I agree with that premise. Quora will be lucky to bail out with a $425 million exit on the downside of this expansion. They're a decade old, the VCs are going to want their money soon and the clock is ticking on this long up-cycle (as the desperate IPO rush blatantly indicates). Who is paying $1+ billion for Quora? There are no overpaying buyers for that type of entity - Yahoo is dead, AOL is dead, and InteractiveCorp is far too shrewd to pay that extreme valuation. Quora is worth $100-$200m tops right now.

Genius is in the same boat. A decade old, failed premise (turns out people don't actually want to annotate everything), failed expansion plans (so... back to lyrics then), no business model. At the mercy of the VCs, they'll eventually be passed around for $10m or $20m like MySpace or Tumblr.

These companies are this start-up generation's About.com (or the latest eHow).

Simple rule for anyone doing a knowledge service: if you put the profit motive over the knowledge motive (which is the only choice if you take a lot of VC), your service will end up in the dustbin of history, no exceptions.

What exactly is the value of Quora? It's Yahoo Answers with better CSS and the idiots filtered out. I assume it's ad-supported - they have started supposedly sharing revenue with users.

It could disappear tomorrow and leave barely a memory.

Don't know about the idiots. My quora feed keeps coming up with pairs of "What is the square root of nnnn?" for seemingly random integer nnnn. Don't know how to stop it. When I feel like it, I answer "2".

Quora pays people who ask questions, based on how many views their question gets. Now it's full of people spamming as many questions as they can, trying to game it.

Ah. When they started, they were seeding it with high quality questions and famous answerers. I guess the floodgates have now opened.

Whoever said "there is no such thing as a dumb question" never visited Quora.

Worse yet, the site is full of dumb answers as well.

I prefer the idiots of yahoo answers. At least some of them have a sense of humor.

Maybe there's an idiot filter but the CSS spam filter isn't working at all. Look up anything related to SaaS/PaaS.

A contemporary (to the exit) account certainly thought Trello underperformed, business model wise (was very complimentary of the tech stack, though)[1]. I've never worked in the B2C space so I can't comment on whether freemium was a better option, but I did spend a few years in B2B/SMB SaaS space and the business I worked for looked very different from Trello and was more successful, financially (our tech stack was almost certainly worse).

[1]: https://usefyi.com/trello-history/

Thanks that's an interesting take and I learned quite a bit.