Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever not only doesn’t want to sell his hot start-up but – as he told me backstage earlier this week at Disrupt – he even has an explicit non-goal of not selling the company.
Non-goals or not, Cheever has a lot to smile about. Traffic is up to record levels at Quora and the site continues to be a paragon of innovation in the social space. In this interview he explains the difference between Quora and Wikipedia, and we get into many other orthogonal discussions as well. But I wonder if Cheever is tempting fate by having such an explicit non-goal. After all, he’ll look ‘a right Charlie’ if Quora gets snapped up in the frenzy of acquisitions that will probably mark the post LinkedIn-IPO social marketplace.
Quora, founded in June 2009, first launched in private beta in January 2010. Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question. One way you can think of it is as a cache for the research that people do looking things up on the web and asking...
Charlie Cheever is the co-founder of Quora, formerly Alma Networks. Before founding Quora Charlie worked as an engineer and manager at Facebook, where he oversaw the creation of Facebook Connect and the Facebook Platform. Prior to joining Facebook, Charlie served as a Software Development Engineer at Amazon. Charlie graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in Computer Science.
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