"Quora.com - It starts with a Q and ends with an A and seeing its recent outburst, it clearly deserves to be UE's Company Of The Week."
Quora.com is a question and answer social networking website which allows users to ask as well as answer questions, upvote or downvote answers and interact with a highly intelligent and diverse audience in all fields. Quora was co-founded by two former Facebook employees, Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever.
One would now be led to wonder how Quora is any different from Yahoo! Answers or Answers.com. Here is a precise answer by a Quora user:
"In my rough estimation, about 70 IQ points."
Indeed, Quora's intelligent user base is its USP and puts it way ahead of its competition.
Quora first launched in private beta on January 4, 2010. It was founded by two Ex-Facebook employees and raised $11 Million in March 2010 which valued the start-up at $86 million! What really inspired the co-founders to come up with Quora was the belief that the internet was short of a lot of useful information which is in people's mind, desperate to come out. In their own words:
"The way we think about this is there’s actually a lot of information that’s still in people’s heads that’s not on the internet. And when you think about it you would say that probably 90% of the information that people have is still in their heads, not on the internet"
It was only in June 2010 that Quora opened to the public. Since then, it has come a long way. As of June 2012, Quora has 1.5 million active users per month.
The most addictive characteristic of Quora is that it makes one feel smart. To be a part of an intelligent discussion and sometimes being the expert in that field not only booms one's confidence but also aids in virally spreading the word about this social network to everyone else - as one would want one's friends to know about one's smartness. Here, talking what makes sense is fashion. Even the most simple questions would find a well researched answer. That is the beauty of Quora.
Quora is certainly up up for a bright future. The Daily Telegraph has predicted that Quora will become larger than Twitter. Quora, along with Airbnb and Dropbox, has been named among the next generation of multi-billion dollar start-ups by the New York Times. Adam D'Angelo was ranked number 22 among the smartest people in the technology industry by CNN Money in 2010. Cheever and D'Angelo were both listed in the Inc. Top 30 Under-30 entrepreneurs list of 2011.
- Videt Jaiswal
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