Adam D'Angelo

Questions and answers is a big space, and there are lots of possible systems that you can create for different goals.

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.

More than a billion people use the Internet, yet only a tiny fraction contribute their knowledge to it.

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.

A lot of people really like to answer questions, and they really enjoy sharing their knowledge. Especially people who have valuable knowledge.

I really like knowledge and reading books and just generally immersing myself in information.

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.

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.

When companies get big, they slow down. They're not as exciting. If you want to get something done, it takes a lot of time and a lot of meetings.

When you look at Yahoo Answers, there can be a lot of garbage. But if you're careful about the rules and supporting good contributions, over time you can get better and better, like Wikipedia.

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.

I think a lot of what the iPad app is going to be used for is just reading the best content on Quora. It really helps the whole system run because people who are writing answers can get this very wide distribution to a large audience of readers.