It's surprising to me that they just started layoff this year. This "startup" will come to an end because of its arrogance.
Layoffs hit Quora
31–40 of 283 posts
Re: Layoffs hit Quora
#32In the past few days, Quora, EBay, 23 and Me and TripAdvisor all announced layoffs. Coincidence or early sign of something bigger?
My thoughts exactly. Two scenarios:
- the WeWork IPO-that-wasn't has caused most VC's to decide that you really need to demonstrate profitability before you can IPO, which is when they get paid, so lots of companies are now doing layoffs instead of just getting more VC money
- or, the economy (which hasn't had a real recession in a long time, since not even 2011 was quite a recession) is just due for a recession and tech startups are the canary telling us this is so
Re: Layoffs hit Quora
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps people shouldn't make startup with something as difficult to make profitable as question and answers type content, and instead leave it for an organization that is oriented to that mission. That way, something like quora would grow more valuable instead of becoming more useless as they attempt to make money out of a squeezed lemon.
Seems like a windmill people keep tilting at. A while back there was "Experts Exchange" AKA "Expert Sex Change dot com".
Experts Exchange: The living embodiment of the SNL Celebrity Jeopardy! sketch.
Re: Layoffs hit Quora
#34Any company that relies on SEO content is basically going to disapear. Google search and their new NLP technology is just extracting the question and answers from content like that on Quora, significantly reducing their page hit volumes. Not only that, other lower ranked content can be verified to be "true" using neural network based NLP, meaning that the value of content has gone down. Google stole the business of q…
I haven't used Yelp in years. AFAIK it's a USA only thing. Most other countries I've visited there are far more reviews on Google than Yelp. No idea how I can trust either of them (the reviews, not the companies) Yelp, yes the writing is on the wall.
An no, google didn't steal anything from yelp. They just let users review places and post pictures.
Re: Layoffs hit Quora
#35Years ago, I would occasionally answer a question on Quora, which usually seemed like a real question from a person trying to figure something out (for example, software career questions).
In recent years, oddly, even the questions seem fake, as if somebody somewhere is being paid to come up with questions. Why would I spend time to answer if not even the person asking seems to really care? Perhaps, I am not the only one to stop seeing the point in Quora a while ago.
Re: Layoffs hit Quora
#36> a 10-year-old question-and-answer startup Has the word "startup" simply replaced "company"? I'm thinking we should at least draw the line at a full decade.
Startup was originally meant to describe a company trying an entirely new business model. If there's nothing new then it's just a small business (until it graduates to medium/large/public/etc).
Unfortunately the venture capital industry decided to just call everything they invest in a "startup" and the usage grew from there.
Re: Layoffs hit Quora
#37is layoff announcement becoming more frequent recently?
Re: Layoffs hit Quora
#38Better title: Quora still inexplicably exists 8 years after its irrelevance became apparent. You know, good news story.
>You know, good news story.
You're missing the forest for the trees.
It's Quora. It's Softbank imploding. It's WeWork. It's Wag. It's Uber. It's Tesla. It's Doordash. It's Lyft. It's Casper. It's 23andme. It's Digital Ocean. It's Mozilla.
Who knows what the financials of the giant private companies actually look like?
This is classic late economic cycle: the companies still appear to be succesful, but the fundamentals are shifting.
Re: Layoffs hit Quora
#39In the past few days, Quora, EBay, 23 and Me and TripAdvisor all announced layoffs. Coincidence or early sign of something bigger?
I'd be curious to know if there's any organization that tracks layoff rate over time. It seems like the US Bureau of Labor Statistics used to do it, but Obama cut their funding [1].
Re: Layoffs hit Quora
#40In the past few days, Quora, EBay, 23 and Me and TripAdvisor all announced layoffs. Coincidence or early sign of something bigger?
My thoughts exactly. Two scenarios: - the WeWork IPO-that-wasn't has caused most VC's to decide that you really need to demonstrate profitability before you can IPO, which is when they get paid, so lots of companies are now doing layoffs instead of just getting more VC money - or, the economy (which hasn't had a real recession in a long time, since not even 2011 was quite a recession) is just due for a recession and…
>the WeWork IPO-that-wasn't has caused most VC's to decide that you really need to demonstrate profitability before you can IPO,
That's a polite way to put it.
I'd say the WeWork IPO-that-wasn't was the public saying don't foist your shit on us. How many VC bagholders are now sitting on "billions of dollars" in meaningless paper gains based on nothing but SoftBank's and others nonsense valuations?