When you have a question or query in mind where you head for? Google, right? And when even Google fails to provide you satisfactory answer, you look for experts whom you can ask your question. While there are many forums and question answer platforms for specific niche like programming, android, Quora is one of the most popular question answer platform where you can ask or answer literary anything. Which other platform offers such liberty, engagement and answers from experts like Mark Zukerberg (Facebook CEO), Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO), Demi Moore, Marc Andreessen (VC)?
While working for Facebook, Adam D’Angelo felt that Facebook was stable now and he could leave. The co-founders of Quora Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever were having lunch in a Chinese restaurant and had a talk about the knowledge that is not shared on the internet or the knowledge that one has in his brain but is not shared. This problem statement gave rise to the development of “Quora”. Both had a vision in mind that there are lot many questions in our mind which are left unanswered and where many use internet to find answers, Quora could be the best solution to help with answers for these questions. They had a hard time deciding the name. After a lot of research and shortlisting many names which delineated questions and answers finally “Quora” was finalized.
With a prototype code ready to be enhanced and developed they started with the development process in 2009. They had a code ready which they had to further develop. In a year they made the website available for public use. In the beginning they invited their friends to the site, who invited their friends which led to increase in the number of users significantly.
Quora has a community of people which consisted of Mark Zuckerberg, big business tycoons, VC’s, Entrepreneurs, people with excellent knowledge about a particular field, authors and bigwigs like Barrack Obama. This increased the quality of knowledge shared on Quora. Later on they also added credits and gifts feature, wherein if your answer was the best and good quality you would get credits for that. Quora also added a feature of blogging to let people share their knowledge and thoughts without limiting it to question answers format.
Once Mark Zuckerberg asked the Quora community that which company could help Facebook grow, and he ended up in buying “NEXTSTOP” which was a start-up. So this is what made Quora different than other sites. It bridged the gap between Twitter and Facebook. Since then Quora has come a long way where users can Upvote, Downvote and see the number of views. The continuous innovation has kept users engaged and its popularity has grown. Today there are approximately 100 million monthly users who visit the website.
Dhaval Nagare is an electrical engineer, a humourist, an impressionist and also likes writing. His writing include all sorts of topics and mostly he writes to inspire and motivate people. You can also catch him on facebook https://www.facebook.com/dhaval.nagare