Quora CEO D’Angelo On Paying its Writers; High Schoolers Love Shared Calendars

Question-and-answer sites can feel like a forgotten era of an older internet. Yahoo Answers, founded in 2005, shut down this year. But Quora, started four years later, is chugging along—and reinventing itself. Last week the company announced new subscription products aimed at creators, or the popular writers, on its site. 

On Tuesday, I caught up with CEO Adam D’Angelo, an early chief technology officer at Facebook, about how the launch went. The new products give the site’s most popular writers a tool to charge readers for extra content, of which the startup takes a 5% cut. It also announced a $5 a month bundle, called Quora+, that gives users paid access to certain answers. 

D’Angelo said the site passed its goal for how many writers wanted to join both of the paid services within a few hours after the launch, a surprisingly strong show of demand from the writers.