"We decided it was best for Charlie to step away from his day-to-day role at the company."<p>Whatever happened it feels like Adam wants to make the point that Charlie was essentially fired. "We" is a lovely ambiguous term. They royal "We"? I suppose it's meant to imply that Charlie also agreed. But "Best for Charlie to step away" is pretty telling. There's a whole slew of options you could use to make it sound like it was Charlie's idea (although he's probably too young to 'focus on his family'<p>I always thought Quora should monetize around an RFP type concept. It feels to me like 80% of users are there for technology recommendations from the horses' mouth.
The best speculation I've seen is that someone (Yahoo?) is buying Quora, with onerous earn-out provisions (1/2/3/4?), and letting Charlie leave now would accelerate his vesting compared to remaining until acquisition and then leaving, if he didn't want to work for the acquirer.<p>I've met both Adam and Charlie (and Marc and much of the rest of the Quora team), and I can't see Adam/Charlie having a falling out over any personal or professional issues as a likely cause.<p>The weirdest thing IMO is that Charlie has totally disappeared from online (FB, Quora, etc.). Either it's to avoid being asked questions, or some kind of personal issue. Either way, I wish him the best.
For what it's worth: this article is syndicated from Business Insider. It wasn't written by San Francisco Chronicle staff.<p>Here's the original: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-sudden-mysterious-exit-of-a-quora-cofounder-has-silicon-valley-baffled-2012-10" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/the-sudden-mysterious-exit-of...</a>
Seems like they were going to split directions at one point or another. Sad to see this happen as I love Quora but unfortunately, investors are in the business of making money, not building amazing user-friendly webapps.<p>Is Quora a great service? Absolutely. Is Quora something I would be incredibly sad to see die? Without a doubt. Is Quora ever going to make enough money to cover costs? Probably not.<p>This leaves a sale as the only possible exit. Adam is taking the unsexy role of being the business guy that drives Quora towards this conclusion. Great product and engineering minds will quit (especially with the departure of Charlie). People will cry out about how "the Quora I loved is dead" and new features will prompt blog posts like this one: <a href="http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/09/10/the-misstep-of-quora-and-the-importance-of-trust-amongst-your-community/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/09/10/the-misstep-of...</a> . But Adam has no choice, either he does this or the company dies and everything that is good about it is lost.
I just went to Quora.com and see nothing that would convince me to spend more than 30 sec. there. They need a better home page to engage potential users who are curious about what that site is. A one sentence blurb about solving all my problems doesn't make me believe it. I want to see examples so I can see exactly what kind of problems and how they will be solved. E.g. on Stack Overflow there is a list of questions and answers that are being asked.
> <i>The answer makes one good point, though: D'Angelo did invest his own money in Quora, basically buying sole control over the company.</i><p>The first clause (investing money) is a much less profound statement than the second clause (buying sole control).<p>In order to buy sole control, he set the valuation of the new shares at something that washed out the "A" round guys. That should be a giant red-flashing signal to everyone involved.
<i>We still have ridiculously high engagement rate for 8% of our users, but that number hasn't gone up and nothing else we've done has managed to move the needle to get further users hooked.</i><p>This leads me to think: does the needle really have to go up? According to pg's latest awesome essay on growth, the answer seems to be <i>yes</i>. But as the hacker news site has shown, <i>no</i> can also be a valid answer. pg's goal with hacker news is to keep a high quality of discussion, and not to grow the site to more users.<p>As you bring in more users, you are bound to reduce engagement of existing users; this is justified if the growth is an order of magnitude higher (eg. when Facebook went from ivy leagues to colleges to high school to public). But for a site like Quora, I doubt if growth at the cost of pissing off existing users is justified at all.
One suspects there's a lot less going on than what everyone would like to think. (Thanks, ChuckMcM, for the nice post about money and stock.)<p>Mr Cheever is "something of a product design genius, and lots of people give him credit for Facebook's best features;" even the now-removed-from-Quora post says "to him the user came first and growth features would sacrifice that." That puts him in complete opposition to the guy (Mr D'Angelo, who to his credit is putting his money where his mouth is) who is paying the bills.<p>The problem is that almost every Q&A type site has the same issue as Quora: only a small percentage of its membership is actively engaged. The number cited by the article is eight per cent, and in my experience, that's about par for the course. Since revenues (and therefore stock performance) are directly tied to use, there are two ways to increase revenues, with implications regarding the user experience for both:<p>1. Increase traffic, AKA "make the pie bigger". This means doing the kinds of things Mr D'Angelo probably championed -- the SEO Solution, playing nice with Google, low barriers to entry (i.e. Free). This is the tactic taken by most startups, since they're generally looking at Mountain View and saying "Gee, if we could just get our hands wet in THAT revenue stream, we'd be rich."<p>2. Keep your existing userbase more engaged, AKA "get your customers to eat more pie". This means doing the kinds of things Mr Cheever championed -- making the experience better, providing more services to them, concentrating on getting lifelong customers rather than more customers for less time. Most startups aren't in it for the long haul; they're in it for the big payday.<p>The NYTimes obit of Arthur Sulzberger pointed out the difference. His family has always wanted to be in the business of disseminating the news; their competitors are in the business of selling advertising. Mr Cheever wanted to take care of users; Mr D'Angelo wants to see a return on his investment. If there was ever a startup in the position to do the former, it's Quora; I know my colleagues would dearly love to have enough money to where they wouldn't have to worry for a while how to keep the lights on.<p>But as William F. Buckley noted a long time ago, "Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive," and that's when someone like Mr Cheever moves on to his next venture.
<i>We all knew one of the commonsense edicts of Hollywood is </i>“never invest in your own movie."*<p>-- With the sound of silence, the Market has spoken.
"The final straw was Matt Cohler joining the Board at the end of August. Matt's with Benchmark, and his involvement is there for the sole sake of getting the website turned around, on an upward trajectory, and <i>in shape to be sold</i> so he could get a return on his investment."<p>I think the italicized bit is the most interesting part of the comment. It seems that that Adam wants to sell the site at some point? but to who? Also, interesting that he is building Quora to flipped it instead of making it into a valid business.
Is Quora really struggling? My posting there is getting more and more engagement all the time (more importantly, this compete.com profile looks quite promising: <a href="http://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/" rel="nofollow">http://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/</a>)<p>Also, how much does running Quora actually cost? If Adam D'Angelo has many Billions of dollars, I can't see them ever having a financial issue.
I LOVE QUORA.<p>They have produced a system which is creating some of the best authored information online. Each time I get their weekly email, I lose about half of my day because each item in it is so amazing that I have to read it.<p>Watch Charlie Cheever's interview with TechCrunch recently. I think it's pretty telling that he was done with the company, it might have been the best call for him to leave.<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/27/quora-we-have-an-explicit-non-goal-of-not-selling-the-company/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/27/quora-we-have-an-explicit-n...</a>
It's just four comments, but they are worth reading on the SF Gate article:<p><a href="http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/The-Sudden-Mysterious-Exit-Of-A-Quora-Cofounder-3912160.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/The...</a><p>Pretty good example the bubble we live in here on HN.