Adam D'Angelo (born August 14, 1984) is an American internet entrepreneur. He is best known for his role as the co-founder and CEO of

Quora Quora is an American social question-and-answer website and online knowledge market headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was founded on June 25, 2009, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Users can post questions, answ ...

, based in

Mountain View, California Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the population was 82,376 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Mountain V ...

, and as the first Chief Technology Officer of Facebook (now Meta).

Early life and education

Adam D'Angelo was born on August 14, 1984 in

Redding, Connecticut Redding is a New England town, town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States. The population was 8,765 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. The town is part of the Western Connecticut Planning Regi ...

, United States. He attended

Phillips Exeter Academy Phillips Exeter Academy (often called Exeter or PEA) is an Independent school, independent, co-educational, college-preparatory school in Exeter, New Hampshire. Established in 1781, it is America's sixth-oldest boarding school and educates an es ...

for high school. While a student there, he developed the Synapse Media Player (a music suggestion program) with Philips classmate Mark Zuckerberg and others. From 2002 to 2006, D'Angelo attended the California Institute of Technology, where he graduated with a B.S. in

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

Career

In 2004, while attending college, D'Angelo created the website BuddyZoo, which allowed users to upload their AIM buddy list in order to compare with those of other users. BuddyZoo also generated network graphs based on these lists. D'Angelo joined

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

shortly after its launch in 2004, and served as its chief technology officer (CTO) from 2006 to 2008, and as its vice president of engineering until 2008. In June 2009, D'Angelo co-founded

with former Facebook software engineer, Charlie Cheever. In May 2012, he invested $20 million of his own money in Quora as part of the company's $50 million Series B round of financing. D'Angelo was also an early investor in

Instagram Instagram is an American photo sharing, photo and Short-form content, short-form video sharing social networking service owned by Meta Platforms. It allows users to upload media that can be edited with Social media camera filter, filters, be ...

before its 2012 acquisition by Facebook,

Asana An āsana (Sanskrit: आसन) is a body posture, originally and still a general term for a sitting meditation pose,Verse 46, chapter II, "Patanjali Yoga sutras" by Swami Prabhavananda, published by the Sri Ramakrishna Math p. 111 and late ...

, a work management platform, and Lunchclub, a networking platform using

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

. D'Angelo is the founder of an AI startup, Poe. Poe is currently integrated within Quora as well. D'Angelo was an early advisor to

prior to 2012.

OpenAI

In 2018, he joined the board of directors of OpenAI. In November 2023, D'Angelo was one of four board members who voted to remove Sam Altman from his role as CEO of OpenAI. When Sam Altman returned to OpenAI, the other three board members involved in Altman's ouster resigned. D'Angelo was the only of the six original board members who remained following Altman's return.

Honors and achievements

*USA Computing Olympiad: eighth place, 2001; * International Olympiad in Informatics: silver medal, 2002 * ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC): California Institute of Technology Beavers (team of 3), World Finalists 2003, 2004; North American Champions 2003; World Finals Silver Medals 2004; World Finals co-coach 2005. * Topcoder Collegiate Challenge, Algorithm Coding Competition: placed among the top 24 finalists, 2005 *'' Fortune'' magazine included D'Angelo as a runner-up in its "Smartest people in tech: Engineers", 2010. * Forbes List of America's Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40 (2016), number 24: Net worth $600 million.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:D'Angelo, Adam Facebook employees California Institute of Technology alumni Living people Businesspeople from California Phillips Exeter Academy alumni American chief technology officers 21st-century American businesspeople American technology chief executives 1984 births Competitive programmers American people of Italian descent OpenAI people