People are trashing Quora because they don't understand the source of its value: its data. Facebook has connections that are mostly of low meaning. Twitter has a few pithy 140-character comments and the success thereof on its own social graph. Quora has thoughtfully-written answers to interesting questions, and counts some of the most interesting and intelligent people among its users (and that will improve as it grows). If you are, say, trying to find a quality co-founder or high-level employee, what Quora has to offer is much more valuable.

On the surface, Y Combinator gains a lot more than Quora. Y Combinator gains some really strong people in the Summer 2014 session. The average Quora engineer is probably as strong as, or stronger than, the average YC founder. Quora gains an HR liability, because once a firm joins YC, every employee is going to want the social access implicit in being part of YC. That's scalable at 4 or 6 people, but not at 77. I'm sure this has been worked out and special-cased, but I think that the Summer 2014 is going to revolve around Quora, the latter having at least a couple dozen people demanding the YC access.

So, here's my theory, and it's just speculation because I don't have inside knowledge. If you have a Quora login, you can read a more extensive analysis here: http://www.quora.com/Quora-company/Why-did-Quora-join-the-20...

Essentially, Quora has a wealth of natural language data written by some of the most intelligent people in at least one industry. Given that talent searching/recruiting is a billion-dollar problem (acqui-hires prove that mediocre talent is worth millions per head; imagine what verified stuff, backed by state-of-the-art NLP rather than executive hunches, is worth) this is pure gold. In fact, it's bilaterally beneficial. Talent wants to be discovered, and others want to find it, and currently the process is reliant on social networks (mostly, centered in San Francisco and New York) that are far past tapped-out. "Network-based" hiring leads to same few people being highly sought and paid millions while the rest live in obscurity, and it hurts both sides. If someone can make the job/co-founder market more efficient, there's immense value-add potential there.

Quora probably has the data, right now, to solve this problem to a large degree. The issue for Quora is that the data is, relative to the interests of business and people in it, completely unlabeled. Unsupervised learning is hard, yo. It's still unclear whether the guy with 382 upvotes on that machine learning question actually knows what he's talking about. (He probably does; but how do you know if those 382 people know anything?) After all, LinkedIn endorsements and recommendations have a well-known inverse property (controlling for age and professional experience, the more someone has, the less qualified that person is). Quora's best "labels" for its data are internal social proof statistics, and it's going to need something of external value if it wants to convince the larger world that its data means something.

This is, I would guess, the first stage of a long-term partnership between Quora and Y Combinator. Quora has a wealth of data from all over the world that, properly read, would be of massive use in talent discovery. YC is an improvement on VC, which itself is a 20th-century-style guild system based on reputation and personal relationships but YC has labelled data relevant to very high talent labels, which is of immense value if you're Quora (and if I'm right about Quora's long-term monetization/value-add strategy, and who knows if that's true). Even though only a small percentage of Quora's data will become labelled in joining forces with YC, it becomes a semi-supervised problem, which is easier to solve.

Why do I think this is a data play (and a brilliant one, at that)? Frankly, the HR headache is such an issue that I can't see Quora doing it unless it would lead to a quantum improvement in its ability to execute.