
There is growing trend towards matching experts to inquisitive minds. These platforms are essentially allowing subject matter experts to sell their knowledge to others. Why not?
Maybe the high valuation - Quora and others are commoditizing expert knowledge with the intention of selling this on?
Pasting the entire contents of copyrighted material is illegal. The top article on HN right now is about plagiarism. What you've done here is literally a crime. Please don't put Y Combinator in this kind of position.
Since no DVD sells for $1000, is it perfectly ok to copy it? Obviously, that's not case. The paragraph below the one you totally misinterpreted is the one you should be quoting:
> by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution.
The Wall Street Journal has a pay wall and the parent posted the full contents of the article on this site.
Regarding safe harbor, YC must comply with any take-down notice to be in the clear. The safe harbor does NOT mean that YC gets a Betamax-style free pass when users upload copyrighted material illegally.
$400M... let me guess: no revenue at all? but it was started by a couple of Mark's dorm pals from college! not a bubble, not a bubble, not a bubble, not a bubble....
Basically it's pointless.
As for Quora, I stand by my original assessment: I don't see this going mainstream. Q&A seems to be something that works well for particular verticals (eg programming aka Stackoverflow) but doesn't seem to be a general purpose or widespread tool. This is in part cultural (eg I believe Q&A is very big in Korea).
I see this more as "bubble thinking" and in this context "bubble" has nothing to do with valuation but more that the people who use and value Quora live inside a bubble. That bubble is the Valley. VCs and Valleywags only know other VCs and Valleywags and all of those people use Quora so they make the mistake of thinking it's far larger than it actually is.
Quora does not have the mainstream breakout appeal that, say, Pinterest or Instagram does and honestly I don't think it ever will (you can quote me on that). Neither does (or will) Stackexchange.
That's not to say either won't exit for 9-10 digits but that's another story entirely.
Quora has done a fantastic job of marketing itself to VCs/Valleywags but I see Q&A much like I do Foursquare and the whole check-in thing. It's a (to borrow a Mark Suster term) FNAC (feature not a company).
IMHO Quora will suffer the same fate every social/curation site does: eternal September. If it ever does grow massively the influx of new people will change the site and those early adopters people like to follow now will move on to the next thing. It's Slashdot, Digg, etc all over again.