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I agree with that premise. Quora will be lucky to bail out with a $425 million exit on the downside of this expansion. They're a decade old, the VCs are going t
by adventured 7y ago
I agree with that premise. Quora will be lucky to bail out with a $425 million exit on the downside of this expansion. They're a decade old, the VCs are going to want their money soon and the clock is ticking on this long up-cycle (as the desperate IPO rush blatantly indicates). Who is paying $1+ billion for Quora? There are no overpaying buyers for that type of entity - Yahoo is dead, AOL is dead, and InteractiveCorp is far too shrewd to pay that extreme valuation. Quora is worth $100-$200m tops right now.
Genius is in the same boat. A decade old, failed premise (turns out people don't actually want to annotate everything), failed expansion plans (so... back to lyrics then), no business model. At the mercy of the VCs, they'll eventually be passed around for $10m or $20m like MySpace or Tumblr.
These companies are this start-up generation's About.com (or the latest eHow).
Simple rule for anyone doing a knowledge service: if you put the profit motive over the knowledge motive (which is the only choice if you take a lot of VC), your service will end up in the dustbin of history, no exceptions.
- thrower123 7y agoWhat exactly is the value of Quora? It's Yahoo Answers with better CSS and the idiots filtered out. I assume it's ad-supported - they have started supposedly sharing revenue with users. It could disappear tomorrow and leave barely a memory.
- mjcohen 7y agoDon't know about the idiots. My quora feed keeps coming up with pairs of "What is the square root of nnnn?" for seemingly random integer nnnn. Don't know how to stop it. When I feel like it, I answer "2".
- bluedino 7y agoWhoever said "there is no such thing as a dumb question" never visited Quora. Worse yet, the site is full of dumb answers as well.
- jodrellblank 7y agoQuora pays people who ask questions, based on how many views their question gets. Now it's full of people spamming as many questions as they can, trying to game it.
- thrower123 7y agoAh. When they started, they were seeding it with high quality questions and famous answerers. I guess the floodgates have now opened.
- tanr54ok 7y agoI prefer the idiots of yahoo answers. At least some of them have a sense of humor.
- mmahemoff 7y agoMaybe there's an idiot filter but the CSS spam filter isn't working at all. Look up anything related to SaaS/PaaS.