| Type | Private | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Founder(s) | Adam D'Angelo Charlie Cheever |
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| Headquarters | Palo Alto, California | ||
| Area served | Worldwide | ||
| Key people | Adam D'Angelo (CEO) | ||
| Employees | 30[1][2] | ||
| Website | quora.com | ||
| Alexa rank | 869[3] | ||
| Type of site | Knowledge organization | ||
| Registration | Required to post (United States, United Kingdom), Invitation only (Worldwide)[4] | ||
| Available in | English | ||
| Launched | June 2009 | ||
| Current status | Active | ||
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Quora is a question-and-answer website created, edited and organized by its community of users. The site was founded in June 2009, launched in private beta in December 2009, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010.[5]
Quora aggregates questions and answers to topics and allows users to collaborate on them by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users' answers.[6] Quora's main competitors are social bookmarking sites like reddit, social networking sites like ChaCha, Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn, Formspring, Answerbag and Answers.com, and expert question-answer communities like the Stack Exchange.
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Quora was co-founded by two former Facebook employees, Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever. D'Angelo quit his position at Facebook in January 2010 to create Quora[7] and said he was inspired to create Quora because he thought:[8] "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."[9] Quora's base of users grew quickly in December 2010.[10]
Quora had half a million users in January 2011.[11] In June 2011, Quora redesigned its website, in order to make information discovery and navigation easier. Nevertheless some critics said that the redesign was inspired by Wikipedia.[12] Quora released an official iPhone app on September 29, 2011. [13]
In March 2010 Quora received $11 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, valuing the start-up at $86 million.[14] Quora's valuation was more than 1 billion dollars in 2011.[15][16] Quora has reportedly turned down several billion dollar acquisition offers, as reported by Business Insider.[17][18]
Quora requires its users to register with their real names rather than a screen name. Although it is possible to remain anonymous on Quora, anonymity is strongly discouraged. It is also possible for Quora users to link their Quora accounts with their Twitter and Facebook accounts. Quora users can upvote or downvote answers. They can also suggest edits to existing answers provided by other users. The Quora community includes several well known people like Steve Case, Marc Andreesen, Dustin Moskovitz, Jimmy Wales and Justin Trudeau.[19][20][21][22]. The majority of Quora users are located in Silicon Valley, followed by New York City.[23]
Quora uses Pylons and Comet for its backend and Ubuntu Linux as its operating system with MySQL as its database. It also uses Git and memcached. Quora uses Nginx as a reverse proxy server and HAProxy for load balancing. Quora has developed its own algorithm for ranking the answers, which works on similar principles to PageRank.[24] Quora uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud technology to host the servers that run their website.[25][26] In 2011, Quora switched its infrastructure's Python implementation from CPython to PyPy, in order to increase response times.[27]
Quora has been praised by several publications such as New York Times, USA Today, Time Magazine and The Daily Telegraph.[28][29][30][31]
According to Robert Scoble, Quora succeeded in combining attributes of Twitter, Facebook, Google Wave and various websites that employ a system of users voting content up.[32] Scoble later criticized Quora, however, saying that it was a "horrid service for blogging," and while it was a decent question and answer website, it was not substantially better than competing sites.[33] The Daily Telegraph of the United Kingdom has predicted that Quora will go on to become larger than Twitter in the future.[31][34] Quora, along with Airbnb and Dropbox, has been named among the next generation of multibillion dollar start-ups by the New York Times.[35]
The founders of Quora, Charlie Cheever and Adam D'Angelo have been named among the top 30 under 30 entrepreneurs by inc.com,[36][37] as well as being named among the smartest people in the technology industry by CNN.[38]