How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You’re offering a content management platform that you offer as a SaaS product to these retailers? David Karandish: Exactly. And in that content management platform, we have a couple of different options. We can provide the content from the Answers.com community. Or we can help partner for the content with top brands. So

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How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In the timeframe that you’re describing, there was activity in the competitive landscape. Of course Quora, with a huge amount of funding, came into the picture and has since become a very large site. How do you view Quora vis-à-vis Answers.com? David Karandish: First of all, we like to see investment into the

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How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You brought in $20 million worth of revenue through Answers.com. What strategic reengineering did you do to the property to get it to the next level? David Karandish: The previous team at Answers.com was doing very little optimization and split testing. For those who aren’t familiar with this, split testing is where you

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How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When you were going through this whiteboarding process of what your vision of what the company wants to be when it grows up, what was the financial situation of the company? David Karandish: We were profitable. We were generating revenue. We were small, but we were doing each of those and we realized

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How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: A plan did not exist at that time? David Karandish: Answers.com was not a parallel path. We acquired Answers.com in 2011. Around 2008-2009, we did a white boarding strategy session. We brought some of the key management team members in and asked them, “If we were going to build the ultimate Internet company,

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How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 1)

You would think question and answer sites are hard to monetize. Read how David Karandish built Answers.com to be a profitable $200M+ company … Note, the much-hyped Quora doesn’t monetize at all yet. Sramana Mitra: David, let’s start with your background. Where does your story begin? What is the back-story to the Answers.com story? David Karandish:

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Adallom (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did you fund the company? Assaf Rappaport: The company started with an investment from Sequoia Capital. Sramana Mitra: So you raised concept financing from Sequoia? Assaf Rappaport: Yes. Sramana Mitra: That’s very unusual. How did you manage to do that? That’s happening very rarely nowadays in the industry.

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Adallom (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the security budgets, security has always been an active area. Part of it is because there are all sorts of creative ways in which hackers tend to find ways to penetrate organizations. Also, there’s the constantly changing architectural issues. The whole cloud thing is relatively new. There is a

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