I don't like the registration-required thing either, but as a Quora user from 2010, the users really fall into two major use cases:
1) People who are active users of the site, for whom registration isn't an issue. There really is a lot of value being signed in if you're actively using the site, with notifications, drafts, credits, voting preferences weighting what you see, etc.
2) People who come to Quora for a specific answer to something via SERP. They generally want one answer, and it's probably reasonable to ask them to log in if they're going to use the rest of the site. If 50% more bounce due to reg-requested than not, it still doesn't hurt things too much.
The case where registration links suck are when you're writing something and send a link yourself to other people. They added the "share this elsewhere" functionality, but I hate it when I write something, post it on FB/twitter/etc., and then people can't read it due to registration wall.
There's probably a much better way to do registration-requested than what they're doing now; all inbound links are open, but some kind of lightweight account created, and then a prompt to register including your existing browsing history, upvotes, etc. (otherwise they're trashed) after you navigate. Maybe make it a brief status area thing to start, then an interstitial, then a modal, etc. Give the user a clear benefit for registering even after 3-4 pages, rather than making it a binary wall.
Those two categories have some overlap though. I had an account on quora, and for browsing the site the requirement is fine, but when searching for something and stumbling on to content from quora (especially on a mobile device where typing is a chore), the added frustration was enough to make me delete my account.
I'm sure more ideas won't hurt, but they just raised $80 million. How did that happen without vision? Do none of those investors have any ideas to offer?
You don't talk about rational during valuations of startups. It's all paper money and you put a number that pleases both of the parties. For example, you can give your friend $100 bill to start a company for leaf blowing and ask him to sign an agreement that you own 10th millionth of his company. What you just did in nutshell is value his company as a billion dollar business. This would just keep snowballing in next series rounds until Facebook is forced to buys it to protect its turf or they IPO it. After the exit, your company would falter and eventually evaporate because everybody is out the door after cashing out. Loosers are be "real" investors (i.e pension companies aka "your 401K"). I'm realizing the startups are game of eventual transfer of money from pension funds and 401Ks to smart aggressive get-rich-now personality types, at least 90% of the time.
What has been spent has mostly been spent on salaries. I suspect they're keeping a much larger buffer than a lot of companies, for two reasons: because they can raise money cheaply, and because they don't have a clear monetization path yet, so it might be years before they have meaningful revenue, even if they discovered the strategy today.
I'd just estimate 250k/person/year loaded cost for their expenses, and it would probably be accurate -- they're not making big media buys or other non-personnel expenses. 125k salary ends up being about 250k once all other direct and indirect costs are factored in.
> 125k salary ends up being about 250k once all other direct and indirect costs are factored in.
I find an additional $125k to be a stretch, but I also have no data to back this up. I'd be curious to see the breakdown for this: $125k + some share of insurances, office spare per square meter, equipment, training, social events, etc - what else?
social security /FICA taxes from the employer, retirement benefit contributions, other benefits, and basically the entire cost of your HR deptartment and possibly other cost centers.
That's the standard rule of thumb, that your cost to your employer is roughly double your salary. Of course it depends on tax rates, insurance rates, quality of benefits, etc. But if you are just estimating for a company you don't have much knowledge about there isn't a much better number to use.
They didn't need to take his investment to get that advice. I think they need to pivot much more than just doing the obvious, and thats probably why they are there. The current Quora "business model" is worthless, zero revenue, no prospect of any.
That's the thing that baffles me about Quora. I've seen interesting questions and responses but they're totally unreadable. A decade+ after we all knew Experts Exchange was a horrid experience and years after Stack Overflow proved you could show the content and be successful... Quora went right back there.
I'm not going to play that game. I don't care enough. They've made it hard enough for me to see if I like their content that I'm not going to try. They lost their chance at me being a user by treating me like garbage.
I shouldn't have to 'impress the bouncer' to get in to read content they want me to see.
As I've explained on an earlier piece: the value of online discussions is the dissemination of that information. Not just to others, but to both those asking and answering questions.
From very early in my online experience, I've found the two best ways to learn things are to answer questions, and to ask them. In that order.
By asking a question, you hear from others. By answering questions you're submitting a testable hypothesis and baseline which others can respond to, and which ultimately can only be improved upon. If I'm right, then others may either respond with less-correct solutions or misinterpretations of my comments. If I'm wrong (or not as correct as I might be), others can improve on my response.
And that's highly useful.
By restricting the availability of the responses to Quora questions, you're hurting that dynamic. And there are plenty of places (reddit, StackExchange, Wikipedia, HN, MediaFilter) in which those questions can be asked, answered, and extended.
I'll draw particular attention to MF: it's a pay-to-play system for responders. If you want an account, you've got to pay a $5 fee. Which is among the reasons I don't participate (at least not under this identity -- I've generally tried to maintain an isolation of this from my real-life ID), though if I found the site sufficiently useful I wouldn't object in principle. However I don't need to pay that fee to view the responses, and I'm more than free to refer to MF posts and extend answers on other sites.
Quora does not (readily) allow for this.
Add that they gratuitously block The Internet Archive and I'm done with them entirely.
That Quora (or any company for that fact) wants to join YC is pretty obvious. For me, the non-obvious thing is why YC would like anything to do with Quora. Maybe I'm missing something but with the bad things going on at Quora, I can't see what's in it for YC. Sure, a high-profile company that you now have a small piece in but I didn't think YC would go for companies with a reputation already. I thought YC was for helping companies starting up and gaining reputation. I don't really believe "Altman wants a piece of every billion dollar company".
I'm not sure what the financial benefit is for Y Combinator XX, LP, but there's definitely some value to all the other YC companies in having dangelo as a YC founder and part of the network.
(I'd have preferred Elon Musk for sure, but I suspect that wasn't on the table...)
" ... but a source tells us “Altman wants a piece of every billion dollar company, every unicorn.” "
Just thinking aloud here so bear with me. In time, no-one will remember how much of the company YC took. Just that YC was an investor. If this plays out, then YC gains access to the people that built those companies and has them taking part in the sessions where others are just starting out. In other words, this kind of play might just be a long term investment.
Overall, if there's a company that gets very successful outside the YC umbrella, this is a way to bring them into the fold (assuming the founders can be persuaded to give up the time).
The question is 'why did Y Combinator allow Quora to join'.
The article points out the obvious problems with Quora. However, what I don't understand with some of these large VC backed web efforts that do not make money, is, why don't they try the obvious 'run a few adverts' business model in selected regions.
They could run adverts on Quora for those folk in Australia (where advertising is generally as predominant as the U.S.) and see how many people click through the ads or ignore the site because they cannot stand the adverts. It is not rocket science.
But, instead of trying to earn some actual money, they stay on the speculative bubble. It is as if they are putting off the inevitable. If the BBC can run ads for international viewers but not licence fee paying Brits, then why cannot the likes of Quora, Pinterest or any of these other web behemoths do something similar, just run a few ads outside the home market? If it doesn't work then they can take the adverts off. It is something that can be experimented with, it is not like it would a one time 'lose virginity' thing that cannot be undone.
I personally find Quora to lack some authenticity. It is like those cults that have all the religious symbols, rituals and names yet you know they are not 'real'. (I know 'real' religions are fake, but the fakery is not immediately evident, their traditions have evolved rather than been adopted). With Stack Overflow, no matter how poor a question is, you know there is someone that needs that answer (or at least needed it once). With Quora you feel people don't ask questions 'as if their life depended on it' and there is no altruistic reason to answer anything. If you are to answer to 'puff up your profile' (as per getting points on SO or even here), then, is there any feeling that those 'points' are worth anything? Who cares!!!
I don't feel Quora have built up a body of knowledge that is worth anything. If they closed tomorrow then nobody would be stuck in their job, or left unable to do research or feel that some library had been burnt to the ground.
Looking at how Wikipedia is funded - essentially a charity with no capitalist-entity overheads like marketing - looks to me like it is extremely clever and shrewd.
It's unlcear if they are being practical or cynical, but this let's everyone "use their imagination" when doing valuations. TLDR: "No data" is better than "bad data"...That is the strategy.
While I do understand the reasons for Quora wanting to join YC, I can't help but feel bad for the one company who will not get to participate now because of this. Maybe I don't understand YC well enough to make this claim but it seems like choosing a less established company would be better for both the company and the partners.
We were invited for an interview a few weeks ago. We didn't get in; the feedback we received was that we should get 10 customers, and reapply in the future.
I was always under the impression that YC was an accelerator that funds ideas. We were further along, had a website up with a handful of beta testers and hundreds of early signups. It wasn't enough apparently.
My hypothesis is that it makes sense from YC's perspective to be more selective, and pick companies that are more established. They are in a position to do this, given the ever-increasing number of applicants.. alas, the rationale of every investor is to pick companies that will have the highest expected returns..
This was a comment I made a while back. YC is only looking for companies that have already shown growth or meet some diversification goal. There are so many applicants with traction there is no need for them to invest in completely unproven ideas since they can just take a wait and see approach which turns out to be more profitable.
Of course there is. They have to draw the line somewhere and there is always going to be an applicant that fell just below the line. I doubt Quora will take up as much bandwidth as other startups, but I'm sure it still figured into their calculations of how many teams they could accept.
Dunno, it seems like people are over-thinking it. Adam is definitely a great addition to the alumni and if he believes he can get enough value of YC, why not?
People are trashing Quora because they don't understand the source of its value: its data. Facebook has connections that are mostly of low meaning. Twitter has a few pithy 140-character comments and the success thereof on its own social graph. Quora has thoughtfully-written answers to interesting questions, and counts some of the most interesting and intelligent people among its users (and that will improve as it grows). If you are, say, trying to find a quality co-founder or high-level employee, what Quora has to offer is much more valuable.
On the surface, Y Combinator gains a lot more than Quora. Y Combinator gains some really strong people in the Summer 2014 session. The average Quora engineer is probably as strong as, or stronger than, the average YC founder. Quora gains an HR liability, because once a firm joins YC, every employee is going to want the social access implicit in being part of YC. That's scalable at 4 or 6 people, but not at 77. I'm sure this has been worked out and special-cased, but I think that the Summer 2014 is going to revolve around Quora, the latter having at least a couple dozen people demanding the YC access.
Essentially, Quora has a wealth of natural language data written by some of the most intelligent people in at least one industry. Given that talent searching/recruiting is a billion-dollar problem (acqui-hires prove that mediocre talent is worth millions per head; imagine what verified stuff, backed by state-of-the-art NLP rather than executive hunches, is worth) this is pure gold. In fact, it's bilaterally beneficial. Talent wants to be discovered, and others want to find it, and currently the process is reliant on social networks (mostly, centered in San Francisco and New York) that are far past tapped-out. "Network-based" hiring leads to same few people being highly sought and paid millions while the rest live in obscurity, and it hurts both sides. If someone can make the job/co-founder market more efficient, there's immense value-add potential there.
Quora probably has the data, right now, to solve this problem to a large degree. The issue for Quora is that the data is, relative to the interests of business and people in it, completely unlabeled. Unsupervised learning is hard, yo. It's still unclear whether the guy with 382 upvotes on that machine learning question actually knows what he's talking about. (He probably does; but how do you know if those 382 people know anything?) After all, LinkedIn endorsements and recommendations have a well-known inverse property (controlling for age and professional experience, the more someone has, the less qualified that person is). Quora's best "labels" for its data are internal social proof statistics, and it's going to need something of external value if it wants to convince the larger world that its data means something.
This is, I would guess, the first stage of a long-term partnership between Quora and Y Combinator. Quora has a wealth of data from all over the world that, properly read, would be of massive use in talent discovery. YC is an improvement on VC, which itself is a 20th-century-style guild system based on reputation and personal relationships but YC has labelled data relevant to very high talent labels, which is of immense value if you're Quora (and if I'm right about Quora's long-term monetization/value-add strategy, and who knows if that's true). Even though only a small percentage of Quora's data will become labelled in joining forces with YC, it becomes a semi-supervised problem, which is easier to solve.
It will have more intelligent people, I'd guess. Average quality will go down. So long as Quora can continue to find the good content, it's not a problem.
I think Quora could add a huge amount of value by solving the talent-discovery problem at scale. It needs some way of knowing whether its internal indicators correlate to success in the real world.
Ok I guess I might need a concrete example of the end product. Would it be like an automated job interview that evaluates answers on the fly? Maybe as a fist level filter for job applicants?
There are a bunch of reasons why it's valuable for Quora to be a YC company:
We'll have Sam and all the other partners to help us.
We get to be part of the YC community / alumni network of founders.
We get access to all the resources of YC.
We were raising money anyway, so there was no overhead in letting YC participate - this ends up the same for us as if we had just raised slightly more money from Tiger. And independent of the benefits to Quora, I think it will be fun personally to participate in some of the YC events. I hope my perspective can help some of the other companies.
63 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] thread1) People who are active users of the site, for whom registration isn't an issue. There really is a lot of value being signed in if you're actively using the site, with notifications, drafts, credits, voting preferences weighting what you see, etc.
2) People who come to Quora for a specific answer to something via SERP. They generally want one answer, and it's probably reasonable to ask them to log in if they're going to use the rest of the site. If 50% more bounce due to reg-requested than not, it still doesn't hurt things too much.
The case where registration links suck are when you're writing something and send a link yourself to other people. They added the "share this elsewhere" functionality, but I hate it when I write something, post it on FB/twitter/etc., and then people can't read it due to registration wall.
There's probably a much better way to do registration-requested than what they're doing now; all inbound links are open, but some kind of lightweight account created, and then a prompt to register including your existing browsing history, upvotes, etc. (otherwise they're trashed) after you navigate. Maybe make it a brief status area thing to start, then an interstitial, then a modal, etc. Give the user a clear benefit for registering even after 3-4 pages, rather than making it a binary wall.
Source: http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-exchange
"Announcing the Stack Overflow Series A Financing" (2010): http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/announcing-our-series-...
"Stack Overflow Raises $12 Million" (2011): http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-09/stack-overflow-rais...
and also http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/03/a-new-name-for-stack-o...
Also from your link:
"When I put all these things together the conclusion is that StackOverflow is one of those rare companies for which VC can really work."
I'd just estimate 250k/person/year loaded cost for their expenses, and it would probably be accurate -- they're not making big media buys or other non-personnel expenses. 125k salary ends up being about 250k once all other direct and indirect costs are factored in.
I find an additional $125k to be a stretch, but I also have no data to back this up. I'd be curious to see the breakdown for this: $125k + some share of insurances, office spare per square meter, equipment, training, social events, etc - what else?
Overhead rate goes down if you hire more peeps.
but their team page does lists 77 people https://www.quora.com/about/team
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5217449
I'm not going to play that game. I don't care enough. They've made it hard enough for me to see if I like their content that I'm not going to try. They lost their chance at me being a user by treating me like garbage.
I shouldn't have to 'impress the bouncer' to get in to read content they want me to see.
From very early in my online experience, I've found the two best ways to learn things are to answer questions, and to ask them. In that order.
By asking a question, you hear from others. By answering questions you're submitting a testable hypothesis and baseline which others can respond to, and which ultimately can only be improved upon. If I'm right, then others may either respond with less-correct solutions or misinterpretations of my comments. If I'm wrong (or not as correct as I might be), others can improve on my response.
And that's highly useful.
By restricting the availability of the responses to Quora questions, you're hurting that dynamic. And there are plenty of places (reddit, StackExchange, Wikipedia, HN, MediaFilter) in which those questions can be asked, answered, and extended.
I'll draw particular attention to MF: it's a pay-to-play system for responders. If you want an account, you've got to pay a $5 fee. Which is among the reasons I don't participate (at least not under this identity -- I've generally tried to maintain an isolation of this from my real-life ID), though if I found the site sufficiently useful I wouldn't object in principle. However I don't need to pay that fee to view the responses, and I'm more than free to refer to MF posts and extend answers on other sites.
Quora does not (readily) allow for this.
Add that they gratuitously block The Internet Archive and I'm done with them entirely.
Seriously? Can we stop fucking calling people who do things that aren't actually science "scientists"?
(I'd have preferred Elon Musk for sure, but I suspect that wasn't on the table...)
" ... but a source tells us “Altman wants a piece of every billion dollar company, every unicorn.” "
Just thinking aloud here so bear with me. In time, no-one will remember how much of the company YC took. Just that YC was an investor. If this plays out, then YC gains access to the people that built those companies and has them taking part in the sessions where others are just starting out. In other words, this kind of play might just be a long term investment.
Overall, if there's a company that gets very successful outside the YC umbrella, this is a way to bring them into the fold (assuming the founders can be persuaded to give up the time).
The article points out the obvious problems with Quora. However, what I don't understand with some of these large VC backed web efforts that do not make money, is, why don't they try the obvious 'run a few adverts' business model in selected regions.
They could run adverts on Quora for those folk in Australia (where advertising is generally as predominant as the U.S.) and see how many people click through the ads or ignore the site because they cannot stand the adverts. It is not rocket science.
But, instead of trying to earn some actual money, they stay on the speculative bubble. It is as if they are putting off the inevitable. If the BBC can run ads for international viewers but not licence fee paying Brits, then why cannot the likes of Quora, Pinterest or any of these other web behemoths do something similar, just run a few ads outside the home market? If it doesn't work then they can take the adverts off. It is something that can be experimented with, it is not like it would a one time 'lose virginity' thing that cannot be undone.
I personally find Quora to lack some authenticity. It is like those cults that have all the religious symbols, rituals and names yet you know they are not 'real'. (I know 'real' religions are fake, but the fakery is not immediately evident, their traditions have evolved rather than been adopted). With Stack Overflow, no matter how poor a question is, you know there is someone that needs that answer (or at least needed it once). With Quora you feel people don't ask questions 'as if their life depended on it' and there is no altruistic reason to answer anything. If you are to answer to 'puff up your profile' (as per getting points on SO or even here), then, is there any feeling that those 'points' are worth anything? Who cares!!!
I don't feel Quora have built up a body of knowledge that is worth anything. If they closed tomorrow then nobody would be stuck in their job, or left unable to do research or feel that some library had been burnt to the ground.
Looking at how Wikipedia is funded - essentially a charity with no capitalist-entity overheads like marketing - looks to me like it is extremely clever and shrewd.
I was always under the impression that YC was an accelerator that funds ideas. We were further along, had a website up with a handful of beta testers and hundreds of early signups. It wasn't enough apparently.
My hypothesis is that it makes sense from YC's perspective to be more selective, and pick companies that are more established. They are in a position to do this, given the ever-increasing number of applicants.. alas, the rationale of every investor is to pick companies that will have the highest expected returns..
On the surface, Y Combinator gains a lot more than Quora. Y Combinator gains some really strong people in the Summer 2014 session. The average Quora engineer is probably as strong as, or stronger than, the average YC founder. Quora gains an HR liability, because once a firm joins YC, every employee is going to want the social access implicit in being part of YC. That's scalable at 4 or 6 people, but not at 77. I'm sure this has been worked out and special-cased, but I think that the Summer 2014 is going to revolve around Quora, the latter having at least a couple dozen people demanding the YC access.
So, here's my theory, and it's just speculation because I don't have inside knowledge. If you have a Quora login, you can read a more extensive analysis here: http://www.quora.com/Quora-company/Why-did-Quora-join-the-20...
Essentially, Quora has a wealth of natural language data written by some of the most intelligent people in at least one industry. Given that talent searching/recruiting is a billion-dollar problem (acqui-hires prove that mediocre talent is worth millions per head; imagine what verified stuff, backed by state-of-the-art NLP rather than executive hunches, is worth) this is pure gold. In fact, it's bilaterally beneficial. Talent wants to be discovered, and others want to find it, and currently the process is reliant on social networks (mostly, centered in San Francisco and New York) that are far past tapped-out. "Network-based" hiring leads to same few people being highly sought and paid millions while the rest live in obscurity, and it hurts both sides. If someone can make the job/co-founder market more efficient, there's immense value-add potential there.
Quora probably has the data, right now, to solve this problem to a large degree. The issue for Quora is that the data is, relative to the interests of business and people in it, completely unlabeled. Unsupervised learning is hard, yo. It's still unclear whether the guy with 382 upvotes on that machine learning question actually knows what he's talking about. (He probably does; but how do you know if those 382 people know anything?) After all, LinkedIn endorsements and recommendations have a well-known inverse property (controlling for age and professional experience, the more someone has, the less qualified that person is). Quora's best "labels" for its data are internal social proof statistics, and it's going to need something of external value if it wants to convince the larger world that its data means something.
This is, I would guess, the first stage of a long-term partnership between Quora and Y Combinator. Quora has a wealth of data from all over the world that, properly read, would be of massive use in talent discovery. YC is an improvement on VC, which itself is a 20th-century-style guild system based on reputation and personal relationships but YC has labelled data relevant to very high talent labels, which is of immense value if you're Quora (and if I'm right about Quora's long-term monetization/value-add strategy, and who knows if that's true). Even though only a small percentage of Quora's data will become labelled in joining forces with YC, it becomes a semi-supervised problem, which is easier to solve.
W...
But will it really? https://answers.yahoo.com/
http://www.quora.com/Quora-company/Why-did-Quora-join-the-20...
quote:
There are a bunch of reasons why it's valuable for Quora to be a YC company: We'll have Sam and all the other partners to help us. We get to be part of the YC community / alumni network of founders. We get access to all the resources of YC.
We were raising money anyway, so there was no overhead in letting YC participate - this ends up the same for us as if we had just raised slightly more money from Tiger. And independent of the benefits to Quora, I think it will be fun personally to participate in some of the YC events. I hope my perspective can help some of the other companies.