Quora in the next YC batch

Hard to imagine what&#x27;s in it for Quora.<p>- Network connections? Their CEO is the former CTO of Facebook.<p>- Help with fundraising? They raised $80mm at $900mm valuation not more than a month ago.<p>I strongly suspect Quora is planning a huge pivot which they feel is ambitious but doable in 3 months, and YC believes in the value of this pivot; that is the only plausible explanation I can think of.

Funny thing, I visited Quora today, for the first time in a while. Years, maybe:<p>Googled something, Quora near top results, clicked link, &quot;signup&quot; nag screen, results blurred out, left page.<p>I guess I still don&#x27;t get it. Curious to see what this will be about.

Keep a link to this for the initial office hours ;)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4503910" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4503910</a>

This is very exciting.<p>More great companies in YC = more value for the whole YC community!

I want to like Quora, but I hate how pushy they are about forcing you to sign up to read their content. I thought I&#x27;d remembered pg making a similar comment a while back: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5217449" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5217449</a> Maaaaaybe this will encourage them to change?

I&#x27;d love to hear more about why. It makes sense for YC (and is probably being treated as a normal investment rather than &quot;Adam filled out a YC application and did a 10 minute interview&quot;), however I feel like it makes Quora seem weak.

I wonder if Quora actually applied, or if the idea was generated outside of the application process. I&#x27;m also pretty curious what the terms of the deal are (although I don&#x27;t expect to actually get those details) with the new standard funding package.

Wow, what a great experiment. How can Quora employees get involved?<p>What percentage of the company does YC get? Did you even make an investment? Given their huge fundraising and valuation, getting even 1% and giving them around $100K both seem odd.

This actually makes quite a bit of sense. At the scale that YC is at now, there are already a few companies worth 10x Quora (Dropbox, Twitch, AirBnB). I&#x27;m sure even at Dropbox et al&#x27;s scale both Dropbox and YC get a lot out of the ongoing relationship. Therefore, in these types of mutually beneficial scenarios why would YC or companies for that matter artificially limit themselves to only getting into such a relationship during some arbitrary timeline?<p>When you think about it, putting such an arbitrary limit doesn&#x27;t make sense, and voila you&#x27;ve broken a mental barrier and can now change the rules of the game. As a founder of a YC company I would absolutely love it if YC becomes this broad &quot;old boys&#x2F;girls&quot; network of awesome tech companies. Who actually cares about what stage the company was at when they joined YC. The more great companies part of the club, the better!

Hope JesusChristSiliconValley has something to say about this. <a href="http://jesuschristsiliconvalley.tumblr.com/post/48962035819/quoraquoraquora" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jesuschristsiliconvalley.tumblr.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;48962035819&#x2F;...</a>

Until Quora stops requiring you to log in to see anything, I&#x27;m never touching the site again (workarounds don&#x27;t count).

Quora needs to change. I get the weekly emails that they make me double click to get though (the UI here is awful, but it doubles page views) and that is basically it.<p>They need to change, which is why I think YC is such a good fit for them. The deal was probably $1 for 0.1% or something like that. Mostly symbiotic relationship. Quora needs the reboot cred and YC likes shiny people.

It would be interesting the learn the terms of the deal. Presumably it&#x27;s nothing like the standard $120k for 7%.<p>I&#x27;m struggling to figure out how this makes sense as a part of the y combinator investment portfolio.<p>EDIT: The only plausible thing I can see Quora wanting that Y Combinator has is access to talent. Is this a recruiting move?

I believe it was made clear that their last raise will be the final round they will take so whatever they do will need to make the business sustainable in the long run. My guess is by participating in YC, they can:<p>- Find up-and-coming businesses that are tangentially related to Quora&#x27;s mission that they can groom and perhaps invest in.<p>- Incubate within the YC ecosystem some spin-off businesses that may not fit well under the Quora brand and what they&#x27;re doing.

My guess that&#x27;s what&#x27;s in it for Quora is the ability to poach talent from YC startups.

I was a frequent Quora user with a relatively well-regarded reputation.<p>During an Ask to Answer session a user took offence to being proved wrong about some fact or other and threatened a <i>retribution</i>.<p>Over next few days emails began arriving in my personal inbox which the User had incorrectly identified as the email of my business clients.<p>The emails were pure vitriol accusing me of fraud etc telling the &quot;clients&quot; to jettison me.<p>I immediately contacted Quora as the information he had access to could only have come from an Administrator (which I had previously clashed with on the thread). Quora denied all knowledge but the Administrator refused to engage with me personally.<p>At that point I realised it just was not worth the exposure.

Why would YC taint itself with all that pg&#x27;s quite accurately criticized Quora for.<p>Scammy SERP practices and forced user count inflation. Hardly something to encourage.

Seems like a good move for Quora. They&#x27;ll get early access to acquihiring super talented folks at struggling&#x2F;failing startups. At the least, they can generate goodwill and word of mouth as a good place to work. Talented people know talented people, etc.<p>Not sure about the impact on YC though. It may create an environment of mixed incentives. Quora&#x27;s incentive is almost perverse, in that they get the most value out of YC from failing startups.

Will we see YC doing (specifically leading) later stage or growth stage rounds now? I think it&#x27;s great though I do worry about signaling problem for companies who don&#x27;t do later stage rounds with YC?

Quora at Summer 2014 Demo Day could be really interesting.

A well established company with a nice product but no revenue generating business model partners with a bunch of hotshot entrepreneurs looking for a startup idea (or pivot) - I wonder if Quora is going to provide a kind of Q&amp;A based platform which creative startups can leverage, almost like a Quora branded YC mini-batch.<p>The startups would have immediate access to Quora&#x27;s user base and a space to focus on (Q&amp;A value added services). Quora gets an infusion of fresh ideas without have to take the risk themselves. Quora could develop some fee based structure for its platform and look at acquiring the most promising startups.

If YC becomes Stanford 2.0, Quora seems like an interesting software collaboration system for all of it&#x27;s &quot;students.&quot; I see the potential especially since Facebook started out just with &quot;students&quot; too.

This is pretty exciting. It&#x27;s good to see YC diversifying itself through small experiments. I&#x27;m curious how much money is YC going to invest in Quora? Same amount as its other startups?

It&#x27;s funny I never thought twice about registering for stack overflow but I can never bring myself to register for quora. And I always feel bummed I can&#x27;t see all the answers.

Definitely seems like something pg would have never done.

No way they are taking the traditional 7% ~ $120k deal. From Crunchbase they already got $141M fund, and let us be very conservative and say their valuation is just $400M. 7% percent of that is 400,000k*0.07 = 28,000k.<p>I guess Quora will be treated the same as other batch&#x27;s participants (except I wonder how many of Quora&#x27;s employee will be physically in SV), but Quora got different deal.

Interesting. I wonder if this will aid in finding a business model[1]. Would love to hear more from someone at YC about what is driving this experiment.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.quora.com/Quoras-Business-Model-and-Monetization/What-could-Quoras-long-term-business-plan-be" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Quoras-Business-Model-and-Monetization&#x2F;...</a>

Quora is awesome but lack of enough users who can actually deliver &quot;answers&quot;. As a student I visit Quora for three things: find out some &quot;secrets&quot; about a company written by former and current employees, find out secrets about cities and history and find out just about anything interesting.<p>StackExchange has a strong, super strong moderation. You can&#x27;t just start a random question and not expect someone close it in ten minutes. SE&#x27;s divisions makes asking question and finding related questions very difficult. Sometimes you don&#x27;t even know where to ask the right question...<p>If Quora has the active user base that SE has I will sure people will flood there.<p>Quora to me is the modern Yahoo Answer but with the hope of quality control.

7% of Quora for $120k, sounds like a steal. just kidding. there is no way they get the same term

How much time Quora founders are going to spend at YC headquarter during the program ?

I am more interested in whether Quora will avoid the problems SO is facing.<p>A year ago or so, the links in the email digest were genuinely interesting. &#x2F;r&#x2F;iama, kind of. Now, many of them is stuff like &#x27;the best thing you have been told&#x27; or &#x27;how does it feel to be in love&#x27;. No thanks. If I wanted that, I would be browsing those instagram-ish images with pathetic captions. Is it their ML getting something wrong, or a general trend?<p>I tried to just visit quora.com but found it fairly boring and hard to browse, so I visit only through the email.

Quora being valued at $900M? Heh, I&#x27;d believe it when there&#x27;s some revenue, or at least some sign of revenue.<p>I&#x27;d have more faith in Quora long term if they were asking for donations like Wikipedia.

For me Quora is useful in finding alternative sites&#x2F;software. For example, If I am looking for a web chat software, I can find most of the available solutions there. Of course, the information is biased because it is posted by the respective founders&#x2F;CTOs. Still I can use that as a starting point for my research. I do hate that I have to login to read content but share=1 comes to the rescue.

It&#x27;s probably not their primary consideration, but I&#x27;d imagine that this is really fun and stimulating for the other companies in the batch. Personally I think startup advice feels most valuable when it&#x27;s in the form of stories (&quot;Here&#x27;s our N of 1, you synthesize this with others into a worldview.&quot;) And having a late stage company or two around can only add to that.

I got an email from a Quora product manager a little while ago asking how I used Quora and what I liked about it. Seems like changes are coming.

YC has always been experimental, it worked out well for non-profits. The more experiments you do the better you can make it work.

StackExchange treats me with respect, Quora currently feels like they are playing the old &#x27;Experts Exchange&#x27; game of shady techniques and firewalled user knowledge.<p>I hope joining YC they find a more open way to do business. Why should I answer questions to build their closed knowlege base?

Thread on Quora <a href="http://www.quora.com/Quora-company/Why-did-Quora-join-the-2014-Y-Combinator-batch" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Quora-company&#x2F;Why-did-Quora-join-the-20...</a>

I wonder if Quora was part of &quot;The New Deal&quot; <a href="http://blog.ycombinator.com/the-new-deal" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ycombinator.com&#x2F;the-new-deal</a>

I can&#x27;t imagine there&#x27;s anything in this for Quora. They just raised $80M last month! I suspect they&#x27;re either launching a new product or pivoting completely.

What a humbly ambitious move by Quora.<p>They sure aren&#x27;t happy enough with where they are or heading to; still they know they need help to change ways.

Quora has a certain negativity in it.

It&#x27;ll definitely be a great and encouraging experience for all other companies in the batch -- working alongside a company with that caliber of funds? That&#x27;s awesome.

Sounds like a partnership not an investment.

I think I know what this is about.<p>It&#x27;s a neat idea. (My lack of specificity isn&#x27;t a sign of cynicism; in fact, I like the idea.)<p>I&#x27;ll give a hint: semi-supervised learning.

Le Sigh.<p>Now PG and his team of suits will use their persuasion to convince a bigger fool to buy Quora, and let all the investors off the hook. And so it goes.. in Silicon Valley.

WTF with ycombinator taking a string of higher valued startups. Smells like paying for access. Not an incubator. More like paying to sleep with the head of a horse.

great move

could this be a way for quora to evaluate acqui-hires?

Very cool! I welcome Quora!

I still think all the Quora bashing about their signup interstitials is overstated. They&#x27;ve determined the optimal experience is for people to sign up to see an answer. I know that seems antithetical to an open and &quot;easy-to-use&quot; Internet, but this isn&#x27;t Wikipedia. Quora is about answers but also about opinions. Their email newsletters, although tweaked recently in a not-so-favorable way, are still amazing. You get a ton of value becoming a user, but unless you sign up (or are semi-forced to sign up) you&#x27;d never know that.<p>While I keep saying I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;ll be a good business, I love Quora. They&#x27;ve done something truly unique in the Q&amp;A space and I&#x27;m happy they have so much funding that they&#x27;ll be around for years to come regardless of whether it&#x27;s a &quot;business&quot;.