Quora co-founder and early Facebook engineer Charlie Cheever is stepping back from a day-to-day role at the company after starting the site in 2009.
He’ll be taking time off after a very long stretch of work, building and scaling Quora (after building and scaling Facebook). He most recently oversaw the launch of the company’s native Android app a week ago with designer Anne Halsall and a handful of other engineers. No word on whether he’ll remain on the board yet, but we’re checking.
We decided it was best for Charlie to step away from his day-to-day role at the company. He will always be a founder of Quora and will be an advisor to the company.
I have a lot of respect for Charlie and we wouldn’t be where we are today without him. Many of his contributions will remain as core parts of the company’s history and culture.
Charlie and I both continue to care deeply about the employees of Quora, the writers and readers of Quora, and want to do what’s best to see Quora continue to grow into a successful company that helps everyone share knowledge.
The company is much larger than the days when D’Angelo, Cheever and designer Rebekah Cox first conceived of the site as a platform where people could share all of the untapped knowledge they normally wouldn’t publish. It’s now 40 people, about to move down to a much bigger office in Mountain View and just closed $50 million from both D’Angelo’s personal capital and Peter Thiel.
It’s not uncommon for co-founders to leave a company as it scales or reaches a new life stage. Sometimes people burn out. Sometimes a person who is great at early product development isn’t happy or isn’t a good fit at a company that is substantially larger. Sometimes there is a difference in vision. It happened with Facebook, with three of the original four co-founders aside from Zuckerberg moving on. It happened at Twitter. It happened at Foursquare.
And now it’s happened at Quora. We’ll be updating as we hear more.
Via: TechCrunch
