Adam D'Angelo

“Wikipedia is kind of extreme, where a very, very small group of people contribute pretty much everything.”

“In the past, there hasn't been much reliable information about startups and small businesses available online. It's information that's really valuable, and it's information that people want to share.”

“I've really enjoyed starting Quora from the beginning. It's really nice to have a new start to things.”

“I think a lot of what the iPad app is going to be used for is just reading the best content on Quora. It really helps the whole system run because people who are writing answers can get this very wide distribution to a large audience of readers.”

“The Internet was supposed to allow anyone to set up a web page and share their knowledge with the world. But in practice, it's too difficult and takes too long, and almost no one does it.”

“Most of the stuff that people look at on Quora today was not written in the last month. You write something really good, and maybe it's the definitive answer on the Internet for the next 10 years. Maybe it's only a year, but not like a tweet, where it's only relevant for a day or a week.”

“You can go to Pinterest, and they'll get to know who your friends are, but they don't get to know very much about what you've done in the past. They're starting with little information about you, and they have to do this personalization.”

“Focus on the long term, and always do what's right to grow the company and not make short-term decisions. And outlast everyone one.”

“When you look at Yahoo Answers, there can be a lot of garbage. But if you're careful about the rules and supporting good contributions, over time you can get better and better, like Wikipedia.”

“You have to get comfortable giving up control, and you find people who do things better than you do. Quora now does better with the team we have built.”

“We started off by inviting our friends to use Quora, and then they invited their friends, and it just grew from there.”

“We need to build systems that can automatically figure out what's high quality and what's not, and encourage users to contribute high-quality content. There's a lot of technical challenges in that.”

“Lawyers and other professionals are using Quora to build their reputation and build their bonafides.”

“There's a lot of information that has been in peoples' heads and hasn't gotten onto the Internet. Even as the Web has gotten really big, there's just been this gap. So we made Quora as a general place for people to share knowledge of all kinds.”

“The more questions and answers we get, the more useful Quora is.”

“If you imagine your friend is recommending you content on a topic they're an expert on, they can do a really good job of that. They know what you're interested in, they know your personality, they know if you have a scientific type of mind-set or not.”

“We want Quora to last forever, and in order to last forever, it's going to need to have revenue. One of the best things about ads is that you don't need to exclude anyone.”

“Our goal is to build this up as a knowledge base that anyone can look at. We're not just interested in people answering their friends' one-off questions.”

“When you look at Google, its job is to find you the perfect web page. There are a lot of cases when you want to know something and a list of websites isn't ideal.”

“The area we define as what Quora's good at is long-form text that's useful over time, and where you care about who wrote the text. Not that you need to be friends with them, just that they're someone trustworthy.”