Adam D'Angelo Wants to Organize the Knowledge of the World

Recently named to Business Insider's 2013 Silicon Valley 100 list, Adam D'Angelo is the chief executive officer of Quora, a question-and-answer website he co-founded three years ago. D'Angelo started Quora as he himself enjoys reading books and learning new things. Seeing how there wasn't a good solution that organized the world's knowledge, he was inspired to launch Quora as a platform where people can access and share knowledge easily. “I think if you look, a lot of the knowledge is decentralized and we wanted to build a core place oriented to knowledge,” he says. D'Angelo believes that the future of information is about quality, not what's first and what's new.

Prior to co-founding Quora, D'Angelo served as Facebook's first chief technology officer, in which role he supervised the engineering team and oversaw new product development. He was also responsible for directing the social network's infrastructure and architecture to ensure scalability as the site grew.