The best speculation I've seen is that someone (Yahoo?) is buying Quora, with onerous earn-out provisions (1/2/3/4?), and letting Charlie leave now would accelerate his vesting compared to remaining until acquisition and then leaving, if he didn't want to work for the acquirer.
I've met both Adam and Charlie (and Marc and much of the rest of the Quora team), and I can't see Adam/Charlie having a falling out over any personal or professional issues as a likely cause.
The weirdest thing IMO is that Charlie has totally disappeared from online (FB, Quora, etc.). Either it's to avoid being asked questions, or some kind of personal issue. Either way, I wish him the best.
While I am all Quora'd out -- I really do hope that Yahoo would buy them.
I've said many times on HN that Yahoo needs to start getting REALLY aggressive in the valley to stay alive; they need to be investing in every startup that comes along and acquiring many more.
All the brain trust is being gobbled up by google and (even moreso, recently) facebook.
I personally think that Acquihires are a bad thing (TM) for the state of our industry... but if Yahoo has any hope in hell, they need to inject some innovative blood into themselves in a damn hurry.
(with that said, I am not sure that Quora is really all that innovative - their UX model was only good when they were tiny - but now they have far too large a signal to noise ratio that is exacerbated by their UX implementation (hijacking typed text, @s etc etc etc)
Buying Quora would be a waste of money for Yahoo. It's incredibly overvalued by the market right now. There's no way I can see to monetize effectively enough to make the valuation make sense, and they aren't growing fast enough (or at all) to justify the thinking of "with all this traffic, it's gotta make money!" Their traffic plateaued about a year ago, after a short run up in the beginning when there was tons of hype.
Given that there are better (or at least more popular) options for many types of questions (StackExchange seems to have figured it out for tech questions, and they aren't saddled with an insane valuation and so have a lot of freedom to exist without even having to grow...though they are growing), I just don't see how Yahoo buying Quora could possibly serve to improve Yahoo; Yahoo's already pretty good at being second or third best in the market.
"but if Yahoo has any hope in hell, they need to inject some innovative blood into themselves in a damn hurry."
I feel like Yahoo would be much better served by building a world-class internal VC arm than by aggressively chasing acquihires. Most acquihires aren't going to stick around after their terms vest, and even while they're around, their hearts and minds won't be dedicated to Yahoo. They're a stopgap solution at best. They can be used to good effect (i.e., to bring innovative projects into the company and to attract young talent to those projects). But they aren't the solution at the scale Yahoo needs.
What Yahoo needs is to win the war (or at least be competitive in the war) for the top talent graduating from university every year. Offering a really innovative, supportive, deep-pocketed, world-class incubator is one way to do this. Possibly a better long term solution than paying superstars for the privilege of their company for a few years at a time.
Ugh, "industry/strategic investors" tend to suck a LOT, at least for early stage. Google doesn't suck, Google Ventures sucks. Intel doesn't suck (in most ways), Intel Capital is ok but would have to be amazing to be as good as Intel is at chipmaking, etc.
Cisco, which has one of the best acquisition strategies of all times, isn't a VC -- you go outside to get VC, even if your staff and product is all stuff people from within Cisco mostly thought up (which some investors have complained about)... if it goes well, Cisco is a natural acquirer.
The problem with taking a strategic in your first round is that there's an implied option preventing any other strategics from investing later or buying you out or in some cases even using your product (especially if adopting your product has a large investment/risk).
IMO yahoo needs to exit more bad people than bring in new good people. I wouldn't sell to them (well, I would, but only for FY money for both me and everyone on the team, with a 2y earn-out) until it is clear they've liquidated all the dead wood. (although I'd love to get to be the liquidator-of-dead-wood... the Romney quote would be appropriate.)
>yahoo needs to exit more bad people than bring in new good people.
Totally agree that they really need to shake things up, and whilst they sit on their laurels, the valley keeps moving and every day we see salesforce, google and facebook churning through the acquisitions that either bring in good tech or good people removing them from the pool completely.
On "what to do with service on acquisition", I've been thinking about that a lot -- basically as we set it up, we've got a plan to maintain service even if we moved on to something else, by charging enough to make the service self-sustaining from the start.
I'd make an acquisition contingent upon allowing the product to live on (either with the acquirer or an independent entity or a non profit); this doesn't impair our enterprise value much, since the product doesn't compete with any potential acquirer. I'm looking at putting this into contracts with customers. (a product could still eventually get sunset, but I think a year or two is a reasonable period post-EOL announcement, not a month...)
Actually the only people I'd "FY" to are landlords in Palo Alto (if I had $100mm, I'd buy a house in PA for $3-5mm, even if it wasn't a great financial decision...), and gas stations (Tesla Model S...)
Aside from posts to /r/funny pointing out idiots on yahoo answers, when was the last time you ever saw anything from yahoo answers that was not a joke (accidental or otherwise)?
Yahoo better start doing SOMETHING to be relevant.
The people saying they do good playing 2nd/3rd place, I think, are naive. 2nd or 3rd place simply means your biding your time until [upstart] comes and eats your lunch.
In the case of acquihires - the fact is that google and facebook are in a talent war. They gobble up the talent, and guess what? that [upstart] eating yahoos lunch will not be [upstart] but google and facebook themselves.
Another user mentioned that they think that Yahoo should create a great VC arm. I FULLY agree with this, as evidenced by the many times on HN I have said exactly that.
So, its a multi front battle yahoo is in: need talent, need innovation strategy {VC/Acquisitions/dropping driftwood/etc}, need acquisitions that facebook/google are strategically vying for and need to create a relevant service.
Quora, while I have my issues with them, IS relevant. In many ways, but the most important way is they DO have a sizeable % of SV braintrust participating.
Yahoo should bring that braintrust's awareness around their brand!
Why not buy Quora, and "extend and embrace" that userbase and seek advice from some of the people on Quora?
There could be a huge PR win here.
"New mom and CEO Marissa Meyer buys Quora, the silicon valley strong Q&A site, meets with users and holds a town hall on what Yahoo users can truly benefit from, accompanied by an all star panel, many of whom are top users on Yahoo's new site Quora... blah blah blah synergy etc"
I think too many people are scared and lazy at Yahoo, lets hope the new mom and CEO has bigger balls than any of her predecessors.
when was the last time you ever saw anything from yahoo
answers that was not a joke (accidental or otherwise)?
Just the other day I typed "1.3 meters in inches" into Google, to use their calculator. Yahoo answers was at the top of Google's rankings.
Yahoo Answers isn't just top for "1.3 meters in inches" - they're also top for "1.2 meters in inches", "1.4 meters in inches", one-from-top in "1.5 meters in inches" and "1.6 meters in inches" and top for "1.7 meters in inches" - not to mention "1 meter in centimeters". Evidently, Yahoo Answers is a market leader in this sort of query.
Would Quora users stick with them if became a Yahoo-owned property? That 8% super heavy user group is 100% of the value. Absolutely core to the quality.
Sort like what Craiglist had in the 90's. You lose them, and Quora is dead. Not sure Yahoo can own Quora w/o killing it just because of who they are.
Quora is/was super relevant to "realtime web" design people -- it was one of the first really interactive realtime apps for a while, along with Asana. It's the kind of stuff you can do with Meteor now.
I've said many times on HN that Yahoo needs to start getting REALLY aggressive in the valley to stay alive; they need to be investing in every startup that comes along and acquiring many more.
All the brain trust is being gobbled up by google and (even moreso, recently) facebook.
I personally think that Acquihires are a bad thing (TM) for the state of our industry... but if Yahoo has any hope in hell, they need to inject some innovative blood into themselves in a damn hurry.
What's the logic behind aggressive investing/acquiring, other than talent?
I've met both Adam and Charlie (and Marc and much of the rest of the Quora team), and I can't see Adam/Charlie having a falling out over any personal or professional issues as a likely cause.
The weirdest thing IMO is that Charlie has totally disappeared from online (FB, Quora, etc.). Either it's to avoid being asked questions, or some kind of personal issue. Either way, I wish him the best.