Last week at Disrupt, Chris Dixon did a version of Founder Stories onstage with Quora founder Charlie Cheever. We learned that Quora is not looking to sell, but we also learned a lot more.
For instance, what convinced Cheever to quit Facebook with co-founder Adam D’Angelo was that tried to “imagine a world where I knew everything that I wanted to know, as long as someone else in the world knew it.” And that’s what Quora wants to build. It’s a pretty outrageous goal, which is what makes the startup so interesting.
But like all Q&A sites, Quora relies a lot on search traffic. Dixon asks, “Do you worry about being so dependent on SEO?” Cheever has a good answer:
“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, Quora also kind of works a little bit similar to a blogging platform, where people sort of promote their own stuff that they write.”
In that sense, it is like a blogging platform for people who only want to blog occasionally, or can’t be bothered to set up their own blog. Quora takes a blog post that might only live for a few days and turns it into evergreen content. And since people are promoting their own answers, they also get a lot of traffic from Twitter. Watch the whole interview above.