It’s really beautiful outside. Like so beautiful that if San Francisco is like this more often it will become really expensive to live here. Also, Quora is raising money according to the multiple people in the past week who have told me that Quora is raising money.
From what I’ve heard, the startup wants to raise between $30 to $50 million in its Series B, at a $400 million valuation — while we couldn’t confirm whether the amount was pre or post, it strangely enough seems modest in light of the billion dollar rounds being thrown about willy nilly.
While there is some prominent investor interest (and a lead, who I’m still digging on), co-founder Adam D’Angelo will also be investing his own money — Up to $20 million according to one source.
While Quora isn’t as splashy as, lets say, Pinterest, former Facebookers D’Angelo and co-founder Charlie Cheever are super geniuses who are slowly and meticulously building a world-class engineering team and culture — the smartest people want to work for either them or Palantir is something I hear all the time when I’m hanging out in Palo Alto on beautiful days like this.
“Very few realize how ambitious the opportunity is,” power user and TC Contributor Semil Shah tells me, “They are the ultimate outliers, a totally weird product that is still in beta and not really fit for generic metrics. If I could put my entire 401K into Quora, I would. No questions.”
Quora (which declined to comment about the funding rumors) is now 30 people strong and currently expanding its offices to further scale and bring its mobile app to the Android platform. So at least we know where the new money will be going.