I think it’s more likely that D’Angelo was there for his link to Meta, while Hoffman was rendered redundant after the big Microsoft deal (which occurred a month or two before he was asked to leave), but that’s just a guess.

I assume their personal relationship played more of a role, given Sam led Quora's Series D round.

And potentially, despite Quora's dark-patterned and degenerating platform, some kind of value in the Quora dataset or the experience of building it?

It literally is a Q&A platform.

Quora data likely made a huge difference in the quality of those GPT responses.

GPT-4 is better than most Quora experts. I hope this was not a critical dataset.