> We do not want to be dependent on outside capital, so self-reliance and careful management of our resources are crucial to our future,"...

I have sympathy to those who hung on to being a Quora employee for so long and their stock options have been 'possibly' lost. Instead of focusing on profitability, Quora has now realised later in its VC fundraising, it needs to turn a profit; demanded by investors. I kind of closed my account after their data breach but still, I'm struggling to reason why Quora exists when they keep taking VC financing.

This risk of doing this continuously is surrendering small amounts of ownership to VCs and diluting the company stock so many investors can control the direction of the company or pull out if they want to, meaning no huge stock return to the founders and employees if they have raised too much.

Perhaps my deep learning crystal ball doesn't seem to be faulty on this. It still appears to forecast a demand of VCs pressuring unprofitable VC funded startups to show evidence of profits and rising revenues or face the music. This article mentions this problem in more depth [0]

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/27/is-venture-cap...

I wasn't ever a heavy Quora user, but once their webpages got weird when coming from a Google Search, I think I started ignoring it. A lot of the types of searches that would bring up Quora results I was able to find on reddit by adding "reddit" to my query, without the soft paywalls.