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Comment on Why Did Quora Join Y Combinator?

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I know it's cliche to say, but my god, where did the $141 million go?

What has been spent has mostly been spent on salaries. I suspect they're keeping a much larger buffer than a lot of companies, for two reasons: because they can raise money cheaply, and because they don't have a clear monetization path yet, so it might be years before they have meaningful revenue, even if they discovered the strategy today.

I'd just estimate 250k/person/year loaded cost for their expenses, and it would probably be accurate -- they're not making big media buys or other non-personnel expenses. 125k salary ends up being about 250k once all other direct and indirect costs are factored in.

125k salary ends up being about 250k once all other direct and indirect costs are factored in.

I find an additional $125k to be a stretch, but I also have no data to back this up. I'd be curious to see the breakdown for this: $125k + some share of insurances, office spare per square meter, equipment, training, social events, etc - what else?

That's the standard rule of thumb, that your cost to your employer is roughly double your salary. Of course it depends on tax rates, insurance rates, quality of benefits, etc. But if you are just estimating for a company you don't have much knowledge about there isn't a much better number to use.

social security /FICA taxes from the employer, retirement benefit contributions, other benefits, and basically the entire cost of your HR deptartment and possibly other cost centers.

Overhead rate goes down if you hire more peeps.

According to the article over half of it ($80 million) was only raised last month, so hopefully little of that went anywhere yet.

as namenotrequired said, the latest round was very recent

but their team page does lists 77 people https://www.quora.com/about/team

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