The story
Founded by Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever on Jun 21, 2010.1
Founding and naming
Quora was co-founded by former Facebook employees Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever in June 2009. In an answer to the question, "How did Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever come up with the name Quora?" Cheever wrote:
We spent a few hours brainstorming and writing down all the ideas that we could think of. After consulting with friends and eliminating ones we didn't love, we narrowed it down to 5 or 6 finalists, and eventually settled on Quora. The closest competition that [the name] Quora had was Quiver.
2010–2013: Early growth
In March 2010, Quora, Inc. was valued at $86 million (equivalent to $127 million in 2025). Quora first became available to the public on August 11, 2009, and was praised for its interface and for the quality of the answers written by its users, many of whom were recognized as experts in their fields.
Quora's user base increased quickly, and by late December 2010, the site was seeing spikes of visitors five to ten times its usual load—so much that the website initially had difficulties handling the increased traffic.
In June 2011, Quora redesigned the navigation and usability of its website. Co-founder Adam D'Angelo compared the redesigned Quora to Wikipedia, and stated that the changes to the website were made on the basis of what had worked and what had not when the website had experienced unprecedented growth six months earlier.
In September 2012, co-founder Charlie Cheever stepped down as co-operator of the company, taking an advisory role. D'Angelo then retained a high degree of control over the company.
In January 2013, Quora launched a blogging platform allowing users to post non-answer content. In March of that same year Quora also established a full-text search of questions and answers on its website, and extended the feature to mobile devices in late May 2013. It also announced in May 2013 that usage metrics had tripled relative to the same time in the prior year.
In November 2013, Quora introduced a feature called Stats to allow all Quora users to see summary and detailed statistics of how many people had viewed, upvoted, and shared their questions and answers. TechCrunch reported that, although Quora had no immediate plans for monetization, they believed that search ads would likely be their eventual source of revenue.
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2014 organization
Quora was evolving into "a more organized Yahoo Answers, a classier Reddit, an opinionated Wikipedia", and became popular in tech circles. In April 2014, Quora raised $80 million from Tiger Global at a reported $900 million valuation. Quora was one of the Summer 2014 Y Combinator companies, although it was described as "the oldest Y-Combinator ever".
Parlio acquisition
In March 2016, Quora acquired the online community website Parlio.
Question details
Users were able to add descriptions to questions. In early December 2015, these were limited to 800 characters, and questions themselves to 150, not affecting existing questions. In August 2017, question details were discontinued entirely and replaced with an optional source URL input field to provide context, reportedly to encourage users to phrase questions more descriptively. Existing question details were stored in comments under respective questions.
Advertisement rollouts
Until 2016, Quora did not show ads because...ads can often be negative for user experience. Nobody likes banner ads, ads from shady companies, or ads that are irrelevant to their needs.
In April 2016, Quora began a limited rollout of advertising on the site. The first ad placement that the company accepted was from Uber. Over the next few years the site began gradually to show more ads, which Vox described in 2019 as "...still relatively sparse."
Multilingual expansion
In October 2016, Quora launched a Spanish version of its website to the public; in early 2017, a beta version of Quora in French was announced. In May 2017, beta versions in German and Italian were introduced. In September 2017 a beta version in Japanese was launched. In April 2018, Beta versions in Hindi, Portuguese, and Indonesian were launched. in September 2018, Quora announced that additional versions in Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Dutch were planned.
2017 anonymity changes
On February 9, 2017, Quora announced changes to its anonymity feature, detaching anonymous questions and edits from accounts. When asking or answering anonymously, an anonymous edit link is generated, which is then the only channel to edit the question or answer.
Since then, commenting anonymously and toggling one's answer between anonymous and public is no longer possible. These changes went into effect on March 20, 2017. Users were able to request a list of anonymous edit links to their existing anonymous questions and answers until then.
2017 Series D funding
In April 2017, Quora claimed to have 190 million monthly unique visitors, up from 100 million a year earlier. That same month, Quora was reported to have received Series D funding with a valuation of $1.8 billion.
2018–2019: Further growth and data breach
In September 2018, Quora reported that it was receiving 300 million unique visitors every month.
Despite the number of registered users, Quora did not possess the level of mainstream cultural dominance as sites like Twitter, which, at the time, had roughly 326 million registered users. This could have been because a large number of registered users on the site did not use it regularly and many did not even know they had accounts since they had either created them unknowingly through social media sites linked to Quora or created them years earlier and forgotten them. Quora uses popups and interstitials to force users to login or register before they can see more of the content, similar to a metered paywall.
In December 2018, Quora announced that approximately 100 million user accounts were affected by a data breach. The hacked information included users' names, email addresses, encrypted passwords, data from social networks like Facebook and Twitter if people had chosen to link them to their Quora accounts, questions they had asked, and answers they had written. Adam D'Angelo stated:The overwhelming majority of the content accessed was already public on Quora, but the compromise of account and other private information is serious. Compromised information could also allow hackers to log into a Quora user's connected social media accounts, via access tokens. A class action lawsuit, case number 5:18-cv-07597-BLF, was filed in the Northern District of California in 2021, on behalf of named plaintiffs in New Jersey and Colorado.
By May 2019, Quora was valued at $2 billion as a company and it was finalizing a $60 million investment round, which was led by Valor Equity Partners, a private equity firm with ties to Tesla, Inc. and SpaceX. In spite of this, the site still showed very few ads compared to other similar sites and the company was struggling to turn a profit, having made only $20 million in revenue in 2018.
Several investors passed on the opportunity to invest in Quora, citing the company's "poor track record of actually making money". Schleifer characterized the disparity between Quora's valuation and its actual profits as a result of "the high valuation for virtually everything these days in the tech sector".
In December 2019, Quora announced that it would open its first international engineering office in Vancouver, which would deal with machine learning and other engineering functions. That same month, Quora launched its Arabic, Gujarati, Hebrew, Kannada, Malayalam, and Telugu versions.
2020
In January 2020, Quora laid off an undisclosed number of employees at its San Francisco Bay Area and New York offices for financial reasons.
In June 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, D'Angelo announced that Quora would permanently allow remote working.
2021
On April 19, Quora eliminated the requirement that users use their real names and allowed them to use pseudonyms.
On August 5, Quora began allowing contributors to monetize their content. In addition, the platform launched a subscription service called Quora+ which requires subscribers to pay a $5 monthly fee or a $50 annual subscription to access content that any creator chooses to put behind a paywall.
On November 22, Quora removed the ability to answer questions anonymously. Instead, they encouraged people who do not want to reveal their identity for legitimate reasons, to create alternative accounts under pseudonyms. The change follows no longer requiring a real name for accounts and was made to reduce the number of policy-violating anonymous answers.
From Wikipedia’s article on Quora, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5