Been doing a show on Tech Crunch TV with us called Founder Stories. I don't know, hopefully most of you have had a chance to watch it and it's really just kind of come bout the challenges of building a company. So please give a round of applause to Charlie and Chris. You can sit down, I'm not gonna leave here.
Is my mike on?
Yeah.
So thanks, this is a special edition of Founder Stories. If you haven't seen the show it is on Tech Crunch TV and I encourage you to watch it. This is Charlie Cheever from Quora. Thanks for being here.
Thanks for having me. It is great to be here.
So, you were at Amazon and Facebook before?
Yeah.
And you had a, you did a great job with Facebook. So you ran the connect platform and the.
Hm-hm.
So, like what, I guess first of all, how did that help you. How do those experiences help you with Quora and how did you decide to leave? Why did you decide to leave kind of this dream job and start a company?
Yeah, I think one of the biggest thing that's happened over the last 7 or 8 years is we seen a really like humanization of the internet and the web and people who didn't used to use the internet or at least only used it passively and didn't interact and didn't put content on there, have started to do that and Facebook was really like one of the leaders in that.
So you saw people's mothers uploading photos and stuff like that. So one of the goals the we have for Quora is to have all kinds of people sharing all their knowledge on the site and I think having that experience helped a little bit.
Did you have the idea and then say 'I've gotta go start this company' or did you just want to start a company or how?
I had the original idea of doing a Q;A type of thing but what convince me was, actually a really good idea was I did this exercise when I was evaluating it which was to, as I went through my day, just catch myself every time that I wanted to know something or was curious about something and sort of make a mental note of that, and then imagine a world where I knew everything that I wanted to know, as long as someone else in the world knew it.
So, you would come up with things you wanted to know and then you wouldn't find that content on the internet and then you said okay maybe it would be great if there was a repository with that content.
Right, an example is like I think I was in a cab, coming up from the airport into New York, and the driver was kind of driving like a maniac and this thought went through my head, you know; are cab drivers safer or less safe than regular drivers? I went to go put that on Quora and someone had actually already put this up like 2 months ago.
The answer is cab drivers are actually safer than driving yourself, if you're curious. But there's actually so many things that just come up in your daily life and I think we've trained ourselves to dismiss them as like there's no way I can find that out quickly so I won't even worry about it. But when you sort of can have access to it, it's really changing.
So, one of the biggest challenges, you have a user generated content site. One of the biggest challenges is kind of getting over the, what they call a chicken and egg problem, where you have to get both contributors and then people asking questions, answering questions, and then people, I guess, just sort of observing and loading things up.
How did you approach that problem?
Yeah, I think you definitely want to take responsibility for making sure that the content on your site is good because there's a real momentum and inertia with sites where you build the scaffolding and then users produce all the content. So, I think if you set it off in the right direction then that will continue and perpetuate, but if it goes in a bad direction, then it's really hard to pull it back.
And so we spent a lot of time in addition to just trying to build the features of the site. I mentioned doing this exercise and catching myself every time I wanted to know something. Once we had a sort of a prototype of this site, I would put all those questions on the site and everyone else on theteam would do that as well.
And then we'd actually go and answer them all, if you know, when we had a few alpha users and beta users, whenever they would put questions up on the site, we would go through and answer as many of the questions as we could by spending you know, 20 minutes researching it.
One thing I noticed in talking to founders of user generated content sites is that there is this mythology that you can kinda just put up a website and people sort of magically come there, and they start developing their own norms and things like this when in fact I think a lot of these sites, the founders are pretty strict about sort of the initial content and are very involved in sort of setting the initial norms and I think are more heavy handed than maybe people from the outside thinks.
Do you?
Yeah, I think the right way to think about that is to think about it sort of from working backwards. One example of something that upset people at first on our site, but now a lot who come around to like is. We sort of have a rule that all the questions have to be formatted with the correct spelling and grammar and formatting, and in the short-term, that can annoy some people, who are like, "Well, I like writing all ut now, since that's happened with all these different questions, now it's like, everyone can sort of see that it's this nicely formatted, easy to read, sort of database of knowledge, so I think it's really important to imagine the long term and focus on that and then work backwards from that.
How do you avoid, like Yahoo answers I think started off having pretty high quality content and now seems to sort of have devolved into a kind of a teen chat room, or I don't know, his problem often that these Q;A sites have had in the past as they grow, the quality goes down. How do you think about that?
Yeah, I think that's one of those problems that it is not any one big thing that is the solution, but a lot of little things. Some of them, the more important ones for us are, number one just the sort of momentum and culture and inertia of having good content. Where people see a lot of examples of good stuff that we show them on their homepages and at the top of question pages and whatnot.
And then those are the examples that they model after. Another important point is there's moderation on this site. Like f you break the rules then the users who are blessed as moderators will go in and remove the content or ban users that are not playing by the rules.
You have to deputize users to be moderators. That is the way you scale that because obviously you can't do that yourself.
Yeah .
So like I know I use Quora a lot for start up type stuff like business technology question What are the other, I think you just recently, like, announced that you were allowing legal and medical, stuff like, what are the other areas that you see flourishing?
One area that's been cool to see is, is movies. There's a lot of good content, especially around like, Inception and Black Swan and a few other movies. There's this user named Mark Hughes, was a screen writer got really popular writing Quora and he just got picked up by Forbes as a regular blogger for them.
And his first post was a, sort of an edited version of a question answered on Quora about could you really become Batman. So that was pretty cool, you' ll see and then Like lawyers, for example a lot of them probably, you know, there 's a difference in the cultural mindset in terms of how they use the internet. I think a lot of law firms actually don't allow their, their employees to post. And like the same with doctors, like yeah, that's definitely true. My dad's a lawyer at a big firm, and he's not allowed to post about law on the site, even though he'd like to.
But a lot of independent lawyers and sort of forward-thinking lawyers are at forward-thinking firms use it. I know one lawyer that I ran into at a user meet-up recently told us that in the first quarter of this year, about half of his new business like, came in through Quora because he posted a lot the topics of his expertise and sort of people came to this site and were looking for a lawyer in that area.
How do you measure success ? I guess you mentioned that quality is really important. Like, how do you, besides the obvious metrics, users, number of users, number of questions. Like, how do you measure success and whether things are working?
It's hard to use metrics as much as we'd like because we want to be data-driven and I think that's the right way to deal with a large system in the long term.
It 's really hard when you want to factor in quality because just looking at the pure number of questions or the pure number of answers, it can easily be skewed. You could be getting a lot of junk that's actually spam or not helping make the system better. But one metric that we kind of keep in mind is, a friend of mine I ran into the other day and he said "Oh, you know I don't post a ton on Quora but I've gotten in the habit of whenever I need to know something I'll check there first before I search the rest of the internet and about 30 to 40 percent of the time, I find something that's great on Quora, and the rest of the time, I have to go do another search or something like that." So, I think one of our goals is basically to drive up that thirty, forty percent towards close to 100%, and then if stuff isn't there, give you this confidence that if you put up a question you'll, something good will come of it and you will get good answer pretty quickly.
But most Q;A sites are highly dependent on SCO and so being dependent on, I think as Bill Verily put it, being dependent on a platform one that is sort of moving up the stack, or something, and adding more. So you see sort of the tension between Google and Yelp for example, with Places and Google had their own, kind of Wikipedia-type thing, Knol.
Do you worry about being so dependent on SEO?
Not really. I think we do get a lot of traffic from search engines because there's lot of good content that matches what people are searching for. But we also, crawl also kind of works like a, a little bit similar to a blogging platform, where people sort of promote their own stuff that they write.
A lot of our traffic comes in through Twitter, because people will write an answer and then tweet it out and their followers will read it. We also have a bunch of people who come into the site directly and just read on their homepage about stuff up there. That's also generally a really important part of the health of the system, getting a lot of attention to the content on the site, even when people don't feel the need to search for it, just so that it gives the writers who write the really good content enough reason to write.
So you had, you guys got like, you had a ton of press, I think maybe especially like, Yeah, I think some of the hype has died down. But, just the other day we had a record high for traffic on the site and we've, we keep growing every day, and so we're really happy with our progress there, and then we're also just excited about, like, my own confidence and like if I put up a question and sort of any broad areas gone up a lot that'll get a good answer whereas I know, like, early on, when we started, there was a lot of content around Silicon Valley and technology and start-up software.
What 's your long term vision? I sort of feel like it's a tension at Quora between
people kind of going on, and having kind of a more like a business discussion or something versus I think what you want to do is create like a long term repository of evergreen content. Like how do you think about that tension, and maybe, what's your sort of, in your fantasy world, like, you know, what does Quora look like?
Yeah, I think there is a little bit of a tension between what you are talking about. But I think, maybe one way to think about what we are focused on the long term is we really want to be the best place for people to want to write the great content and keep it evergreen. So part of what we do for that is we build an audience where like on any question, a bunch of people can follow the question and then as someone who's choosing to maybe start a blog and write on that and just put something out into the ether and hope that somebody comes and looks at it.
You have a waiting audience that when you write it, it will get sent to them. You'll see it right away and give you good feedback and there's sort of a community right on that very specific topic and I think over the long term if you have people invested in writing good stuff, then that will, like push the bar up and we'll end up with really good database of knowledge.
There was a thread on Quora yesterday of what questions people want me to ask you and a bunch that were about monetization. I think I know the answer, right? It's like, you don't know yet, and it's probably advertising?
Your hunch is right.
So, I mean, I think, I don't know personally I think like it's very hard to find very large scale consumer internet businesses that haven't figured a business model. It's probably just a question as to whether Yeah If you have things around like purchasing intent or what camera should I buy? You know, those things tend to monetize.
Yeah, for now we are just focused on building a really good product and building a set of questions and answers that keep getting better and helping people find what they are looking for. But we do want build a really sustainable company that can reinvest in building better and better technology to organize all this information and better tools for people to use it.
So, part of the, part of the goal of The founders of the shows to kind of provide the educational and help kind of fledgling entrepreneurs, and maybe pass on some of the things you've learned. So for example, what are some of the things that surprised you the most, lets say doing your own company versus working at Facebook and Amazon?
I think, if I had to give any sort of kind of advice I'd say that keeping a level head is absolutely necessary. Like, I mentioned how we, just like a couple days ago, had our highest traffic day ever. A couple of days before that, Amazon web services, basically all of our servers went down, and the site was down for about 24 hours.
I think we're doing really well, but in the same span of two weeks, you can go from, you know, the worst disaster to a really high high and back up and down again.
How do you, like what do you do you have techniques for keeping level, or do you just try to keep it in the long term perspective?
Yeah, we have a company value I've always Thinking about the long term and staying focused on that. And I think all the early people that we've worked with all have this kind of focus and we don't get too high when things are up and too down when things are low.
What do you look for when you hire? What are the top things you look for in people?
I think, the first thing that we look for is maybe, just upside. Like, we think we have a lot of ability to teach people and help them get better. And if people are willing, or seem like they have a lot of raw talent, either in just being really, really smart or having a really good sense of product or design or something like that.
And that's paired with a combination of willingness to just put in a lot of effort and put in sort of extra hours, not necessarily in the office, but just spending your free cycles thinking about how can I make this better? How can I, like, make this a perfect user experience or make this faster.
or make it work better. At least what I've seen over time is those ki
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