Can anyone explain why Quora would garner such a high valuation? I have a hard time believing its revenue based so is it seen as an acquisition target?
I simply do not see #4 happening. Hell, at this rate I'm willing to bet that StackExchange, itself a rather niche site (or network of sites) has higher activity than Quora.
I don't know a single person outside the (somewhat incestuous) startup industry that uses Quora. In fact, I do not know a single person outside the tech industry who knows about Quora.
Claims that Quora has achieved good traction are, to be polite, overly generous, but more frankly, bullshit.
They have a reasonable diversity of backgrounds (it feels about on par with Reddit or MeFi in that regard) which leads me to think it's not entirely a tech industry phenom.
Also: they have an interesting strategy of courting mainstream media distribution; there's a "Quora" section on Slate now, for instance. They could keep doing that.
9 figure valuation? No clue. Valley numbers, agreed. Just saying.
Slate is more mainstream than HN, but not mainstream. Forbes is a better example of mainstream reach, but also the risk: the Forbes audience is not a quality content crowd, it's an infotainment filler crowd, and infotainment is cheap these days.
Yahoo Answers tried to be the One Q&A Site to Rule Them All. I don't personally consider Quora to be a general purpose Q&A site.
Its possible that they launched as a general purpose Q&A site and then they may have switched when it seemed prudent. Or its possible that they may still be trying to be a general purpose Q&A site, but in that case their branding doesnt match their ambition.
Having #1 and #2 are good for attracting the proverbial greater fools to take it off your hands. Also add #5 - use and/or answers by people the main stream public has heard of. Some more of those, particularly celebrities, politicians, entertainers saying sh*t, could have this become so mainstream that their answers will be quoted on the Nightly News.
So it becomes a complain and explain platform like twitter.
Because people using Quora think very highly of themselves, and when you have all these people that all think very highly of themselves and each other concentrated in a single place, then they all think this is a very special and valuable place indeed.
This would not mean much in general, but I am willing to bet that most of those Quora investors are also Quora users so they suffer the delusion too.
Oh, Quora the product hardly matters. This is just a simple case of proven founders being able to raise whatever money they want.
Sure, Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever didn't actually start Facebook, but they came as close as anyone can be short of actually being Mark Zuckerberg.
I'm not buying that. I can understand that driving an inflated seed or A round, but at this point I would expect to see something more fundamental in the valuation.
Inflated rounds tend to build on each other because no one wants to take a down round and as long as their is forward progress there should always be more value in the business than six months ago.
