Seriously? Can we stop fucking calling people who do things that aren't actually science "scientists"?
I was always under the impression that YC was an accelerator that funds ideas. We were further along, had a website up with a handful of beta testers and hundreds of early signups. It wasn't enough apparently.
My hypothesis is that it makes sense from YC's perspective to be more selective, and pick companies that are more established. They are in a position to do this, given the ever-increasing number of applicants.. alas, the rationale of every investor is to pick companies that will have the highest expected returns..
I'd just estimate 250k/person/year loaded cost for their expenses, and it would probably be accurate -- they're not making big media buys or other non-personnel expenses. 125k salary ends up being about 250k once all other direct and indirect costs are factored in.
I find an additional $125k to be a stretch, but I also have no data to back this up. I'd be curious to see the breakdown for this: $125k + some share of insurances, office spare per square meter, equipment, training, social events, etc - what else?
but their team page does lists 77 people https://www.quora.com/about/team
On the surface, Y Combinator gains a lot more than Quora. Y Combinator gains some really strong people in the Summer 2014 session. The average Quora engineer is probably as strong as, or stronger than, the average YC founder. Quora gains an HR liability, because once a firm joins YC, every employee is going to want the social access implicit in being part of YC. That's scalable at 4 or 6 people, but not at 77. I'm sure this has been worked out and special-cased, but I think that the Summer 2014 is going to revolve around Quora, the latter having at least a couple dozen people demanding the YC access.
So, here's my theory, and it's just speculation because I don't have inside knowledge. If you have a Quora login, you can read a more extensive analysis here: http://www.quora.com/Quora-company/Why-did-Quora-join-the-20...
Essentially, Quora has a wealth of natural language data written by some of the most intelligent people in at least one industry. Given that talent searching/recruiting is a billion-dollar problem (acqui-hires prove that mediocre talent is worth millions per head; imagine what verified stuff, backed by state-of-the-art NLP rather than executive hunches, is worth) this is pure gold. In fact, it's bilaterally beneficial. Talent wants to be discovered, and others want to find it, and currently the process is reliant on social networks (mostly, centered in San Francisco and New York) that are far past tapped-out. "Network-based" hiring leads to same few people being highly sought and paid millions while the rest live in obscurity, and it hurts both sides. If someone can make the job/co-founder market more efficient, there's immense value-add potential there.
Quora probably has the data, right now, to solve this problem to a large degree. The issue for Quora is that the data is, relative to the interests of business and people in it, completely unlabeled. Unsupervised learning is hard, yo. It's still unclear whether the guy with 382 upvotes on that machine learning question actually knows what he's talking about. (He probably does; but how do you know if those 382 people know anything?) After all, LinkedIn endorsements and recommendations have a well-known inverse property (controlling for age and professional experience, the more someone has, the less qualified that person is). Quora's best "labels" for its data are internal social proof statistics, and it's going to need something of external value if it wants to convince the larger world that its data means something.
This is, I would guess, the first stage of a long-term partnership between Quora and Y Combinator. Quora has a wealth of data from all over the world that, properly read, would be of massive use in talent discovery. YC is an improvement on VC, which itself is a 20th-century-style guild system based on reputation and personal relationships but YC has labelled data relevant to very high talent labels, which is of immense value if you're Quora (and if I'm right about Quora's long-term monetization/value-add strategy, and who knows if that's true). Even though only a small percentage of Quora's data will become labelled in joining forces with YC, it becomes a semi-supervised problem, which is easier to solve.
Why do I think this is a data play (and a brilliant one, at that)? Frankly, the HR headache is such an issue that I can't see Quora doing it unless it would lead to a quantum improvement in its ability to execute.
But will it really? https://answers.yahoo.com/
(I'd have preferred Elon Musk for sure, but I suspect that wasn't on the table...)
The article points out the obvious problems with Quora. However, what I don't understand with some of these large VC backed web efforts that do not make money, is, why don't they try the obvious 'run a few adverts' business model in selected regions.
They could run adverts on Quora for those folk in Australia (where advertising is generally as predominant as the U.S.) and see how many people click through the ads or ignore the site because they cannot stand the adverts. It is not rocket science.
But, instead of trying to earn some actual money, they stay on the speculative bubble. It is as if they are putting off the inevitable. If the BBC can run ads for international viewers but not licence fee paying Brits, then why cannot the likes of Quora, Pinterest or any of these other web behemoths do something similar, just run a few ads outside the home market? If it doesn't work then they can take the adverts off. It is something that can be experimented with, it is not like it would a one time 'lose virginity' thing that cannot be undone.
I personally find Quora to lack some authenticity. It is like those cults that have all the religious symbols, rituals and names yet you know they are not 'real'. (I know 'real' religions are fake, but the fakery is not immediately evident, their traditions have evolved rather than been adopted). With Stack Overflow, no matter how poor a question is, you know there is someone that needs that answer (or at least needed it once). With Quora you feel people don't ask questions 'as if their life depended on it' and there is no altruistic reason to answer anything. If you are to answer to 'puff up your profile' (as per getting points on SO or even here), then, is there any feeling that those 'points' are worth anything? Who cares!!!
I don't feel Quora have built up a body of knowledge that is worth anything. If they closed tomorrow then nobody would be stuck in their job, or left unable to do research or feel that some library had been burnt to the ground.
Looking at how Wikipedia is funded - essentially a charity with no capitalist-entity overheads like marketing - looks to me like it is extremely clever and shrewd.
http://www.quora.com/Quora-company/Why-did-Quora-join-the-20...
quote:
There are a bunch of reasons why it's valuable for Quora to be a YC company: We'll have Sam and all the other partners to help us. We get to be part of the YC community / alumni network of founders. We get access to all the resources of YC.
We were raising money anyway, so there was no overhead in letting YC participate - this ends up the same for us as if we had just raised slightly more money from Tiger. And independent of the benefits to Quora, I think it will be fun personally to participate in some of the YC events. I hope my perspective can help some of the other companies.
" ... but a source tells us “Altman wants a piece of every billion dollar company, every unicorn.” "
Just thinking aloud here so bear with me. In time, no-one will remember how much of the company YC took. Just that YC was an investor. If this plays out, then YC gains access to the people that built those companies and has them taking part in the sessions where others are just starting out. In other words, this kind of play might just be a long term investment.
Overall, if there's a company that gets very successful outside the YC umbrella, this is a way to bring them into the fold (assuming the founders can be persuaded to give up the time).
