Cheever, who was an early Facebook employee with D’Angelo, played an important role in defining Quora’s direction from its initial start, and was just recently involved in the launch of the company’s Android app and push toward mobile.

Quora is a Silicon Valley-based company that provides a social platform for users to post and answer questions. Launched in 2010, it’s seen significant growth and mainstream appeal, although it still has strong usage within the tech community.

D’Angelo posted about Cheever’s reduced role on Tuesday evening, meeting intense skepticism from respondents, many of whom asked D’Angelo why the company didn’t provide more information on Cheever’s exit and who speculated on his departure. D’Angelo noted that Cheever will stay on with the company in an advisory role.

Below is D’Angelo’s post, which a Quora spokesman said was all the company would be releasing:

Read Quote of Adam D’Angelo’s answer to Charlie Cheever: What is Charlie Cheever’s status at Quora as of September 11th, 2012? on Quora

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The “crowdsourced” question-and-answer site Quora raised more than a few eyebrows on Monday when it closed a new $50-million round of financing that values the fledgling company at $400 million, despite a conspicuous lack of scale when it comes to users. Is this just another example of the bubble-style funding rounds that have made Instagram and Pinterest the talk of the VC business, or a sign of how much power the “Facebook mafia” has in Silicon Valley? Or is Quora really onto something that could potentially turn into a multibillion-dollar idea?

Quora has more or less admitted that it doesn’t really need the $50 million it just finished raising, at least not yet. Co-founder Adam D’Angelo said (on Quora, of course) that more than half of the Series A funding round of $11 million the startup raised in 2010 is still sitting in the bank, unused. So why raise that much money at all? As Om has noted, one reason Quora did so is simply that it could — there was apparently plenty of interest, and the company wound up with financing from original Facebook investor Peter Thiel, among others.

Raising money is easy for Quora, so why not do it?

This is the startup version of the old adage “make hay while the sun shines,” and when two of your co-founders are Facebook alumni — Adam D’Angelo was the chief technology officer of the social network, and Charlie Cheever oversaw the development of Facebook’s “open graph” platform — there is plenty of hay to be made, especially since both founders are likely to become extremely wealthy when Facebook goes public (more than a third of the $50 million that Quora raised reportedly came from D’Angelo himself). More than anything, VCs love to give money to people who don’t need it.

D’Angelo has said that one of the reasons Quora raised the funding is so that it would have more “runway,” or room to prove itself and its concept before it has to start making money. And it’s clear, based on interviews with the founders, that the company sees what it is building as a potentially world-changing idea. Both seem devoted to it not because they believe it will be easy to flip or sell for billions of dollars (which they don’t really need), but because they think there is an interesting problem worth solving. As Cheever told me in 2010:

We’re not really focused on making money right now. I think if we can solve the problem we are trying to solve, we will find a way to make money.

In a nutshell, that problem is how to aggregate or crowdsource expertise on a wide variety of topics efficiently, and it’s one that any number of startups and services have tried to tackle, all the way from Yahoo Answers and Ask.com to Formspring, Reddit and Stack Exchange. And most have failed: Yahoo Answers and others have degenerated into cesspools of uselessness and spam, while companies like Aardvark disappeared inside Google and other acquirers, never to be seen again. Facebook launched its own Questions service in 2010, but there’s no sign that many people are using it much.

Among those who have tried to attack the problem from a different angle are sites like Demand Media’s eHow, which pays writers to come up with articles that contain some kind of expertise about a topic. Interestingly enough, eHow was built by Josh Hannah — who bought it in 2004 and built it into a major player before selling it to Demand Media, and is also an investor in an open-source spinoff called WikiHow. Hannah, now a partner with the venture-capital fund Matrix Partners, is an investor in Quora’s latest financing round.

Wikipedia is the model, but can Quora mimic its success?

Despite all the failures, there is one obvious example of a successful crowdsourced knowledge base, used by hundreds of millions of web surfers daily: Wikipedia. More than a decade after it was originally launched, the site is one of the top 10 most-visited web destinations on the Internet with 15 billion pageviews per month. And even more unlikely, Wikipedia has accomplished this feat without raising any venture-capital funding whatsoever, relying solely on donations and charitable funding.

The two sites have somewhat different approaches: Wikipedia asks users to contribute links and verified facts to articles that are designed to be a one-stop source of information about a topic — contributors are explicitly not allowed to state opinions based on their personal knowledge. Quora, however, tries to get those with knowledge to answer questions about specific topics, and then the community gets to vote on which answer they like best. Both sites have strict rules about what kinds of content can be posted, to avoid the Yahoo Answers problem. As a user of the site, I’ve found the quality of the answers to be consistently pretty high.

One of the main things that has helped Wikipedia grow as quickly as it has is the fact that it ranks extremely highly in Google search results, since it is seen by the search giant as an unbiased source of factual information. Given that kind of traffic, Wikipedia could easily generate hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenues if it added some innocuous banner advertisements to its pages (something it refuses to consider). And some Quora supporters believe that results from the site could benefit from the same phenomenon, especially as Google looks for more social signals about information.

So the ingredients of a compelling story are there: founders who have their eye on a big vision, who aren’t motivated solely by a quick flip for cash, and who are trying to build a Wikipedia-style global knowledge database powered by individual input from experts. The fact that Quora’s usage numbers seem a little lackluster is the only fly in the ointment for believers — but then, there was a time when Wikipedia wasn’t really a household name either.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Mark Strozier

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Quora co-founders Charlie Cheever & Adam D’Angelo @ Crunchies 2010

Quora, a Palo Alto-based knowledge (read: Q&A) community has raised a whopping $50 million in Series B funding from co-founder Adam D’Angelo along with Facebook early funder Peter Thiel, Northbridge Ventures and Matrix Ventures. D’Angelo, who was chief technology officer of Facebook, has put $20 million of his own money (big props for that) in Quora while others chipped in the rest.  D’Angelo co-founded the company with Charlie Cheever in 2009 and currently has about 30 employees.

The company’s valuation is said to be $400 million, which only adds to the hype around the company. About a year ago, I had heard the company was getting investment interest at valuations in excess of $300 million. The company has thus far raised $61 million in total. Surprisingly, in the most recent announcement, there was no mention of previous investor Matt Cohler of Benchmark Capital, another early Facebook employee. (Matt Cohler emailed and let me know that Benchmark did indeed participate in the round.)

And what is the company going to do with this much cash? Well, grow its team, build out its infrastructure and do stuff most normal companies do. On Quora, D’Angelo writes:

We intend to use some of this funding as a cushion in case of macroeconomic changes. More than half our series A funds from two years ago are actually still in our bank account today. We could have waited longer to raise this round, but we wanted to extend our runway. That lets us keep our focus on long-term growth and quality, and lets us avoid making short term tradeoffs like many other companies.

And then there is some laughable explanation that they will have huge Amazon Web Services bills so they need the money.

We project a large portion of this money to go to EC2 and other AWS bills. It might be replaced by whatever the most appropriate place for us to run our infrastructure is in the future but as of today it’s looking like EC2.

Appdata puts its usage through Facebook Connect at about 180,000 monthly-active users and about 20,000 daily active users. I am sure they get a lot of traffic from the Web, but it can’t be enough to justify the nosebleed valuation.

The question here is why does this service merit such a high valuation? I mean, its traffic at best can be described as middling. There is lot more fly-by traffic from search engines, but is that enough to justify their valuation? Its mobile applications is meh and more of an afterthought. The design of the service is forgettable. Some members of the team have left to work for other companies such as Pinterest and Facebook. The only thing that is actually good about the service is some of the content contributions and the discovery of content.

Now in comparison, Instagram was a startup that snagged $50 million on $500 million (rumored) valuation before being acquired by Facebook. It had great mobile expertise. It had more than 30 million members and it had a very engaged daily audience. It was content that appealed to many people and it was growing so quickly that Facebook had to buy it.

When you compare Quora’s lack of traction with another Q&A community, Stack Exchange, which liberally shares its usage data, you are left scratching your head, asking yourself, what am I missing? Of course, there is the timing. Facebook is going public soon and that essentially raises the value of anything related to Facebook, merited or not. The way I see it, it is a deal that is being done because it can be done. Or as The Wall Street Journal says, it is Facebook mafia at work.

Updated on May 16, at 8.22 am with  a statement from Matt Cohler, who intimated that Benchmark Capital did indeed participate in this round of funding.

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Updated: If you’re a web service, especially a young startup, you want to get as many users as possible, right? But there are worse things than having a small number of users — particularly when the service you are offering depends on the quality of the content provided by those users. Quora, the red-hot Q&A site that has been growing at a dramatic rate over the past few months, finds itself in that position now: The site depends on high-quality answers, and has deliberately kept things small in order to cultivate a knowledgeable community. But can it keep those virtues when membership is exploding and not everyone wants to play by the rules?

Early on in its growth, Quora — which was launched early last year by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo and fellow Facebooker Charlie Cheever — made it clear it wanted to remain small in order to cultivate a community that would be different from, and better than, other web services by keeping out trolls and focusing on positive behavior. Call it the “Yahoo Answers” problem; that service, while similar in approach, suffers from an overwhelming supply of stupid questions and equally stupid answers. Cheever told Liz Gannes: “Our No. 1 thing is knowledge that people trust,” said Cheever. “Being a resource trumps making people feel good about themselves.”

To try to build up a core of high-quality content and users, the site remained in invitation-only beta before opening up to all users in June of last year. The quality of answers is noticeable: Questions have been asked and answered by Silicon Valley luminaries such as Netscape founder and VC Marc Andreessen, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, and even AOL founder Steve Case. In an interview with me in November, Charlie Cheever talked about the kind of community Quora was trying to create, and how he and others at the site spent a lot of time thinking about how to encourage good behavior, and how to handle the inevitable disputes over unacceptable questions and answers.

Such challenges, however, become exponentially harder as a community grows larger and more diverse, which is exactly what has been happening to Quora over the past few weeks. Ever since a number of high-profile blog posts and events drew attention to the service in late-December, membership has been climbing rapidly — something you can (naturally) read all about in a response to a question on Quora itself. Some users, including me, have seen their email inboxes overwhelmed with hundreds of follows every day for the past two or three weeks — in part because the site auto-follows all your Facebook and Twitter friends when you sign up. Although Quora won’t say exactly how many users it has, it likely has more than double or triple the number it did a month ago.

Quora cofounder Charlie Cheever

There are obvious challenges on the technical side when it comes to that kind of growth — as Twitter found in its early years — but even more than that, there are substantial moderation challenges if you want to maintain a certain atmosphere and community ethic, as Cheever and D’Angelo clearly do. Questions have to be read and edited, and rules have to be enforced. Just this week alone, several corporations, including the Huffington Post, set up Quora accounts, but Cheever confirmed to me that the rules of the site — at least for now — allow for personal accounts only. I’ve also come across accounts with fake names, another problem that social networks of all kinds have to contend with.

Then there are the kinds of behavior Quora wants to encourage. A user named Lucretia Pruitt got hundreds of up-votes for a post she made instructing new users in the proper conduct — but while many up-votes came from Quora staff, other users responded negatively to what they saw as a lecture, and disputed some of the recommendations. Alex Blagg, founder of a social-marketing site called BajillionHits, got into an argument on Twitter about the fact that his humorous answer to a question was being threatened with removal, and others have criticized the moderation on the site as well. These incidents bring up a central issue for Quora: How much of a site’s standards do you let the users themselves determine, and how much do you impose?

Some users are already complaining about the decline in quality on the site as traffic increases, while others are afraid this will happen soon. That said, there are lots of high-quality communities online that are going through, or have gone through, the same thing Quora has — from Slashdot and Metafilter to newer communities such as StackOverflow and Y Combinator’s Hacker News. It’s not an easy transition to make, and many services have failed to overcome what Robert Scoble calls the “chatroom problem,” or fallen into the “trough of disillusionment,” as Gartner likes to call it. Quora may someday wish it had remained small and exclusive.

Update: Charlie Cheever has written a Quora post (members of the site can write posts to all their followers as well as asking questions) about the efforts that the service is making to maintain a high level of quality, which he says the company is “deeply committed to.” The site has added a quiz and some tips on how to phrase questions, which is now shown to all new members (screenshot below), and Cheever says that it also plans to improve the “voting ranking mechanisms” for answers, as well as “special tools to support the efforts of reviewers and admins to improve the site and maintain civility.”

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Charlie Cheever, a co-founder of hot startup Quora, doesn’t really like the word “community” that much, for a number of reasons. Whatever he chooses to call it, building one is at the core of what he is trying to do with Quora, along with his co-founder and fellow Facebook alumnus Adam D’Angelo, the social network’s former chief technology officer. The startup has raised $11 million from Benchmark Capital (among others), but Cheever said in an interview with me that the company has no real interest in monetizing the community it has built so far around questions and answers. “We’re not really focused on making money right now,” he said. “I think if we can solve the problem we are trying to solve, we will find a way to make money.”

What problem is Quora is trying to solve? Cheever says that while there is a huge volume of information already online — and terabytes more added every day — he and D’Angelo are trying to get at “the 90 percent of information that isn’t on the Internet yet, because it’s in people’s heads.” Quora’s mission, he says, is to get those thoughts on the Internet “and get it in front of people who care about it.” The best way to do that, he believes, is to create “a civil place on the Internet where people can interact” and be able to ask and answer interesting questions.

Other sites are also going after the same prize in different ways: StackExchange is a platform based on StackOverflow, the tech-focused Q&A site, which is being rolled out to address more topics, and is backed by Union Square Ventures (whose most prominent partner, Fred Wilson, spoke highly of Quora in a recent interview with GigaOM). A recently launched legal Q&A site called LawPivot has been described as a “Quora for legal questions,” and Kommons is another newly launched startup that wants to crowd-source questions to ask public figures via Twitter and the web.

So far, Quora has been able to do a fairly good job of keeping its interactions high-quality, something the startup paid a lot of attention to while it was in invite-only beta. (It opened to the public in June.) But will it be able to maintain that level of quality as it scales and becomes more widely used? Even Cheever isn’t sure — but he says the company is determined to try. One of the ways it’s trying to do this is by selecting moderators from the community who can help users and also referee disputes that arise over how Quora’s “ideal society” (as Liz called it in an earlier post) should function.

In one recent incident, for example, a Quora user posted a response to a question about whether users of the site were “borderline Aspies” — in other words, showed signs of Asperger Syndrome. Though the response was thoughtful and inoffensive, a moderator deleted it, and Cheever later got involved in a discussion about how moderators and admins do their jobs at Quora. “There are times where things come up that we haven’t dealt with before, and we have to figure out with our users how to deal with it,” Cheever said. “We want to be as open as possible about what we’re doing and what the policies are.”

Even Wikipedia — which Cheever says Quora has looked to as a model of how to create a community around “user-generated content” — has had its own growing pains involving its community, and the rules that govern who can edit pages. That kind of backlash is one of the reasons that Cheever doesn’t really like the word “community.” While it has lots of good overtones of real-world communities, he says, it can also have a more negative connotation: something closer to an exclusive club, where only certain people are allowed in. Within reason, Cheever says that Quora wants to appeal to as broad a cross-section of people as possible. Unlike Wikipedia, which often removes topics because they aren’t deemed “notable” enough, Quora wants as broad a selection of topics as well.

A stroll through the site shows questions ranging from thoughtful queries about the inside workings of Facebook and what are some of the hot Silicon Valley startups that are most likely to fail, to esoteric questions such as “What is the best way to track my APM in StarCraft II,” which Cheever himself posted an answer to. The Quora founder says he now spends three to four hours a day, not just answering questions on the site, but also, helping guide users and oversee responses in cases like the Asperger question, where policies need to be adapted or developed.

For now, Quora feels like a really fascinating series of conversations you might overhear while wandering through a particularly popular — but very civilized — bar or restaurant in San Francisco or Palo Alto, Calif. The company’s real challenge will be to maintain that civil society even as it scales beyond the core group of like-minded users who, until recently, provided the bulk of activity on the site. And what about competitors such as Facebook’s own Questions feature, which many took as a direct shot at the startup run by two prominent former employees? “We don’t really talk about that much,” Cheever said. “I don’t even know what Facebook Questions is like, really.”

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So what is Quora up to? The top items on the company’s list, said Cheever, are growth and maintaining a high bar for quality content – and the two are often at odds.

The thing that most stood out from our conversation is that Quora thinks of its role as one of governance. They want to design tools that encourage people to contribute knowledge that is informative and current. The company’s plans are less about features, and more about figuring out ways to get new users to make good contributions, and giving power users incentives to share more. In a way, it’s sort of like trying to birth an online version Plato’s ideal society, with participants fulfilling designated roles in the interest of the common good.

That means that while Quora’s team thinks about things like introducing user rankings as a way to organize information, it hesitates on implementation because that might discourage new expert contributors with no previous standing on the site from joining the conversation, said Cheever. Instead, Quora has recently been working on things like giving user admins tools to distinguish quality contributions, and building topic hierarchies. Another new feature recognizes how long it has been since a user visited the site, and formats his personalized news feed accordingly.

That’s a different approach from the typical user-generated site – say, Facebook – which is designed to foster maximum participation by users, without placing any sort of value judgment on what they do.

“Our No. 1 thing is knowledge that people trust,” said Cheever. “Being a resource trumps making people feel good about themselves.”

Like Formspring, another (very different) Q&A company I visited last week, Quora thinks of the contributions it inspires as a sort of “inverse blogging.” Participants aren’t writing into the void, with no idea if anyone wants to hear their opinion of the best hummus or the best startup lawyer. If someone asks a question, it’s because she wants to hear an answer. And there’s less pressure, said Cheever, to make something perfect. There’s not an expectation that something has to be polished and professional-grade, or that people have to have the skills to build their own website to share their knowledge with the masses.

Though the hope is that everybody’s an expert on something, Quora also wants to offer satisfying ways for non-experts to participate. Non-experts can do research and write concise summaries, they can recruit experts and elicit their expertise, or maybe they could just be good at finding thumbnail pictures for topics (which the site recently added), said Cheever.

Another big focus has been catering to power users. As tech insiders have been roused to share their knowledge – especially about their own products or those of their competitors – Quora answers have often become topics for news stories. (Here are some from GigaOM.) D’Angelo has even done this as himself, confirming rumors of Google’s unannounced major upcoming social product in a post that amounted to irresistible linkbait. But some users would rather keep their answers within the community, so a few months ago the company introduced a “not for reproduction” option that will ostensibly stop these posts from being distributed outside the site (I’m not sure there’s a legal precedent for disallowing fair use like this). Quora is also, by design, not currently indexed by search engines, though it plans to allow them in the future.

What about scaling to knowledge areas outside its core topics of Silicon Valley and technology (if those two things are even separable)? Cultivating a community of quality contributors is one thing, but Quora’s big test is its breadth. Some competitors, like the technically focused Stack Overflow, are instead choosing the strategy of launching multiple sites to address different topics. Cheever admitted that diversification on Quora is happening slowly, but said general knowledge about things like local information in cities, music, movies and sports, as well as more specialized areas like physics, is coming along.

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