How to pay to kick start knowledge

Question

Have you ever found yourself wanting to jump start your professional knowledge on a niche topic and wanted to pay X hundred USD to pick a professional's brain for an hour? Has anyone found a community that facilitates this?An example might be wanting to understand the deep nuanced differences between practical applications of two distributed SQL engines (which wouldn't be answerable on Quora, Stack Overflow, etc.).

uneekname · Accepted Answer

There are a lot of professors who have public contact info, and many would be happy to answer your questions about their area of research. It wouldn't hurt to ask!