Adam D’Angelo is an American internet entrepreneur of Italian descent. He is best known as the co-founder and CEO of Quora, a platform to ask questions and connect with people who contribute unique insights and quality answers.
Early life and education
Adam D’Angelo is a 34-year old, American internet entrepreneur of Italian descent. D’Angelo went to Phillips Exeter Academy in high school where he created a music suggestion software called Synapse Media Player, along with Mark Zuckerberg and others.
D’Angelo graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from California Institute of Technology in 2002. In 2003, D’Angelo created the website BuddyZoo while attending college. The website enabled users to upload their AIM buddy list and match them with those of other users. The service also produced graphs based on the buddy lists.
In 2001, D’Angelo was ranked at eight at the USA Computing Olympiad as a high school student and won a silver medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics in 2002. D’Angelo also received ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC): California Institute of Technology Beavers (team of 3), World Finalists 2003, 2004; North American Champions in 2003; World Finals Silver Medals in 2004; World Finals co-coach in 2005; and was one of the top 24 finalists in the Algorithm Coding Competition of the Topcoder Collegiate Challenge in the same year.C
In 2004, Adam D’Angelo worked as chief technology officer and also served as VP of engineering for Facebook. D’Angelo was responsible for engineering, optimization, scalability, architecture, ads systems, news-feed, management, and recruitment. In 2008, D’Angelo left Facebook because he felt his responsibilities no longer fit well with his skills and interests, but despite that, he remains a strong and enthusiastic supporter of Facebook. It was D’Angelo’s second time leaving the company when he quit his job as the CTO.
Quora
Months later, Adam D’Angelo came up with a startup of his own called Quora, a Q&A website where questions are asked, answered, and edited by internet users in the form of opinions. D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever co-founded Quora in June 2009.
In March 2010, Quora obtained a series A funding of $11 million, with Benchmark Capital as an investor. Since 2010, Quora’s user base has been increasing promptly. Marc Bodnick, a co-founder of Elevation Partners, left his company to join Quora in January 2011. Quora received $50 million in a series B funding in May 2012, with Peter Thiel as an investor. In April 2017, the company has declared to have 190 million unique visitors monthly, and up from 100 million a year earlier. In June 2011, Quora redesigned the usability and navigation of its website. The co-founder, Cheever stepped down in September 2012, as co-operator of Quora, taking an advisory role. Quora started a blogging platform in January 2013, enabling users to post non-answer content on their profiles.
On March 20, 2013, Quora started a full-text search of questions and answers on its website and continued the feature to mobile devices in late May of the same year. In May 2013, it also published that all its usage metrics had tripled relative to the same time in the prior year. Quora added a new feature in November 2013, called Stats to allow all Quora users to see detailed and summary statistics regarding how many people had viewed, upvoted and shared their questions and answers. According to TechCrunch, they believed that search ads would likely be their eventual source of income, although Quora had no direct plans for monetization.
Quora secured $80 million in April 2014, at a reported $900 million valuation from Tiger Global. Quora was also known as one of the members of the Summer 2014 Y Combinator batch. Quora acquired Parlio, an online community website in March 2016. In April of that same year, Quora also started a limited rollout of advertising on the site. Quora began a Spanish version of its website in October 2016, to the public. In early 2017, following this announcement, a beta version of Quora in French was declared. In May 2017, Quora launched beta versions in Italian and Germany. In September 2017, Quora launched a beta version in Japanese. In April 2018, Quora started beta versions in Hindi, Indonesian, and Portuguese. Currently, Quora planned to provide additional versions in Bengali, Dutch, Finnish, Marathi, Norwegian, Swedish, and Tamil.
Quora was recorded to have earned $85 million in a series D funding in April 2017, with a valuation of $1.8 billion, with Y Combinator and Collaborative Fund as investors. In September 2018, Quora reported hitting 300 million users monthly. In spite of its high number of registered users, it did not possess the same level of mainstream cultural dominance as sites like Twitter, which, at the time, had roughly 326 million registered users. This may have been because a high number of registered users on the site did not use it frequently and many were not aware they had accounts since they had only either registered them unknowingly through other social media sites linked to Quora or registered years beforehand and forgotten about them.
In December 2018, the company announced that approximately 100 million user accounts were affected in by a data breach.
Other achievements
Adam D’Angelo was an advisor and investor in Instagram before its acquisition by Facebook in 2012. D’Angelo joined the board of directors of OpenAI in 2018, and an investor in internet companies.
Fortune magazine included D’Angelo as runner-up in an article called Smartest People in Tech.