Hi, Friends!
Born | August 21, 1984 (age 33) |
Education | Phillips Exeter Academy, California Institute of Technology |
Occupation | co-founder of Quora |
Known for | Former CTO of Facebook |
Net worth | US$600 million (2015) |
Adam D'Angelo is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Quora, an online knowledge market-based in Mountain View, California. He was chief technology officer of Facebook, and also served as its vice president of engineering. He left Facebook in 2008. In June 2009, he started Quora with Charlie Cheever, another early Facebook employee.
Education
Adam D'Angelo attended Phillips Exeter Academy for high school. There, he developed the Synapse Media Player (a music suggestion software) along with Mark Zuckerberg and others.
Adam D’Angelo attended California Institute of Technology, where he graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science.
In 2003, while attending college, D'Angelo also created the website BuddyZoo, which allowed users to upload their AIM buddy list and compare them with those of other users. The service also generated graphs based on the buddy lists
With a net worth of $600 Mn, Adam D’Angelo is the CEO and Co-founder of Quora and is also a 0.8% stakeholder of Facebook.
He had been awarded a silver medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics in 2002 and is also a runner-up in ‘Smartest people in tech’ article by Fortune Magazine.
Adam had attended the ‘Phillips Exeter Academy’ for his high school in 2000, along with Mark Zuckerberg, and later also went on to complete his Bachelors in Computer Science from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) between 2002-06.
During his time at the Phillip Exeter Academy, Adam and Mark instantly clicked and became friends, because both were late arrivals, transferring to the school in the 11th grade.
Together, they had also developed a music suggestion software (that suggested music according to your taste) known as ‘Synapse Media Player’. Synapse eventually became a huge success and got acquired by Microsoft.
Post this stint, Adam moved to Caltech to pursue his further studies, where he also created the website ‘BuddyZoo’. It allowed users to upload their AIM buddy list and compare them with those of other users.
He had also put his studies on hold for a while, to spend a semester helping Mark during the early days of Facebook.
And after completing his education, Adam decided to join Mark Zuckerberg’s initial team that formed The Facebook as VP (Engineering).
One thing that he learned from Facebook and Mark was that – “Execution was far more important than an idea.”
With that thought in mind, he retired from Facebook as their CTO in 2008, and went on to create Quora!
What is Quora?
Simply put – Quora is a question-and-answer website where users ask questions, answer them, and edit and organize them.
It was Co-founded by former Facebook employees – Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever in June 2009 and was made available to the public on June 2010.
The beauty of Quora is its authenticity! It is a platform, for sharing knowledge, as opposed to information, where one can expect some really genuine answers, with facts and proofs.
The Quora community includes some well-known people, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Dustin Moskovitz, Jimmy Wales, Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher, Avicii, John Green (author), Adrián Lamo, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, etc…
So for instance, if you ask a question pointing out to Jimmy Wales (Founder of Wikipedia), you can expect the real Jimmy Wales to actually come and answer your question!
Even though, Quora is similar to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Answers.com, yet works differently. Real names are mandatory, and you need to log in using either your Facebook or Google account or create an account there. You can follow topics, questions, and people, and accordingly, their activity will show on your feed. You can Upvote or Downvote an answer, or even comment on one if you want to.
With a fairly simple and self-explanatory design, you can begin using Quora by scrolling through the random questions on the home screen a.k.a. ‘Read’. On this screen, you will be shown all the most popular questions under the topics that you choose to follow.
Then there is also the ‘Answer’ tab, next to Reading, which displays the questions that need answers or the ones you have been asked to answer by someone. Next to that, will be the ‘Notifications’ tab and finally ‘More’ tab where you would find your profile details, messages, your reading list, your content, stats, settings, etc… Lastly, up on top you would also find the big search bar, wherein, you can search for questions using relevant keywords.
To some it all – it is evolving into a Knowledgebase of Knowledgebase!
