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
some
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