Adam D'Angelo is the cofounder and CEO of Quora. D'Angelo was also the chief technology officer (CTO) of Facebook until 2008, and a year afterward, he founded Quora with Charlie Cheever. He is also an individual investor who has been active since 2017.
D'Angelo started programming as a hobby when he was in junior high school, and when he attended high school at Philip Exeter Academy, he met Mark Zuckerberg. During their period as students there, he and Zuckerberg created a music recommendation plugin for the music player WinAmp, called Synapse, which received up to a $2 million purchase offer from companies such as America Online, WinAmp, and Microsoft. As a student, D'Angelo also won a silver medal during the 2002 International Olympiad in Informatics. In the same year, he started studying for his bachelor's degree at the California Institute of Technology in computer science and earned his degree in 2006.
While still attending college, D'Angelo cofounded Wirehog, alongside Zuckerberg and Andrew K. McCollum in 2004. Wirehog was a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing website developed as a spinoff of Facebook's features and was available for use until 2006.
Given D'Angelo's connection to Zuckerberg, he was also involved with Facebook beginning in 2004, and from 2006 until 2008, he was CTO of the company. After leaving Facebook, D'Angelo founded Quora in 2009, a website where users can ask questions and get answers from their peers. In addition to founding the company, he has also been its CEO since its inception. D'Angelo has worked to expand the company, which was valued at $2 billion in 2019.
D'Angelo is a board member of several other startup companies. One of those companies is Asana, where he has been a member of the board of directors since December 2008. In 2018, D'Angelo joined the board of directors at OpenAI. When there was a leadership reconfiguration at the company in November 2023, D'Angelo was part of the board that declared that it no longer had confidence in OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, and declared that Altman had departed the company.
Several days later, after negotiations in private, Altman returned as CEO of OpenAI, and the entire board of directors was replaced, except for D'Angelo. It is reported that D'Angelo retained his position on the board as he acted as a mediator for the return of Altman.
