Today I attended a Q/A session by Adam D'Angelo. It was part of a recruiting drive Quora is running at CMU. It was quite a thought provoking session - obviously with the benefit of talking to someone who's been there, done it et. al.
Take aways
1. Think bigger - What is the vision of Quora? They mention that the vision of Quora is to create a repository of human knowledge that can be accessed by anyone/everyone in the world. There is so much knowledge that's inside a person's "brain". It is a way to bring that knowledge out into the world. You watch their vision "video" and statement and you can't help but feel that it is audacious. It's not just audacious in a large way, it's audacious in that the scale of the imagination is a little scary. Many might think it, few would attempt it. That's big. Also, they say they are a long term focused company - so that's good.
2. Idea - There are so many pieces of information that are missed in Wikipedia, etc. Not facts, information. One reflection is that the content on Quora is so often opinions. Opinions are knowledge and learning. Distilling facts from information and using that to create knowledge repositories is excellent, but it's also limited. It can't share insights that opinions can have. The best way to know about something is to have 5 experts argue over it. Done - you have all the information that you need.
3. Implementation - Incentivize users who contribute, Make sure you can separate good content from bad content. That is the trick of the trade - that is what other Q/A websites weren't able to do. It is a difficult problem that is going to grow over time. This is what keeps users interested and gives contributors the visibility that makes them continue sharing.
4. Startup Motto - Get Users! - If you can get users, that are willing to use your product, you can almost certainly get investors who can bring in money which can then be used to hire employees etc. It can all move on from there. Get users! Also, once you get users, the biggest thing they give you is that they tell you what to do. That is the biggest barrier to entry in software, and possibly in all businesses - you don't know what to make. But users tell you that, and then make you rich for giving them that. In internet, they tell you that every single minute, all the time - and you can respond quicker.
5. Content and the internet - Mid way during the talk I started thinking. Will google become irrelevant or commoditized in the future? With facebook, there is so much content/information that google doesn't know. Now, with quora there will be so much information that google wouldn't really know. Sure, it'll see the content and remember direct page clicks, what what about who. What about who upvoted what, what they are interested in, what topics they follow, who their friends are, which topics did their friends follow, what questions their friends like. Google will not know any of that stuff. One thing mentioned by Andy was that Quora is complementary to google (like yelp, tripadvisor etc.) So they bring all the content on to the internet and then allow google to index it. Google in turn sends a lot of traffic their way. Works out well for both of them. Google might even become a gateway into all of these websites - quora, stackexchange for Q/A, FB for profiles/social, Wikipedia for knowledge. So one might say not really losing relevance. But but but, where will the money go? If I am an advertiser I'll choose FB. People are going to buy based on what they hear from friends and reviews from yelp. If I'm a recruiter, I'll pay Quora/Stackexchange more when questions are asked about my company. I'll market myself more on FB/Quora. I'll use a blogging platform like tumblr, there will come other specific news portals. There was once a time when all the content on the web was unorganized, open web pages. Simple HTML web pages. That day is gone and getting away faster. Content is quickly getting structured and really really fast. The content on a simple e-commerce site is so complicated and specific to it. There are far more connections on the web and the owners are people who create them - more often that not the specific applications. Google is an IR system that works on the unstructured - In a world when vanilla HTML pages are no longer the norm, would google lose out? [They probably won't lose out in the way it sounds - They have android and now glass! but they might become Microsoft or IBM.]
6. Business Model - Some person had to ask about the business model. He had to mention it. Some form of advertising in the future. The good part is investors know they are going to be able to make money in the future so know they are focusing on growing the company. It works! Worked with Amazon, works Internet, for all the ubiquity it offers can very easily be a market largely pervaded by a single company. Traditionally the larger players lose out on the fringes - and there are markets left for niche and various other things that affect the economies of business. For a while at least it seems like the . Partly, penetration only depends on internet - customer cost acquisition in new geographies lower. Marketing by referral and it's almost as if one company comes in and creates a brand that just defines that space. Largely prevalent in the internet. What I'm trying to get to is that for most businesses online, there is one company that has simply dominated a market after the battle ends and one emerges the winner. Mail/Search/Social Network/E-Commerce etc. (Not mentioning blogging because it's not entirely there yet.) Possibly because the power is a function of power works acutely here.
7. Andy built a simple service he built when he was in high school or something - one someone can build over a weekend. It was before the social network days - something one could use to simply put their IM friends list online and then people could use it view other friends' lists and contact them if they approved. Received over 200K visits. I still don't have an intuition about how big the world is and how powerful a social medium is. Should work on that.
8. Internet changing - More people online, More information, More time spent online, More time on mobile. More people spending more time on internet and less on TV.
9. Internet is changing - How does this affect the content? I put some thoughts about this in point 6 and I guess it deserves more inspection. In this world of roti (food), kapda (clothes), makaan (shelter), electricity and internet there might be a world where I have services that take care of nutrition, healthcare, shopping, networking (social/business). Content gets split back into strict domains like it used to. Computing and internet become merely the glue that tie them together and are (any maybe should) are relegated to the background. Companies with knowledge prevail. The content will change drastically, and the rules will change a lot too. I am not sure how they will, but they will.
10. Machine Learning techniques - Difference with academia is that things need to be high performance, so the models used are often much simpler in preference for those that work well efficiently. Who answered the question and Which friends liked an answer are almost more important than the content. Recommendations at right about which questions you might find interesting are written in a very simple way at the moment - based on some keywords etc.
11. Blogging - One thing I didn't mention in the list in 6 next to mail/search etc. was blogging. One thing I was thinking about during the talk was that Quora in some way is like blogging right. I am an expert who is putting views out there. Blogging is a lot like that, in fact it's exactly like that. It's just that instead of writing about what I want, I'm writing about what people ask. Quora is almost a blogging tool. And then, lo as we were talking to Andy, he mentioned that himself. Quora is like a blogging tool in some ways.
12. Culture - There is a general culture in the company to look at product features and discuss them all the time. For eg., google introduced tabs for browsing - and then discuss it on a mailing list. Obviously companies put out what works for them. A lot can be learnt by looking at what they are doing. The product is an answer to them sharing their learnings.
13. Chicken and Egg - Oh and one thing I forgot to mention - The one question that I asked was how did you get the first community of users online? I had imagined they targeted some communities and asked them to use it and maybe they were expert communities - Bah, not at all. They asked 500 (yes that many) of their friends to use it to ask questions and answer them on the website. 50 of them actively did. They kept using it and realized some benefits of QnA. Then it slowly became popular once for information about silicon valley startups and companies in the valley. Generally about startup culture and it went from there - becoming popular in more circles and geographies. Key Insight - You just have to be valuable enough to one set of people for them to use your service. The rest will come.
14. High entry barrier to new comers problem - One problem in Q/A kind of sites is that after a point of time the power users of the community become really powerful and attain good status. They end up increasing the entry barrier to newcomers and thus people slowly tend to move out. Solution - Low entry barrier to good content. If the content is good, you'll show up regardless of how well known you are.
