Adam D’Angelo

Adam D'Angelo is a computer scientist and internet entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and CEO of Quora, a question-and-answer platform based in Mountain View, California. He also served as Facebook's first chief technology officer before founding Quora in 2009.

Born on August 14, 1984, in Redding, Connecticut, D'Angelo attended Phillips Exeter Academy for high school, where he developed the Synapse Media Player, a music recommendation software, alongside Mark Zuckerberg. He earned a B.S. in computer science from the California Institute of Technology (2002–2006). As a student, D'Angelo won a silver medal in the 2002 International Olympiad in Informatics and was a World Finalist in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) in 2003 and 2004.

Career history

• Facebook: Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering (2006–2008)
• Quora: Co-founder and CEO (2009–present)
• Instagram: Early advisor and investor (pre-2012 acquisition)
• Asana: Board member (since December 2008)
• OpenAI: Board member (2018–present)

In November 2023, D'Angelo was one of four board members who voted to remove Sam Altman as CEO of OpenAI. When Altman returned as CEO days later, the other three board members involved in the ouster resigned, but D'Angelo retained his position, reportedly acting as a mediator for Altman's return.

What Adam D'Angelo could bring to OpenAI: With deep technical expertise from his foundational CTO role at Facebook during its critical growth phase, combined with his two decades of experience building and scaling the knowledge-sharing platform Quora, D'Angelo brings both engineering leadership credentials and an understanding of leveraging AI for large-scale community platforms. His proven ability to broker consensus during the November 2023 board crisis and his early investment in AI startups like Asana position him as a stabilizing and strategically engaged board member during OpenAI's governance evolution.