The expansion of Facebook from a Harvard-based project to a household name in the world can best be termed more or less as a roller-coaster ride, involving some gutsy yet sensible decisions from the stakeholders, who have a peculiar tale representing their valuable life experiences.
One of them is Adam D’Angelo, who was Facebook’s first Chief Technology Officer, and later left the company to create his own establishment, Quora, a question-and-answer website having millions of registered users, though not all of them are active contributors.
Giving up a lucrative career at Facebook and starting something right from the scratch is a bold decision that holds Adam responsible not only for managing financial matters of the new project, but he also has to play a major role in taking care of other management-related affairs.
“At Facebook, it was very familiar as I worked with people with a similar type of expertise,” Adam recently told Om Malik of Gigaom.com.
He continued:
“At Quora I have to manage different kinds of people. I have had to pick up a lot of different skills and I have had to get better at dealing with different kinds of people. I have had to learn finance, learn fundraising, and at Facebook, while I knew those things, I wasn’t ultimately responsible. “
Although Quora has not yet gained the success Facebook has attained, Adam is hopeful that his brainchild will continue to grow at a decent pace. Being the owner, he is actively looking for talented individual who could serve his mission well.
Adam maintains that one has to find people better than them to grow a company and that the owner must be willing to let control go out of his hand and give his employees the liberty to follow their minds. He said:
“You have to get comfortable giving up control, and you find people who do things better than you do. Quora now does better with the team we have built. My thoughts and time are spent entirely on recruiting and what’s on my mind is the number of good people we can hire.”
One of the main reasons of success, as mentioned by Adam, is to focus long-term goals while you are running a company rather than making short-term goals a priority.
Source: Gigaom
Photo: Crunchbase
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