Will Quora Be to Job Boards What Facebook Was to Online Dating?
By Sarah Lacy
On April 24, 2012
An interesting post script to yesterday’s Quora post landed in my inbox today from LA entrepreneur Jon Lawrence of GxStream.
I hesitate to post it here, because I’d hate to see Quora overrun with opportunists looking for jobs. But it’s interesting that Quora is becoming an informal way to discover talent for some. I could see this trend continuing and Quora becoming to job boards like Facebook was to online dating — a less obvious way to scope out potential matches.
Jon’s story is below:
Hey Sarah,
Wonderful story on Quora today, thanks for it.
I wanted to take a minute to share my own personal story about the site if I could, since it’s played a significant early role in both my startup and my general life.
My love affair with the site began in early 2011, during a too-frequent bout of unemployment that came with being a freelance producer in the TV business. As it turned out, a lot of people were asking really good questions that I was really happy to answer. A lot of them were questions about quasi-obscure television business and production topics that people don’t often get to hear.
In the midst of answering these and taking care of my 1.5 year old daughter, I got a random inquiry from another Quora user, hoping I could shed some more light on a particular angle of showbusiness. I was happy to provide as detailed an answer as I could. The user, George Kellerman, proceeded to thank me, and let me know that if I ever needed anything, to feel free to ask him.
As March and April soldiered on, I wasn’t sure what the upcoming television season held for me work-wise. After years in television, and realizing that the legacy content business had survived “long enough to see itself become the villain,” I was restless to get out of the world of suing my audience, and into a more productive space. I’d always had at least a toe or two into tech, so I reached out to George to ask what suggestions he might have for getting out of the legacy media rut.
His suggestion, was to come up to a 106 Miles Meetup in Redwood City and check it out, and to meet and talk with some friends of his in LA. I did both, and the meetings and meetups were enough to get me seriously focused on getting out of the old business.
Over the following 4 months, George gave invaluable feedback on business ideas I was kicking around, such that by late August, we had secured representation with Yokum Taku at WSGR, and I had closed a deal with our first Angel investor. Over the following months, George continued to give us really, really granular and productive feedback. Of course, as Pando recently covered, George has since become a 500Startups Venture Partner. He has also become one of my startups official advisors.
Around January, my Quora inbox got another inbound request from a user who wanted to discuss investing in television production and business models. As we established an offline conversation, he became interested in what we were up to, and became an investor as well.
Quora has really been an amazing platform to both help me maximize the value of the topical knowledge I was willing to share, and to connect me with other Quora’s whose own answers I’ve gone back to time and again through startup mode.
At any rate, it’s only a personal anecdote, but one I thought worth sharing since it puts a slightly different light on the value add of the Quora’s quality of community (say that 3x fast). Thanks again for the great article.
Kind regards,
Jon
Sarah Lacy is the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily.
She is an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" (Gotham Books, May 2008) and "Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos" (Wiley, February 2011).
She has been covering technology news for over 15 years, most recently as a senior editor for TechCrunch.
