If you imagine your friend is recommending you content on a topic they're an expert on, they can do a really good job of that. They know what you're interested in, they know your personality, they know if you have a scientific type of mind-set or not.
I really like knowledge and reading books and just generally immersing myself in information.
Focus on the long term, and always do what's right to grow the company and not make short-term decisions. And outlast everyone one.
Our goal is to build this up as a knowledge base that anyone can look at. We're not just interested in people answering their friends' one-off questions.
I've really enjoyed starting Quora from the beginning. It's really nice to have a new start to things.
On Quora, you're not answering questions because you want to get points or because you have nothing else to do.
We need to build systems that can automatically figure out what's high quality and what's not, and encourage users to contribute high-quality content. There's a lot of technical challenges in that.
Wikipedia is kind of extreme, where a very, very small group of people contribute pretty much everything.
We're more interested in someone writing a really great answer that's going to be read by thousands or tens of thousands of people over the next few years as it stays on Quora and as it gets distributed on the Internet.
In 2007 I was at Facebook, and we looked at some of the social networks in Asia, and they were full of games.
The area we define as what Quora's good at is long-form text that's useful over time, and where you care about who wrote the text. Not that you need to be friends with them, just that they're someone trustworthy.
There's a lot of information that has been in peoples' heads and hasn't gotten onto the Internet. Even as the Web has gotten really big, there's just been this gap. So we made Quora as a general place for people to share knowledge of all kinds.
You have to get comfortable giving up control, and you find people who do things better than you do. Quora now does better with the team we have built.
You can go to Pinterest, and they'll get to know who your friends are, but they don't get to know very much about what you've done in the past. They're starting with little information about you, and they have to do this personalization.
When we get people to log in, they end up using Quora a lot more, and we can provide a lot better experience for them. We can show them a personalized news feed; we can send them digest emails and do all this ranking to find some stuff they want to read.
Most of the stuff that people look at on Quora today was not written in the last month. You write something really good, and maybe it's the definitive answer on the Internet for the next 10 years. Maybe it's only a year, but not like a tweet, where it's only relevant for a day or a week.
I have a view that if you build something that's good, and you keep making it better, it lasts.
Anything you want to know, you go to Quora and get it. And at the same time, give people a platform that is easy to use for sharing the knowledge.
Lawyers and other professionals are using Quora to build their reputation and build their bonafides.
I think as more people use the phones to access the Internet, they have a lot less patience for trying to find things on the search engines. That is because you need to figure a lot of things out for search to work.
