Quora's $50 million

It seems pretty obvious why they raised so much -- I don't get the confusion. They're settling in for the long haul. Remember: these dudes are already rich from their Facebook days. They wouldn't even be doing this if they didn't <i>truly</i> want to.<p>They raised $50 million so they can keep going on this project until it's solved, which may take 5+ years. The financial resources issue has been solved. It's what most anyone who's truly dedicated would <i>like</i> to be able to do. They just happen to be in the position to do it.

"With only around 20-30k daily active users, it certainly wasn't money raised based on user adoption".<p>I wish people would stop throwing AppData figures out as if they're fact, they're not. Dustin Curtis has no clue as to how many daily active users Quora has (no one does), but rather how many daily active users who so happen to have connected their Facebook account.<p>It's not a good indicator of success, and Facebook (and in turn AppData) has proven to be incredibly inaccurate as of late in regards to user numbers.

Quora is the <i>epitome</i> of Silicon Valley group think. You think the site's big if you live in the valley. Leave and no one's heard of it.<p>This is bubblicious.<p>Anyway if anyone from Quora is reading this: your site has become a terrible experience for those with a small screen because the top quarter is dominated by your floating top bar.

quora has about 650k questions in total, most of which are unanswered and in general ignored. my estimate of answered questions puts it at 80-90k.<p>as for user-base, the churn rate is huge with the majority of users following 2-3 topics before leaving the site forever. there is subset of users who generate all the content and value of the site.<p>lets look at some numbers:<p>Yishan Wong: Answers 1457, Question 760 Jeff Hammerbacher: Questions 1092, Answers 1041 Jan Mixon: Questions 802, Answers 4101 Michael Wolfe: Questions 9, Answers 1088 Mark-Hughes-1: Answers 1294, Questions 48<p>power-laws ahoy.<p>it's good source of info on startups and the tech scene, which makes it more like a popular discussion forum than a social network. I don't see this growing to millions of active users unless it tries to take on Yahoo! Answers.<p>i believe the quora team acknowledges this, and with the introduction of boards they're trying to redefine the site to be some kind of textual pinterest.<p>this sounded quite pessimistic, it's actually the site i visit the most and i hope they continue to grow without comprising on the quality.

I found it interesting that Peter Thiel invested his own personal money into it.<p>Does that mean the Founders Fund wasn't interested?<p>Is it common for a VC (especially a prominent one) to invest their personal money into startups, as oppose to their fund's money?

Perhaps I'm confusing Quora with another site, but isn't this the one that throws up a sort of registration wall when you follow a link there? Doesn't happen now when I try, but I'm sure it has in the recent past.<p>Millions of dollars are being sunk into this site? Why?

Quora explains using AWS for "everything" here: <a href="http://www.quora.com/What-stack-does-Quora-run-on-EC2" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/What-stack-does-Quora-run-on-EC2</a>, but they don't say how many of what. Their traffic is a secret too, despite what the article tries to assume of AppData, but I'm curious why it is believed that running application servers and their databases/cache is economical. Does Quora really see a huge flux in activity and inactivity?

I would not be so quick to judge the valuation. We have only one side of the story, and that side, the reporters, has proven to only care about their own page views. The founder putting $20M of his own money is a strong indication that the team believes there is real value in Quora. Until we get statistics from the team, we should hold out on most comments regarding the valuation.

"20-30k daily active users."<p>That seems rather...low for a $400 million valuation.

It's fair for a blogger to raise questions and not provide answers. But I'd be very interested to hear dcurtis's personal opinion on this. Why <i>did</i> they raise so much money?

Is it possible they raised this to ensure they didn't die in the event of a bubble?

Where is the money to be made?

I thought ENCOM was worth more than 50M.