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Comment by randomacct3847 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what motivates Adam D’Angelo to keep on as founder and CEO after 10 years of running Quora. Here is someone who got rich off FB and could do anything. Maybe early on that “anything” was Quora but I really can’t believe that what Quora is now is anything close to what he envisioned when he first started the site. At this point it feels like a Zombie co that keeps chugging along because it has no other choice but to do so?

Quora embodies what I fear most about the idea of ever starting a VC-backed co...that once you accept money it is very hard to return it and if your burn rate is low you could just “exist” for years without actually succeeding or accomplishing much at all.

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Have you thought about this a lot?

Quora is Adam's baby. He owns most of it and has been involved as a primary investor for... I'm not sure how long. Before that he was CTO of Facebook and an early investor in Instagram. He's made immense returns on these investments. I don't have numbers, but I would bet money he could buy back Quora from investors with cash and still be a several-hundred-millionaire. With that said, why would he do anything but his pet project?

Having so much success though can also mean that you don't have as much drive to make a great product because you're already set. Not that it must be the case here, but passion is hard to maintain when it doesn't really have much effect on your life.

Also, if the site can be run completely independently (and it looks like operational costs are rather low) then why even take VC in the first place? Surely the effects of hundreds of millions requiring a return could easily be predicted as eventually causing problems?

I agree with your first point, but Adam is also one of the sharpest people I’ve ever known. It’s hard for me to resolve the idea that he’d be complacent.

As for funding, he wasn’t liquid when Quora started afaik, but also even smart wealthy people take loans and get VC.

But what if this was his sole vision for Quora in the first place? It doesn't require a genius to know that everybody who worked in the new era of social media (mid to late 2000s) understood that you could create an empire from your users' free labor while doing literally nothing. Quora was built as such, Quora was made so that one website contains questions and answers about everything and exploit search engines and SEO to become one of the most popular websites for a long time.

Well now you know the secret to get rich, go ahead ;)

2018 is too late already, Quora and many others came in a time when making a post viral on Facebook and Twitter was way much easier in late 2000s and early 2010s and almost for free, exploiting Google search engine was also much easier back then. Now the internet is popularity contest business, pay for exposure or see your products die.

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