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Comment by sama | Hacker News Reader

Clearly makes a lot of sense for us :) I think the other companies in the batch will get a ton out of this.

I'm hopeful Quora will too--as the YC community grows larger, we can help companies in lots of ways, including with things like hiring that are particularly important for later stage companies.

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I'm reading this as implying that a potential benefit to Quora is using YC as a hiring filter, presumably from failed startups.

Seems like there could be some potentially misaligned incentives for YC founders there...

I'm guessing 5k + 5k per founder for ~6% of the company wouldn't work for a later stage company. Would this be more like a Series A investment?

What do you think were the qualities that helped Quora rise above the many other similar Q&A websites? The layout and UI doesn't really seem too immersive.

Something that Facebook and Quora have in common is that the initial set of users were cool enough to prime the pump of viral growth. With Quora, you had awesome people giving answers only they had. Like a startup co-founder talking about the early days of their now successful venture.

So starting with awesome people creating awesome content helped. Over time, Quora has done a few things really well: (1) growing the community while keeping it fairly high brow, (2) their topic taxonomy, and (3) their email digests.

My problem with Quora is that it's more entertainment than useful. SE/SO is more functional. Who really cares what are the things about San Diego that most people don't know?

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