Quora Co-Founders Share Numbers, theSecret to Surviving the Hype Cycle
by: Sarah Lacy,
For the longest time, there were two
companies about which I couldn’t
understand all the fuss: Foursquare andQuora.I still have never gotten much intoFoursquare, although I have spent enough
time with Dennis Crowley that I’m rooting
for him as a fellow entrepreneur. But overthe last few months, I have found myself really falling in love with Quora
—
but notfor the reasons you might think.Last week, I
sat down with the site’s co
-founders Charlie Cheever and
Adam D’Angelo for a 90 minute exclusive interview. That may be a
record for the ultra-shy duo, who rarely grant media requests and preferto let the site speak for itself. I asked for the meeting because, as a user, Iwas finding Quora increasingly more interesting just as other tech
journalists were saying it had peaked. As it turns out, I’m not alone inmy interest. D’Angelo tells me that the site’s traffic hit an all time record
last week and has been surging over the last six months, breaking recordafter record.
What’s driving it? An astounding diversification beyond just tech newsthat’s mostly happened while the blogosphere wasn’t looking. The
company recently looked at five different categories of answers:Business and technology, food and entertainment, politics and social
sciences, health and life advice, and “other.” The first four drive almost
exactly the same amount of content on Quora
—
a fact the foundersconfirmed in a post a few minutes ago.
Engagement shows an even bigger divergence from the early techadopters. A well up-voted answer is more likely to be about movies thanstartups. A great new answer is more likely to be about parenting than itis to be about Facebook or Apple put together. In the past three months,the two topics drawing the most up-voted answers were movies andfood.The gushing over Quora by the classic early adopters was originally dueto the quality of the answers from high profile techies being soastoundingly good. As a journalist who spends my day talking to manyof these people, that was my least favorite aspect of the site: I wantedthem to talk to me first, damnit!
But still, in the past few months, some of the best stuff I’ve read
anywhere on the Web has been on Quora. This one byJJ Abrams on
shooting movies as a kid stands out strongly in my memory, but thereare many, many others. This one made a big impact too: What it feelslike to write a movie that is panned for bad writing. It puts such ahumanface on a bomb, such that I never felt right Tweeting about bad filmwriting again.
Tech insights didn’t do it for me. Those are my stock and trade. Butgetting to see a window into the soul of Hollywood people I’d never get
to meet?
“Oh God. This is what people were gushing about a few yearsago,”
I thought.
What’s interesting to me is t
hat the answers are about more than
celebrity. The JJ Abrams stuff is cool, but you don’t find that everyday
on the site. It was pretty much just around
the release of “Super 8″. A lot
of the other celeb answers are by the omni-Web-present Ashton Kutcher.And really, we
can
get enough of celebrity on the Web
—
most notablyon Twitter. What stands out are the answers from people buried deepinside the Hollywood machine. One recent answer that captivatedCheever: What are actors actually snorting when they pretend to do
cocaine? (Answer: It’s
frequently powdered sugar and actors report
everything tasting sweet for the rest of the day.)
That’s the kind of stuff you can get on Quora that you can’t getanywhere else. It’s like having a good friend in the film industry, or I
presume, the tech
industry for those who don’t spend their days inside of it already. It’s less about Reed Hastings answering your questions —
he
has too much to lose by being blunt. It’s more about a guy from Netflix
answering them. The everyday people that actually create the products,sites, and movies we love. The previously nameless and faceless parts of the machine that know where all the bodies are buried and are just
“unimportant” enough to be honest.
There has been plenty of speculation that Quora could replace journalism because CEOs can respond directly to the public, but itis
this
kind of insight
—
sometimes random, sometimes profound
—
that
media can’t compete with. We can get the CEO on the phone, but these people are harder. They’re more difficult to track, pa
rtly because we
Search History:
Result 00 of 00
00 results for result for
p.
Quora Co-Founders Share Numbers, the Secret to Surviving the Hype Cycle
131
Reads
0
Readcasts
34
Embed Views
Recommended
More From This User
Notes
Load more
