• Quora Gains A Twitter/Facebook Growth Expert, Loses Top Engineer to Pinterest

    Alexia Tsotsis

    Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

    Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011
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    Good news people who are really curious about Quora growth! You might one day be reading an article like this about Quora …

    Because Quora has hired a former Twitter and Facebook guy, Andy Johns, to focus on user growth and engagement. Johns, who tweets under the apropos username @ibringtraffic, spent a year and four months at Twitter, two years at Facebook and is now taking his speciality to the fancy Q&A startup.

    Quora has additionally hired Zynga’s Robert Matei to also focus on this mysterious growth thing, if you go by this (left) Instagram of his signature on some Quora hiring papers. Which you totally should.

    You know who isn’t hiring a growth team, or at least doesn’t need to as far as we know? Budding self-expression engine Pinterest, who is apparently signing up a new user every second according to the rumor mill. Pinterest did however recently hire early Quora employee and Pinterest power user Tracy Chou, according to like her bio on every social network and this tweet.

    Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Pinterest. Just add Spotify and Instagram and you’ve got just about every major startup I’m interested in.  So there you go.

    Image via Robert Cezar


    Company: Quora
    Website: quora.com
    Launch Date: June 2009
    Funding: $61M

    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...

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    Company: Twitter
    Website: twitter.com
    Launch Date: March 21, 2006
    Funding: $1.16B

    Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.

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    Company: Facebook
    Website: facebook.com
    Launch Date: February 1, 2004
    IPO: NASDAQ:FB

    Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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    Company: Pinterest
    Website: pinterest.com
    Launch Date: 2009
    Funding: $338M

    Pinterest is a social networking site with a visually-pleasing “virtual pinboard” interface. Users collect photos and link to products they love, creating their own pinboards and following the pinboards of other people whom they find interesting. The site has experienced rapid growth in recent months.

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