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Quora raises $50M at a $400M valuation with Peter Thiel leading
- mikeryan 14y agoCan 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?
- suking 14y agohype based
- pclark 14y agothe founding team of Quora were on the founding team of Facebook = extraordinarily strong leadership team.
- mikeryan 14y agoI'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.
- noahc 14y agoInflated 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.
- brown9-2 14y agoBut the original question is, where are they leading Quora to?
- gamache 14y agoThey're 40% Instagram, relatively speaking.
- staunch 14y ago1. Very well connected founders. 2. Founder ponying up millions of his own cash. 3. Frighteningly Ambitious(TM) problem. 4. Reasonably good traction and product execution.
- larrys 14y agoHaving #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.
- kjhughes 14y agoI like staunch's answers, plus 5. Investors are hunting for an Instagram-like Facebook spillover win.
- Androsynth 14y agoHow is 'Q&A site for venture capitalists' a frighteningly ambitious problem?
- kjhughes 14y agoOne Q&A site to rule them all is ambitious if not frighteningly so.
- flipp 14y agoahhhhhhhhhh
- Androsynth 14y agoYahoo 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.
- hristov 14y agoBecause 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.
- pw 14y agoOh, 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.
- sparknlaunch12 14y agoWe 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?
- dguaraglia 14y agoWow, 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.
- pclark 14y agoOr 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?
- dguaraglia 14y agoAlthough 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.
- jordhy 14y agoI 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.
- citricsquid 14y agoAren'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?
- noahc 14y agoThe 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.
- hristov 14y agoI 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.
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- yurisagalov 14y agoUgh, paywalls/loginwalls.
- blackysky 14y agoOk 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 ...
- SuperChihuahua 14y agoI think it has to do with probabilities - many small loses and one big win (Facebook) - and you have a profit
- Drbble 14y agoBut many small losses and zero big wins...
- nikcub 14y agowe will really be in a bubble when: 1. your parents or granparents call you to ask how they can invest in this Quora round 2. the mainstream media say we are not in a bubble
- cletus 14y agoFirstly, 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.
- noahc 14y agoI 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.
- andrewcooke 14y ago> I dont think the lower class and noneducated 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.
- AznHisoka 14y agoPeople can talk about elite team, synergetic community, excellent quality content, usability, etc but it all comes down 95% to one thing: SEO.
- pclark 14y agoQuora is just damn useful. 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.)
- kjhughes 14y agoTechcrunch broke the evaluation story 3 weeks ago: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/21/quora-is-raising-at-a-400m-valuation-with-dangelo-putting-in-his-own-money/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/21/quora-is-raising-at-a-400m-... And Quora already has numerous Q/A's on the valuation. See, for example, http://www.quora.com/Valuations/Is-Quora-worth-400-million-dollars-If-so-why http://www.quora.com/Valuations/Is-Quora-worth-400-million-d... along with the Related Questions listed on the right.
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- chrisaycock 14y agoPasting 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.
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- kahseng 14y agoOops was just emulating what I saw before, this is better: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&gs_nf=1&cp=44&gs_id=3&xhr=t&q=Facebook+Alums+Push+Q%26A+Site+Quora+-+WSJ.com&pf=p&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&oq=Facebook+Alums+Push+Q%26A+Site+Quora+-+WSJ.com&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=5fcdc9aab960680&biw=2327&bih=1344 http://www.google.com/#hl=en&gs_nf=1&cp=44&gs_id...
- Drbble 14y agoWhat you say is literally not true, unless that bit of text was selling for $1000: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#506 http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#506 Further, YC is protected by DMCA safe harbor provisions.
- chrisaycock 14y agoSince 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.
- mkramlich 14y ago$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....
- cpeterso 14y agoHow does Quora make money?