Stack Exchange was founded by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, as question-and-answer websites for topics in varied fields. Its website is designed to be similar as Stack Overflow, its flagship website.
The idea to create Stack Exchange can be dated back to 2008 when Atwood and Spolsky created Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer website for programmers. In 2009, the two started additional websites that were based on Stack Overflow.
Then in September that year, Spolsky's company, Fog Creek Software, released Stack Exchange version 1.0 in beta so others - for a monthly fee - can create their own communities using the very software Stack Overflow was using.
This strategy wasn't going well as expected. Spolsky only saw a few customers willing to use it, and the community was also growing slow.
When Stack Overflow raised $6 million from venture capitalists, the company changed its strategy: it stopped focusing on creating new products, and instead started to be a Q&A for specific topics. Stack Exchange 2.0 was the name.
When Stack Exchange publicly relaunched in January 2011, it was having 33 website, 27 employees and 1.5 million users. In its beta phase, Stack Exchange topics included physics, mathematics, and writing.
Stack Exchange quickly became the competitor of Quora, WikiAnswers and Yahoo! Answers.