Crowdsourcing is a beautiful thing but question and answer engines not always deliver. The usefulness of the answer usually depends on the knowledge and availability of the respondents. When it comes to caliber and depth Quora, the fast-growing Q&A site started by a former Facebook Co-founder, delivers.
I asked a simple question: “What are the top startups in Israel 2010? Both in terms of product, potential for exit and viral growth” and aggregated the community answers. Please voice your opinion and help us rank the startups by taking this VC Cafe poll:
[iframe https://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?formkey=dDFXWTFuQ3ZsUWJudjlleElSRXZmU0E6MQ 500 650]Most community/UGC sites follow the 90:9:1 rule : 90% of people just browse, 9% may comment and rate and 1% are active content creators (most likely applies to the answer side since more people ask questions). While this is probably true at Quora as well, their 1% is usually comprised of industry insiders, VCs and entrepreneurs. For this type of questions, Quora was a great fit. I’m sure we didn’t capture all, so an ‘other’ field was added for you to suggest the missing startups.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
