If Quora was where it is without VC funding the article would have been quite different.
It would be considered a success.But when one is valued at close to 1 Billion yes it is an underachievement.
Remember 99% of VC fundings are about getting the startup bought at one point or an IPO with a big price tag so early investors can cash in,therefore => GROWTH is a major indicator of achievement. Venture capital is not free money.
Quora is essentially a bunch of guys asked their rich mates for funding; they got it and produced some semblance of an interesting project. But it has zero business potential.
Most analysis has put the dedicated Quora community at around 700k with a further 1-2 million fleeting users of less than 1 log in a month.
It's a question that crops up on Quora constantly. Pick any popular question and you see 90% of the answer come From the same <5% of the community.
Say what you will of the product, but the people originally behind Quora (and the people currently running Quora) did really great work at Facebook and had a reputation in SV for their brilliance. And they got their wealth because of the things they achieved at Facebook. So it's not surprising they were able to raise lots of money. VCs love investing in people who have track records of doing great things.
I don't doubt the team are great engineers. That does not make Quora a great business, a viable business or even anything of value.
If you can pitch HN on why Quora matters then do it. Otherwise it is what I said - a bunch of people, well connected with SV who blagged a ton of cash with no way of making good on the promise.
If we pick apart your (more recent) characterization:
Yes, they're a bunch of people. Sure, they were well-connected in SV and they got a lot of cash. But you seem to imply their connections were undeserved (implication is in the tone: "rich mates", "a bunch of people"). Their connections were based on the previous engineering projects they had led successfully, their previous track record.
You only know that they had "no way of making good on the promise" in hindsight. And hindsight is 20/20. VCs aren't in the business of betting on sure things. But VCs love betting on people with track records of accomplishment. Nobody has a sure fire way of making good on any potentially-high-growth business idea.
Explaining that was the entire point of the article. Given that startups by definition need fast growth ('definition' being pg's definition, as explained in the article) and given that the growth of these startups has slowed dramatically, these startups are underachieving.
Maybe 'underperforming' would be a better word to use, since we're all familiar with that term as it relates to companies large and small.
If they are not going to have that explosive growth, they are no different from your neighborhood car shop. But that one will still be around next year since it is actually running a profitable business.
2. The companies here are not under-achievers; they are non- achievers.
3. It's a shame that FourSquare is still labelled as a gamified check in service. Especially contrasted with Yelp and their fake review scandals. 10 years later and Yelp are still in the red. Never turned a profit and no possibility of doing so.
During bubble times (now), there's the alternative of be small enough to sell something new to a big corp. More or less a very complicated high risk for all involved outsourcing of big company R+D. So... what happens when you're medium sized aka too expensive to sell, and also old news rather than being something new?
If you're a million dollar company with the brand new idea of selling dog food over the internet, a perfectly valid exit strategy is during a bubble, sell for ten million to Amazon because thats they cheapest fastest way for them to get into the lucrative dog food delivery market. If you're a $120M company with the tired (internet) generations old idea of selling dog food on the internet, pivot (if you can) or shut down.
I'm all for small, sustainable sites which provide a service and don't try to monetise too desperately. But when you take $50 million in VC funding, surely the founders know they're boarding the ten-times-return-or-bust train?
Compared to 95% of their peers (which are, at least statistically, true underachievers in that they never made it into the mainstream or at least the tech-mainstream, or didn't survive long enough that we would recognize them today), they're waaaay on the right side of the bell curve.
Indeed. What a bunch of slackers!