One of the most intelligent yet least talked about people in the tech industry is the CEO of Quora, Adam D’Angelo. Starting at a young age, D’Angelo showed his intelligence by winning medals in world computing Olympiad and algorithm coding competitions. It comes as no shock that D’Angelo would move on to bigger and better things as time went on. In 2004 when Facebook was just starting out D’Angelo was in the mix, serving as both the CTO and the vice president of engineering. After 4 years of working and developing at Facebook D’Angelo left because he had his sights set on his own company.

After leaving Facebook, D’Angelo invested his own money into developing Quora. Quora was noted early on as being a great place to ask questions because it was designed very well, something that doesn’t often happen with early websites. Quora quickly became a hit and in 2010 was becoming so popular that the servers were struggling to keep up with the traffic that their pages were getting. The most surprising aspect of Quora is that it still maintains relevance within todays day in age, even when competing against such robust search engines like Google. Quora’s success is largely in part due to the intelligence of D’Angelo and all that he learned from developing Facebook alongside Zuckerberg.

In today’s world, D’Angelo still has a pivotal role in many tech companies outside of Quora. He still maintains a close relationship to Facebook, regularly offering advice or suggestions to Zuckerberg (like the acquisition of Instagram by Facebook). D’Angelo also serves as a board member for OpenAI, one of the tech companies that has taken the world by storm with their GPT 3.5 chatbot otherwise known as ChatGPT. D’Angelo seems to have an eye for ideas that can shake the foundations of the tech industry as he has been at the center of many of the worlds most influential and lifechanging tech companies.