Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global

Summary

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Episode: Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global
Date: September 15, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this engaging episode, Guy Raz speaks with Nirav Tolia, co-founder and current CEO of Nextdoor, about his entrepreneurial journey, from his early days at Yahoo, through the creation and challenges of Epinions and Fanbase, to Nextdoor’s founding and recent rebranding efforts. Tolia opens up about failure, resilience, leadership transitions, and the deeply personal lessons he has learned along the way—including moments of public scrutiny, broken friendships, and his return to lead Nextdoor during a critical juncture.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Disconnected Neighborhood: The Problem Nextdoor Aimed to Solve

• [02:21] Nirav Tolia shares a key insight: in 2010, 30% of Americans couldn't name a single neighbor.

  “When we started Nextdoor in 2010...30% of Americans could not name a single neighbor by name...we kind of wore that as a badge of honor because we knew that it would scare away the vast majority of competitors.”
  — Nirav Tolia [02:21]

• The need for trust and neighborly connection underpinned the whole concept.

2. Nirav’s Early Years: From Yahoo to Epinions

• [05:49] Tolia tells the story of joining Yahoo in the 1990s, which his parents thought was a chocolate milk company, Yoohoo.

  “I think my parents believed for the first few weeks when I was working at Yahoo that I was working for a chocolate milk company.”
  — Nirav Tolia [05:49]

• [08:37] Created “Round Zero”, a community for aspiring entrepreneurs, attended by future luminaries like Larry Page and Reid Hoffman.
• [10:51] Tolia boldly leaves Yahoo (forfeiting millions in stock options) to co-found Epinions, driven by the urge to create something of his own.

  “I always wanted to start something and I was crazy enough to think maybe I can create my own Yahoo.”
  — Nirav Tolia [10:51]

• [12:23] Epinions: early user-generated review site, focused on collective expertise.

  “Naval [Ravikant] had this great expression: nobody is smarter than everybody.”
  — Nirav Tolia [13:36]

3. Surviving Failure and Public Scrutiny

• [14:56] Dot-com bust nearly wipes out Epinions. Layoffs reduced the staff from 100 to 20.
• [18:19] Forced resignation amid controversy over résumé misrepresentations; loss weighed heavily on him.

  “There are always things that we do that we wish we didn’t...The best thing to do is to acknowledge mistakes, to learn from them, and then to move forward.”
  — Nirav Tolia [20:18]

• [21:05] Lawsuits fractured key friendships with co-founders, with relationships “never repaired” [22:04].

4. Reinvention and New Lessons

• [23:55] Sabbatical in New York leads to renewed energy and self-reflection:

  “One of the hardest things about being a founder, in my opinion, is you never have the space to really absorb the greater lessons...have a little bit of reflection.”
  — Nirav Tolia [22:51]

• [26:12] Launches Fanbase, an online sports community, but it fails to find traction or a viable business model despite a strong initial user surge.
• [31:24] When Fanbase falters, Tolia considers shutting down. Investor Bill Gurley encourages perseverance by sharing Rudyard Kipling’s “If”.

5. The Origin Story of Nextdoor

• [34:16] The team explores ideas; “Neighborly” emerges as the prototype that would become Nextdoor—an online neighborhood message board.
• [39:56] Early user testing reveals strong resonance: people want to know and trust their neighbors.

  “…there was no network comprised of...the people who live right next door.”
  — Nirav Tolia [39:58]

Launching Nextdoor: Unscalable Beginnings

• [43:11] Verification starts with physical postcards to ensure users are real residents—a deliberate, hands-on model.
• [45:59] Neighborhood boundaries were literally mapped out with sharpies and feedback from locals.

  “Don’t be afraid to do things manually at the beginning because it’s a people business...you can’t do that at scale; you have to do that one conversation at a time.”
  — Nirav Tolia [46:13]

• [47:23] The company remained frugal and lean, launching nationally with just 176 neighborhoods.

6. Scaling Challenges: Quality, Moderation, and Monetization

• [49:11] The biggest hurdle: getting people to join and invite neighbors, as most didn’t even know whom to invite.
• [52:45] Content moderation handled by community leads at first; later, algorithms delivered more relevant, personalized content (“if you have a dog, lost dog posts matter a lot”).
• [55:55] Revenue arrives only in 2015, after five years focused on engagement over monetization. With hindsight, Tolia admits waiting so long to involve small businesses was “probably a mistake.”

7. Leadership Transitions: Burnout and Stepping Aside

• [60:02] By 2018, Tolia acknowledges burnout and a sense of plateauing. The board suggests bringing in new leadership.

  “I was not operating at maximum intellectual capability or emotional capability…By 2018, I think I would have been totally happy selling the company.”
  — Nirav Tolia [60:02]

• [61:00] Transition to Sarah Friar as CEO; Tolia becomes “chief cheerleader” from the board.

8. Stepping Away, Self-Renewal, and the Unexpected Return

• [64:01] Takes his family to Italy for personal renewal during the pandemic, describing it as “my own personal renaissance.”
• [65:57] Returns as CEO in 2024, motivated by a sense of unfinished business and his wife’s encouragement.

  “If you don’t take this opportunity and Nextdoor fails...you can ask yourself, why didn’t I do whatever I could to help it succeed?”
  — Nirav Tolia [66:16]

9. Reinvigorating Nextdoor: Next Steps and Vision

• [68:13] Sets out to make Nextdoor “the essential local application”—a platform as vital as email or text for local happenings.
• [70:37] Integrates third-party local journalism and explores building built-in recommendations and transactions (i.e. “a button after the conversation happens that says: okay, book this for me”).
• [71:59] Envisions Nextdoor as a real-time community hub: alerts, safety, recommendations, “a place where you continually discover” your local world.

10. Themes: Luck, Resilience, and Community

• [73:36] Final reflection on luck vs. effort:

  “It’s all luck…I’ve done everything I can to ring the bell, but most of the most successful people I’ve met, it hasn’t been just because of skill or just because of luck. It’s been some conflation of the two and that’s kind of what makes it magical.”
  — Nirav Tolia [73:36]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “You’re a lot less intelligent than I thought you were. Do you have any idea how hard it is to build something like Yahoo? Well, you’re about to find out.” — Jerry Yang, paraphrased by Nirav [11:20]
• “I never would have had the courage to start this thing without Naval and Mike and our other co-founders...for me, the journey has always been more about who and then what.” — Nirav Tolia [12:23]
• “Any founder knows that...when things are tough, you are forcing yourself to pick yourself up off the ground and go into the office even though you were kicked the day before...” — Nirav Tolia [31:24]
• “At the beginning of a journey, when it’s brand new, it’s amazing—it’s just possibility.” — Nirav Tolia [31:58]
• “Don’t be afraid to do things manually at the beginning…building community...you have to do that one conversation at a time...” — Nirav Tolia [46:13]
• “I always wanted to be the person who could take it from day one to...day infinity. But what was driving me was wanting Nextdoor to be successful, because it felt like the best thing I could do professionally ever.” — Nirav Tolia [62:46]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Problem stats on knowing neighbors: [02:21]
• Yahoo and entrepreneurial beginnings: [05:49]–[11:20]
• Epinions origin and user-generated wisdom: [12:23]–[14:34]
• Surviving dot-com bust and CEO lessons: [14:56]–[17:04]
• Missteps, lawsuits, and fallouts: [18:19]–[22:27]
• Sabbatical and renewal in New York: [23:55]
• Fanbase’s rise and quick struggles: [26:01]–[30:36]
• “If” by Kipling and not giving up: [31:24]
• Birth of Nextdoor and user validation: [34:16]–[42:36]
• Neighborhood definition and manual scaling: [45:59]
• Early growth, moderation strategies: [47:19]–[52:45]
• Advertising and revenue delay: [55:28]–[57:50]
• Burnout and transitioning leadership: [60:02]–[62:16]
• Italian sojourn and Nextdoor’s IPO: [64:01]–[65:39]
• Return as CEO in 2024: [65:57]
• New vision: making Nextdoor essential: [68:13]–[72:29]
• Reflections on luck and the journey: [73:36]

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Tone and Style

The conversation is candid, direct, and insightful—Tolia is open about vulnerability, failure, friendship, and the deeply iterative nature of building enduring technology platforms. Guy Raz asks probing, empathetic questions, maintaining a warm and thoughtful tone throughout.

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For Listeners Who Haven’t Tuned In

This episode provides a sweeping look at the realities of entrepreneurship—heartbreak, chance, grit, transformative learning, and renewed passion—through the lens of someone who has built (and rebuilt) a major digital platform. If you’re interested in the human stories behind global tech brands and what it means to bet (and re-bet) your life on an idea, this is a must-listen.

Transcript

[Guy Raz]

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[Nirav Tolia]

When we started nextdoor twenty ten the pew report on community in america said thirty percent of americans could not name a single neighbor by name so thirty percent of our potential audience doesn't know any of their neighbors even if they want to invite them we knew from the very beginning this was going to take more dedication more resilience more patience and in many ways we kind of wore that as a badge of honor because we knew that it would scare away the vast majority of competitors.

[Guy Raz]

Welcome to how i built this a show about innovators entrepreneurs idealists and the stories behind the movements they built.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I'M guy raz.

[Guy Raz]

And on the show today how the founders of nextdoor wanted to turn physical neighbors into virtual ones with a network that's grown to nearly three hundred fifty.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Thousand neighborhoods around the world if you.

[Guy Raz]

Know most of your neighbors that's actually pretty rare as you just heard in that clip barely one out of three people in america know most of the people who live around them and that number has gone down significantly over the past thirty years so when nirv tolia.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And his co founders decided to start.

[Guy Raz]

Nextdoor back in twenty ten it was with that trend in mind they wanted to build real world communities online that brought neighbors together to share tips and recommendations and local events but scaling that vision was anything but easy it started with a single neighbor sending a physical postcard then another and another and then came the questions how do you get people to trust the platform how do you get them to keep coming back and eventually how do you make money off of this before nextdoor nirav had already taken some pretty big swings he left yahoo in the late nineties when it was one of the hottest tech companies in the world he co launched epinions which was kind of an early version of yelp and then fanbase an almanac for sports fans that completely failed but that failure it set him on the path to nextdoor and as you'll hear nextdoor was always the company nirov was most passionate about but even passion didn't make the journey easy it took years before the business earned any revenue it and internal tensions grew so in twenty eighteen nirav stepped down as ceo six years later he's back convinced that nextdoor had never reached its full potential and now he's rebranding the company and trying to restore its relevance but he faces some pretty big challenges years of financial losses and a stock price down nearly ninety percent from its peak and nirav will talk about how he plans to turn the business around but for now nirav's story starts in odessa texas in the nineteen seventies and eighties his parents were both physicians who'd immigrated from india and when nirav got to stanford he thought he might become a doctor as well but then he got hooked on the early internet and in the mid nineteen nineties he left stanford and got his first job in tech i.

[Nirav Tolia]

Ultimately stumbled upon this thing called yahoo which in the early days of the internet was the guide to all the websites that existed online and it was started by a couple of stanford grad students in a trailer on campus and so yes ultimately i was able to meet them join there as an early employee you know the funny story is there happens to be a chocolate milk company called yoohoo and true story i think my parents believed for the first few weeks when i was working at yahoo that i was working for a chocolate milk company interestingly in a series of months after i joined yahoo the dot com boom really ignited and at that point people were watching cnbc and they were seeing yahoo as a public company and they were seeing the stock double and triple and quadruple and i was part of that it was like i had won the lottery so it was not something i earned being at yahoo i was not qualified i don't think they had their pick of the best candidates back then because it was such an unorthodox job choice and it.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Was magical and from what i read i mean your first kind of work at yahoo i mean it was basically a version of like data entry like you were physically literally categorizing websites into.

[Nirav Tolia]

A database it was marketed much better than data entry and the job was actually pretty cool it was called being a yahoo surfer so at that time and i was employee eighty four at yahoo so there weren't that many people there we would go and surf the web and we would get submissions into the yahoo directory which we were responsible for reading and categorizing and then i would say the true job was more like being a librarian but it was way cooler we would joke can you believe they're paying us to surf the web every single day and so again it was the break of a lifetime and that paved the way for everything that's happened since one of the interesting.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Things about your time there was i mean clearly you were you are ambitious and you started this kind of informal like monthly meetup in the late nineties called round zero and i guess the idea was just to find like minded young people in working in tech who had dreams of building their own thing and you were one of them even though you were at yahoo and this became like a kind of a really hot ticket right like people really wanted to come to these meetups and i think like larry page and reid hoffman people who years later would become known for linkedin and obviously google like lots of people before they were known were coming to these monthly meetups tell me about that well when i was at.

[Nirav Tolia]

Yahoo i realized something really striking as fortunate as i was to be there the thing that was gnawing at me was i'm not actually building what's here and so then you start thinking okay well what else can i do because this is a great job but you know i'm a young person and i want to create my own yahoo but that was a really scary thought because who would be stupid enough to leave yahoo to start a new company and so the way that i decided to de risk that is i started talking to people first one of my colleagues at yahoo and we would talk together about our dreams of being entrepreneurs and when we got together for dinner ultimately in about six months we realized we were onto something because entrepreneurs need community they're helping each other whether it's intellectually helping each other think through whether or not they should start certain companies or emotionally helping each other or just hiring each other and this thing did turn into a pretty big organization and so we picked this name round zero that's really about entrepreneurs coming together before they go and get round one financing yeah we then incorporated it as a nonprofit we got some sponsors and yes reid hoffman larry page many of the other stars of today were just attendees at.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Round zero i imagine that that experience kind of being around other people who had dreams and ideas and ambitions start to shape your own or start to kind of push you in that direction and in nineteen ninety nine so roughly two and a half three years after you join you decide to leave yahoo to start your own company to co found a company with some other smart people including naval ravikant who's now a pretty well known investor and podcaster and others who are involved tell me a little bit about it's kind of crazy in one sense because you could have just stayed at yahoo and just with your stock options alone you probably could have been worth fifty plus million dollars but you left i think you forfeited ten million dollars in stock options at.

[Nirav Tolia]

That point you know it always depends on where the stock is right so ultimately depending on when i would have sold it would have been some number of millions of dollars but that wasn't ever part of the consideration i always wanted to start something and i was crazy enough to think maybe i can create my own yahoo and i remember at my goodbye party from yahoo because i was one of the first people who left no one was leaving yahoo.

[Guy Raz]

People were banging the doors to come.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Into yahoo one hundred percent and so.

[Nirav Tolia]

Jerry yang the founder of yahoo is at my going away party it was so nice of him to stop by and he came up to me and he said you know i'm wondering why are you leaving because you know you got a great opportunity here and you're doing good work and we're doing so many exciting things and the company's on an amazing track and i said jerry when i walk into the office every day and i look around and i think about what you built i would love to do the same thing like i would love to build a yahoo myself and he was dead quiet and he kind of looked at me and jerry's got a bit of a sarcastic sense of humor he's a great guy but he will definitely shoot you straight and he looked at me right in the eyes and he said you're a lot less intelligent than i thought you were do you have any idea how hard it is to build something like yahoo well you're about to find out.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Okay so you leave yahoo to start this new thing called epinions and tell me how that came about how did.

[Nirav Tolia]

That happen yes i mean at round zero i had met several people who ultimately became my co founders of epinions and one of them is naval ravikant who's gone on to incredible success and numerous other co founders eddie pinions have gone on to do amazing things and i can't imagine how difficult and lonely it is to start a company by oneself i never would have the courage to start this thing without naval and mike and guha and our other co founder dion and opinions was naval's idea and i wouldn't have jumped if it weren't for those other folks and so for me the journey has always been more about who and then what all.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Right so there's this idea that naval has and basically if i understand it correctly it was supposed to be like sort of user generated review site for everything not like yelp which is mainly sort of services but this is going.

[Guy Raz]

To be for products anything you could.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Get expertise from anybody and it would be gathered at this site is that a fair description yeah naval had this.

[Nirav Tolia]

Great expression nobody is smarter than everybody and so way back we would make purchasing decisions based on periodicals like consumer reports yeah we would make our purchasing decisions or our decisions around where we wanted to travel or how we wanted to spend our time we would make really important decisions based on these so called experts and naval had this idea that expertise is distributed can you create a place where people can submit their opinions on a wide range of things products services experiences and then you put in certain mechanisms that will ensure that the best opinions float to the top and the worst opinions sink to the bottom you will get the most valuable database of information that exists and it's freely available online and that idea and that notion i don't think opinions was the first but it was one of the first and it was certainly one of the first mainstream examples of user generated content and online community and you.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Launched you guys raised some money but.

[Guy Raz]

I think not that long after you.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Launch you get the dot com crash right and you guys survived it but tell me before we get into what happened what was the business model did.

[Guy Raz]

You have a business model how were.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You going to make money on people writing reviews we certainly had a business.

[Nirav Tolia]

Model and that was the same business model that most of the experts at the time had when they would publish content as well and that's advertising yeah and so it was going to be a free service and if we had enough eyeballs we were going to monetize now this was something that was very familiar to me because i'd been at yahoo this was not a far fetched thing and so opinions yes we launched in i think we started the company in april of nineteen ninety nine we launched a couple of months later and i would say about a year to the day after we launched the dot com bust started and so all around us companies are going out of business it was incredibly difficult and we almost ran out of money ourselves we lost most of the employees i think we probably were up over a hundred employees we went down to twenty employees at some point many of the co founders left and without a doubt the failure or imminent failure of something was the fulcrum for really learning about what it might take to survive why did you.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Stay on i mean as things started to really collapse you know there there were other opportunities you could pursue but why did you have a feeling because i think you guys had to had massive layoffs i mean you were weeks away from folding you had to beg investors for money and i'm assuming it was around this time that you also become the ceo of the company yeah.

[Nirav Tolia]

All of those things sound bad laying people off and begging for money and being weeks away from shutting down the lights if they sound bad imagine how they feel and i became the permanent ceo probably less because i deserved the role and more because in the middle of the dot com bus we had no chance of hiring someone who could be a real ceo what did you.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Do i mean aside from get some emergency funding once the you know the crisis kind of begins to subside what.

[Guy Raz]

Were you doing to try and salvage.

[Nirav Tolia]

It well you know around that time i won another lottery which is one of my investors benchmark capital general partner bill gurley who i've worked with for many years decades who i think the world of and he gave me the opportunity to coached by someone who'd been the ceo of a real public company intuit there was a guy named bill campbell and bill c coach as we call him became my mentor and it wasn't just for me it was for our entire management team because you know i was not the reason that opinions ultimately survived it was all of those people and so slowly but surely we grinded our way to being break even to being profitable we merged with another private company we renamed the entire thing shopping dot com and believe it or not shopping dot com ultimately went public had a bit of a mixed track record but ultimately was bought by ebay for i think about six hundred twenty six hundred thirty million so not a terrible outcome but when we think about our original dreams we wanted to build something like yahoo which at the time was one hundred billion dollar company but when we think about almost dying it's very improbable that we ended where we.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Did yeah all right so around this time this happens in two thousand four you resigned you stepped down but in a press release that the company sent out they said you know we became aware of that mister tolia had misrepresented his background tell me about that i mean you were in your early thirties and what happened what did you well.

[Nirav Tolia]

Look i think there are always things that we do that we wish we didn't right there are times when we have to pay for those mistakes and sometimes we don't right i mean this was a case of me having to pay for it when you are a company that wants to go public you want to be as unencumbered by controversy as possible right and the best thing for me to do at that point was to step away now did i have a choice no not really i mean they kind of asked me nicely to do it i understood that it was the right thing to do but yeah i mean it was devastating for me on a number of levels one is you know you don't want to publicly fail so that's one piece of it the second piece of it is i loved my job i loved working with those people i loved trying to solve that problem and so when you lose that opportunity and that's the hardest.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Thing yeah i think one of the things that they that they said was that you had you had claimed you had a degree from stanford which you didn't because you hadn't graduated which i don't think is a big deal you went there you just dropped out early which today is a badge of honor.

[Nirav Tolia]

I did i did actually get my degree at stanford you did but anyway.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You did eventually get it right yeah yeah yeah and then i guess that you had worked at mckinsey and maybe.

[Guy Raz]

You didn't and i'm just curious i.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Don'T want to put you on the spot and bring this up again because it's we all make mistakes we all do things like this especially when we're younger do you think that that some of that just came from a culture and environment that you were around where people were like sort of i don't know fake it till you make it or become it i don't know i'm.

[Nirav Tolia]

Just no look i don't think there's ever any value in justifying things based on the environment or based on some other thing i think the best thing to do is to acknowledge mistakes to learn from them and then to move forward and that's something that's not easy.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

To do one of the fallouts of the merger was a lawsuit that your former co founders who you speak about with reverence and respect naval and the others they had left the company they were not involved but they felt like the merger basically i guess their shares went down to nothing they were worthless and so they felt like they were misled with the merger because they had to approve it and all these things and so they filed a lawsuit against.

[Guy Raz]

The investors you were named in this.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Lawsuit tell me about how that i mean i imagine just on a personal level that massively impacted your relationship with those other co founders well you're definitely.

[Nirav Tolia]

Taking me down a trip of memory lane that you know i've tried to.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Avoid i'm sure i'm sure because we don't want to get most people don't want to we want to avoid pain i'm the same way but we are talking about your life and it's part of it and i think no look.

[Nirav Tolia]

This was twenty years ago and it is for me even today a huge bummer that those relationships that i had were affected by this outcome and and so i've tried over the years to put myself in their shoes it took friendships and it fractured them and they've.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Never been repaired never been repaired to this day twenty plus years later that's.

[Nirav Tolia]

Unfortunate right i doubt very much given the incredible success that they've had that they're thinking about this ever right and that's good and this is not something i think about on a daily basis right but when i go back and think about it yeah those were people that were really important to me it.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Was eventually settled again about twenty years ago but it's gotta be a low point i mean there's a lawsuit you're out of a job as ceo i'm sorry to bring you back to this place but i mean i imagine that there at moments in your head you might have thought i'm done i'm finished i'm not i don't have what am i going to do with the rest of my career i don't know what's going to happen next without a doubt.

[Nirav Tolia]

All those things go through your mind and you know i was definitely in a situation where you get so cooked as a founder like being in the tunnel you haven't had the opportunity to take a step back and say hey what does all this stuff mean what have i learned like am i qualified to be a ceo am i a good founder is that the thing i should be doing should i go work for someone else right and so leaving while it was incredibly painful also gave me the opportunity to do a lot of self reflection one of the hardest things about being a founder in my opinion is you never have the space to really absorb the greater lessons you're just in motion and so to stop for a second and have a little bit of reflection it was actually quite.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Valuable for me so you didn't just leave you moved you left san francisco the bay area moved to new york city after this went down i think.

[Nirav Tolia]

It was a year later it was a year later i decided that i wanted to take the opportunity to live in a place that i always wanted to live in had visited new york and i was so enamored with the city that i thought to myself gosh i mean maybe i'll just live here for a year and for me it was always the plan of i'm just gonna go for a year and just see what it's like and i didn't know what the professional opportunities in new york were now ultimately when i was there i met entrepreneurs and i started doing some consulting and i started doing some investing and i started realizing that i was missing being part of the flow and i called up bill gurley who i talked about before from benchmark and he said something really interesting he said okay well you want to start a company in new york all right well but let me just ask you a question since you're in new york how many billion dollar consumer internet companies are there in new york and at the time the answer was zero and so what he was really saying is look if you really want to optimize the probability of success you should probably move back to san francisco and so when it got to be time to get serious about starting a new company i was lucky enough to have one of my first colleagues from opinions a woman named sarah leary we went and joined benchmark as entrepreneurs in residents together with the intent of starting a new company but as part of that i moved back to silicon valley but and i highly encourage entrepreneurs who are coming off of one journey to take a sabbatical because i learned some of my greatest lessons in new york they have nothing to do with business right but.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

About life all right you had had this experience with epinions and i guess while you're at an entrepreneur in residence for benchmark you guys start to talk about a new idea that would become basically a database of every college and.

[Guy Raz]

Professional athlete tell me a bit about.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

How this idea came about how did you start to come up with this idea for what would become fan base.

[Nirav Tolia]

So we really felt that we knew we wanted to do something in the areas of user generated content and online.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Community because you had that experience already.

[Nirav Tolia]

We were people who had spent more time thinking about how to solve some of those problems than anyone else and so we had competitive advantage right and i had grown up in a place odessa texas where the idea of sports and team particularly around football you know the book friday night lights that was written about the football team in my high school when i was a junior and then the third piece was going and trying to find an area that we could build a successful business and a user generated content and online community version of of espn so espn was the old guard espn had all of the professionals that were writing about these things but where was the fan's perspective.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So you get together and you manage to convince a pretty top google engineer to come join you prakash had also.

[Nirav Tolia]

Been eddie pinions and so we were getting the band back together and it's john akaram yeah he had gone to google and was one of the early engineers on google maps but he had been someone that we had known sarah and i had known and had worked with for many many years prior to him leaving google all right so you.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Guys get together with this idea to start a fan website like the espn but for fans but without a clear vision for what exactly it was going to be and by the way let.

[Nirav Tolia]

Me just say one thing i don't think that it's a fatal flaw to not have the clearest vision because there is no doubt the vision will change what happened to us is that we had many different visions and when none of them worked we didn't really fall back on one of them and try to force it and so sometimes having too much vision can be a problem right because you don't stick to the simple things and we couldn't ultimately find enough success in the simple things but you know when fanbase launched in a matter of months i think we had ten million users or something crazy like that so there was a lot of usage but it just never clicked you.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Launched in august of two thousand nine you've got rosters and scores on twenty one thousand teams so college and professional teams because you guys had raised a little bit of money to do this and as you say i mean within a couple of months you had over ten million users which is that sounds great but but there was a problem right and the problem was what what was the main problem well the users.

[Nirav Tolia]

Would come in and then they wouldn't stick around so maybe they would come again maybe they would come one more time but then they didn't come back.

[Guy Raz]

And they didn't contribute we had some.

[Nirav Tolia]

Contributors you know most of these contributor communities guy of one hundred users who visit you only need one to contribute so think about youtube ninety nine point nine percent of the users of youtube have never uploaded anything they've never contributed anything besides their viewing hours right so it wasn't so much i would say actually interesting learning from that was we probably got the contributor side right what they contributed though was not resonating strongly enough with people who were looking for information and part of the reason at that point youtube was starting to ascend and as a result all of the holders of professional content began to protect their licenses much more aggressively and so what happened very quickly for fan base is if a michael jordan fan came and said here are my three favorite dunks of michael jordan of all time and i'm going to upload them because i think it's kind of cool if you're a jordan fan you want to come and see them as well we knew at that point if we posted those things we didn't own the rights.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Yeah you couldn't and we could get.

[Nirav Tolia]

Sued out of existence right so that then led us to pivot a little bit more towards high school and what we realized about high school was it's just not nearly as big a business as professional sports and so when professional sports was off the table it made it very difficult for us to think about building a thriving business so how.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Quickly after launch did it become clear to you that you could not make.

[Nirav Tolia]

This work it was pretty quick after the launch and then i think for probably the next six months we tried everything to get this thing to ignite again and you know when you try everything as an internet company it means you change the user interface you think about developing a mobile app if you have a web app you think about activating a different community you think i mean you think about every idea that you possibly can and none of those.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Worked so you come to the conclusion pretty quickly that this is not salvageable and i guess you you know you'd raise some money you went to your investor bill gurley again and said hey this isn't working and i think your idea was return the money to the investors and fold this thing up yeah.

[Nirav Tolia]

And look you said you came to the conclusion pretty quickly any founder knows that you're talking about dog years for every year of being a founder right and when things are going well the time flies by but when things are tough you are forcing yourself to pick yourself up off the ground and go into the office even though you were kicked the day before and so when i say for six months we came into the office every single day knowing that what we were working on had no future but we were going to try to change it and so it was a very very challenging time and so in early twenty ten we say we've kind of tried everything here maybe we give the money back because most of it's still intact and we go take the summer off and then we think about what's next so i have a meeting with bill gurley and so i start to give him my narrative of gosh we've tried everything and i really wish this could have worked and i feel so bad you took a chance on us and he slides over a piece of paper and says read this and i look at it and it's a poem actually one of my favorite poems he probably didn't know that but it's if by rudyard kipling and it was a very powerful way for him to say i don't think you can give up and it was surprising because i didn't have a contingency idea and so i took the poem back to my co founders and i said here's what bill said and bill followed by saying i believe in the team come up with a new idea see if you can do it and if so we'll back it and so when you finally have the courage to say this didn't work i'm shutting it down to then find the activation energy to say actually we're not shutting it down we're going to start from scratch because you know the energy you have at the beginning of a journey when it's brand new it's amazing it's just possibility so the three of us said okay we're going to try to come up with a new idea but it's not like you can schedule a meeting ten am come up with billion dollar idea i mean that's not the way these things work at least in my experience but we met we crowdsourced ideas from each other prakash in particular said as the person writing the majority of the code he said i'm sitting on my hands and not writing a line of code until you can prove to me with user feedback that whatever idea we have is something that's worth building so.

[Guy Raz's Family Member]

Tell me about some of the ideas.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

That you started to talk about it's.

[Nirav Tolia]

Funny there was an idea called need feed and it was this idea that we're all looking at news feeds these days would you create a feed where people say i need advice on this particular thing i need to be prepped for this particular meeting i need to find a trusty plumber that was one of the ideas we probably had dozens of bad ideas and ultimately there was this one idea and it wasn't called nextdoor at the time it was called neighborly and the idea is can we create the next generation of a neighborhood message board and it'll look like a newsfeed it'll look like a social network it'll be more fully featured and we felt like local was an opportunity that had largely been ignored but coming off of the failure fan base it's not like i thought of myself or my co founders as we're awesome at coming up with ideas the next idea we're going to come up with is going to be a winner i think if anything we were scared we were anxious what if this turns out just like fanbase what if this also doesn't have legs what if we put everything that we have into this thing and it ends up being a waste of time and so in the moment it was very scary.

[Guy Raz]

When we come back in just a moment how do you turn a bunch of neighbors into a new online community one postcard at a time stay with us i'm guy raz and.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You'Re listening to how i built this.

[Guy Raz]

I love traveling with my family we.

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Did an awesome trip this summer and we discovered so many cool things and one of the things that made the trip so special were the airbnb experiences we did immersive tours cooking classes a chance to get coffee with a world class barista even a meetup with a renowned chef a i had so much fun on those experiences that i decided to host my own airbnb original experience in san francisco it's called the reinvention lab and it's designed to help you think about how to unlock your next big move in your career or even in your life i'll help you discover your own story in ways i do on this show with my guests and attendees will get a chance to take.

[Guy Raz]

A deep deeper dive with me on.

[Guy Raz's Family Member]

So many lessons i've learned from this show lessons that have transformed how i work and think about the future so come join me in san francisco and.

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Take your idea to the next level.

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To learn more about my airbnb original experience sign up for an airbnb account.

[Guy Raz]

And head to airbnb dot com guy.

[Guy Raz's Family Member]

And i'm excited to see you there.

[Guy Raz]

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[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

May vary.

[Guy Raz]

Hey welcome back to how.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I built this i'm guy raz so it's the summer of twenty ten and nirof and his co founders decide to ditch fan base in order to work on a totally new concept and eventually.

[Guy Raz]

They land on the idea of a digital version of a neighborhood bulletin board.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Like the kind you'd see at a.

[Nirav Tolia]

Local hardware store we ended up building this little prototype it was drawn initially meaning hand drawn shown to neighbors and almost from the beginning they resonated with this concept that i do want to know my neighbors i do want to know what's going on around me i don't have an easy way to do that today so there's facebook for our friends there's linkedin for our colleagues there's twitter for people whom we find interesting but there was no network comprised of what we believed was one of the most important communities of them all and that was the people who live right next door now we didn't even have the name next door at that point right it was more about i think one of our co founders adam ginsberg is his name he lived in an area in san francisco i'm trying to remember the name of the neighborhood now but they had a listserv they had a little news group that they were using to communicate and he would show us the kinds of conversations and it was about trying to fix potholes and it was about letting people know if there was construction and it was about recommending service providers and it was actually.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Very valuable so basically you start to test this out and what gives you confidence that this was going to work what kind of data did you gather or feedback did you get where you thought okay let's do this let's pursue.

[Nirav Tolia]

This well certainly we had a strong intuition having built products in the past and certainly having failed at building products that this felt different which is to say when you do user testing people are excited i mean there was a time when we were changing servers and so we went down for a couple of hours and we got tons of incoming messages from our users saying what happened what happened to this thing that i'm using it's important to me did you take it down is there a site outage right and it wasn't even called anything at that time it was just called a neighbor site wasn't called nextdoor it wasn't professional right but that's a very strong sign so there was strong user feedback and then there was another person that came on we were very lucky to have him on the board as well rich barton the creator of expedia and then more recently zillow and i remember pitching him many of the ideas we had and then showing him the idea that became next door and he said that's the right one and then sarah and i said to him okay well are you so passionate about this that you would join our board he said yeah i'm passionate about this one and so we had kind of the investor viewpoint we had the user viewpoint and then we had our.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Own intuition and you had a little bit of money from the previous venture that was you just kind of carried over from fanbase so fanbase essentially becomes.

[Guy Raz]

Next door i mean this is still.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I guess i should mention twenty ten twenty eleven it's still a more let's say innocent time in the history of the internet so some of the things that user generated companies deal with now including nextdoor were not quite as much of a problem back then but how for example were you going to make sure that people really lived in the neighborhoods that they were who they were.

[Nirav Tolia]

So over and over again what we heard is well i need to make sure that the people on this thing are my actual neighbors and so that led us to many innovations including looking at a map breaking the map down into specific homes and then we had to verify that they lived there and so we would do very old school things like send them a printed postcard via us mail with a code and you would have to enter the code to verify your address and so in the early days i mean look we weren't thinking what's going to happen when we have one hundred million users i mean that's a pretty expensive postcard bill yeah but we had one hundred users five hundred users a thousand users right but we built it with quality from the very beginning because that's what the neighbors asked for and we felt like we'll solve the scalability issue later how.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

How were you thinking about making sure that the content was appropriate you know even if it's just local people neighbors with their real names i mean they.

[Guy Raz]

Can still post a bunch of kooky.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Stuff right i mean they can still.

[Guy Raz]

Go on rants they can i mean.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

All kinds of things could happen was.

[Guy Raz]

There any way for you to prevent.

[Nirav Tolia]

That i think about it less as prevention and i think about it more as you build the system and the reference of the system with high quality content because if you see high quality content you just assume this is a place for high quality content it's a little bit like if you go outside and you see trash on the ground you might actually throw something on the ground too if you go outside and it's perfectly manicured you're going to feel really bad about throwing a little trash there right so that was a very important decision the other thing we did is every single neighborhood had a founding member and had a series of leads and it was their responsibility to ensure that the conversation was very relevant and of the neighborhood there are neighborhoods that are a little more fractious and they discuss things in a little bit more of a fractious way and there are neighborhoods that are much more homogenous where politeness is the cultural custom of the neighborhood we had three hundred thirty five thousand distinct neighborhoods that use nextdoor and we needed to build a system that would be flexible enough that all of those neighborhoods could feel authentic to themselves.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So in that first kind of year of building it out before you launched how did you sort of determine what constituted a neighborhood i mean a neighborhood in the middle of nebraska is four very different i mean houses can be two three miles apart compared with a neighborhood in you know in san francisco.

[Nirav Tolia]

Every single neighborhood boundary was something that was drawn in consultation with someone who lived there we asked our members and then we built a tool i mean in the early days we sarah my co founder and other co founders maybe prakash as well would be looking at maps taking a sharpie and drawing a polygon around areas to ensure that we were getting the user feedback and then baking that into the code it kind of bears mentioning that this idea that it's okay to do unscalable things initially and so many young entrepreneurs particularly technology ones are always thinking well i can't do that that's manual that'll never scale worry about solving the scalability problem after you have product market fit doing manual things to get product market fit is perfectly fine and in fact i would say the number one learning from user generated content and online communities the number one learning don't be afraid to do things manually at the beginning because it's a people business building community and you can't do that at scale you have to do that one conversation at a time so most of these challenges what do you want to talk about what's the shape of your neighborhood what should the interface look like those are all things that we would take to the.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Neighbors how many people did you have before you launched how many people did.

[Nirav Tolia]

You hire it wasn't that many i mean i think when you're experienced enough to have laid off people and to have been part of a company that failed i think in general we were very cautious about hiring people about spending money i love this old expression in silicon valley more companies die of indigestion than starvation yeah i think we probably had fifty people or so when we launched but the idea came to us in the summer of twenty ten we didn't actually launch until the fall of twenty eleven and that is not because it took us a year to build the thing it was more because we wanted to be sure before we uncloaked publicly we wanted to be sure that we were onto something and when we launched nationally we had one hundred and seventy six neighborhoods using nextdoor and i remember a board meeting where one of the board members said okay you got one hundred seventy six neighborhoods how many neighborhoods do you think there are overall in the us of course no one knows the answer right but we said i don't know it's probably like a couple hundred thousand maybe right and the board member said okay so if it's taken you a year to do one hundred seventy six it's going to take us one hundred years to get all the neighborhoods right but that was kind of a very daunting challenge but you know one hundred seventy six then as soon as we launched though people were starting their neighborhoods so my parents started their neighborhood in odessa texas my brother started his neighborhood in dallas my sister in law started her neighborhood in san diego my brother in law started his neighborhood in southern california so very quickly very soon thereafter we had all fifty.

[Guy Raz]

States and what were you what were.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

The guidelines you were giving people what were you encouraging people to post on because one of the challenges you had a fan base was the quality of the content wasn't that great right that was the challenge you know the quality.

[Nirav Tolia]

Of content was not the real challenge with nextdoor the challenge was people don't know their neighbors and so how do we get people to join nextdoor how do you hear about it you don't bump up against the content your neighbors can't invite you because they don't know who you are and so that led to a lot of different innovations including we would pay for them to send postcard invitations to their neighbors that would say hey i'm guy i'm your neighbor in this neighborhood and i really want you to join this thing that we started called next door so and so and please join here's a code all.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Right so you have this idea right and you're ready to launch it in october of twenty eleven but you know from fan base that getting enough users.

[Guy Raz]

Isn'T enough and in this case you.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Needed not just the users but you needed them to stay there and to really participate in the site in some ways but i'm assuming back then there.

[Guy Raz]

Wasn'T a whole lot of pressure to.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Generate revenue it was more about getting users and gathering them into the site.

[Nirav Tolia]

You know there's always pressure to have a business model however when you choose an indirect business model and an indirect business model is when you're not asking your primary users to pay you directly you are making money indirectly through advertising or through some other means when you're building that kind of business it's not a simultaneous you attract the user and you attract the advertiser at the same time it's a sequential build so i don't want anyone listening to think that we started next door thinking oh it doesn't matter how we're going to make money or when we're going to make money or you know why we're going to make money no no we wanted to build a successful business on day one but we had articulated a vision where the reason advertisers would care about advertising on nextdoor is because there were vibrant communities and community audiences and so on fanbase a bunch of people showed up on day one and by day two it was slightly less people by day three it was less and then that just kept happening on nextdoor it was exactly the inverse on day one hardly anyone showed up we just had to find the neighborhood the founding member and the lead but then those people would invite two or three people and those people would invite two or three people and two weeks later there would be a couple dozen but when we started nextdoor twenty ten the pew report on community in america said thirty percent of americans could not name a single neighbor by name so thirty percent of our potential audience doesn't know any of their neighbors even if they want to invite them and so this was we knew from the very beginning this was going to take more dedication more resilience more patience and in many ways we kind of wore that as a badge of honor because we knew that it would scare away the vast majority of.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Competitors one of the things that could have created problems and from time to time did but if had it been sort of the dominant feature of the site would be if somebody really just some neighbors decided to really kind of just use it as a platform for their political views right if it just devolved into let's say misinformation people were.

[Guy Raz]

Saying things about neighbors that weren't true.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

For example like how did you think about trying to control for that possibility because that could have had an impact on the credibility and then the business.

[Nirav Tolia]

Yeah it's a great question so ultimately we created neighborhood guidelines you can't discuss national politics if you do you can get reprimanded right you can get disciplined right a much harder one is when someone wants to discuss something that the local government's doing and it's relevant to the community but other people are like you know what i don't care i i don't want to hear this right and so the real antidote in today's world is personalization it's this idea that over time we are smart enough using technology and it's primarily machine learning to learn here are the people and the topics that guy wants to hear from and if he doesn't want to hear about what's happening at city hall that's okay we don't have to silence the entire neighborhood because there are people in the neighborhood who do want to have that conversation so it's much more sophisticated today at our scale and with the technologies that we have in place but in those early days our only real arbiter was the people we had chosen to start those neighborhoods and now it's algorithmic basically now it's algorithmic but it's not algorithmic in a bad way it's algorithmic in that based on your behaviors we show you more of the things you like and less of the things that you don't like it just so happens though that we all have different we have different tastes i'll give you an example i get a lot of feedback these days on nextdoor that there are too many posts about lost dogs.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

A lot of posts on lost dogs i'm actually looking at mine here in marin county and there are a lot of lost dogs and cats which tugs at my heart because i have dogs.

[Nirav Tolia]

And cats so you said exactly the thing that i was gonna say right which is before i had a dog i didn't wanna see any lost dog postings yeah two years ago we got a dog if i lost my dog.

[Guy Raz]

Oh my god it would be like.

[Nirav Tolia]

Losing a family member right yeah and so that has changed my perspective completely you know another example that is maybe a little bit more nuanced but still makes sense is if you're in a neighborhood and they're having a conversation about someplace to take the kids for ice cream that's a great conversation if you have children if you don't have children you don't care you want to have the conversation about where to get an after dinner drink right so being able to facilitate those things in the same neighborhoods that's got to be part of what makes nextdoor special because we're not robots and we gotta figure out a way to unite around common things and then let all those people express themselves in different ways and still find feel like nextdoor is for them tell me.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

About so from what i gather from what i've read it seems like the first four maybe five years you didn't have any revenue coming in i mean it was there was no paid advertising there was no and it really was only in like twenty fifteen when you start to experiment with having like local businesses set up pages and start to advertise tell me about why you waited so long before you started to experiment.

[Nirav Tolia]

With ads it's a really hard thing to generate revenue but in our case it's much harder to think about establishing ubiquity of all neighborhoods and having all of those neighborhoods be vibrant and as a startup i think it's very difficult to work on multiple hard problems at the same time and so it's not that we didn't feel working on the advertising product was important it's that we were so consumed certainly in the first five years and even today to be honest with trying to create the most vibrant atmosphere for people who want to be part of their local community that we didn't invest enough time on the advertising side and as i listened to your question i think we probably made a mistake not thinking about how to bring small businesses into the conversation from the beginning now because i'm pretty frugal and because the company was successful we could raise money we were spending zero on marketing we were not hiring hundreds and thousands of people i think we were sub two hundred employees we had one office we were kind of slow and steady but i've been reading this book since coming back to nextdoor called the founder's mentality and one of the principles in the founder's mentality is you have to innovate and execute at the same time you know some people will say this is my innovation phase and then some people will say well this is our execution phase we're not innovating right now the books made me think gosh you know you got to figure out the muscle so that you can do both you may be sixty four forty seventy thirty something like that but you can't be one hundred zero and i do believe now that from the beginning if we'd involved small businesses it would have created a more vibrant community.

[Guy Raz]

When we come back in just a moment nirav has the conversation with his board of directors that every founder ceo.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Is afraid of stay with us i'm guy raz and you're listening to how.

[Guy Raz]

I built this foreign.

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[Guy Raz]

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[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I built this i'm guy raz so.

[Guy Raz]

By twenty eighteen nextdoor is in about two hundred thousand neighborhoods including internationally and after a few rounds of fundraising the company has reached a valuation of over a billion dollars but even though the future for nextdoor looks limitless nirav realizes.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

That his ability as a leader is.

[Nirav Tolia]

Not i was getting burned out i was tired i was not operating at maximum intellectual capability or emotional capability so an intellectual capability is all right i know how to start companies now this company's got two hundred people we still haven't really figured out revenue what's going.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

On was that making you feel stressed that you weren't making a whole lot of money you weren't bringing a lot.

[Nirav Tolia]

Of revenue look everything was making me feel stressed we're not growing fast enough we're not generating revenue our product isn't moving fast enough the quality of the experience isn't where we need it to be everything was making me stressed and it was the stress in my world that got in the way of seeing clearly thinking clearly and then on the emotional side the stress is where you're short with people so by twenty eighteen i think i would have been totally happy selling the company did you try.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Did you look around no no i.

[Nirav Tolia]

Mean you know bill campbell used to say this great expression you know companies are not sold they're bought and the idea is you don't go like putting a shingle out saying i'm selling my company you build something so great that someone wants to buy it but i definitely was not feeling fulfilled and as a result i was probably not fulfilling other people and it started to show up in the progress of the company and so i think the board felt at some point gosh has he plateaued because they didn't think that the opportunity had plateaued and so they have a conversation and in silicon valley's conversations they're kind of interesting they start with hey have you ever thought of bringing on a ceo and you can be the chairman and you're the founder and you have the great idea ideas but you need someone who's got the operational rigor and discipline and understands what scalability is like right but you know what that conversation really means i mean what that conversation really means is it's time for a new leader and i knew in that moment that what they were saying was true and we hired a wonderful woman sarah fryer who's now the cfo of openai and you know i felt like she would be a great leader and by the end of twenty eighteen.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I was out yeah i'm curious about that time because i have to imagine that in twenty eighteen you're in your sort of mid to late forties and not old by any stretch of the imagination i'm sure i'm in my fifties but i mean did you feel like.

[Guy Raz]

At a crossroads like what am i.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Going to do next or maybe i just kind of go in a completely different direction with my life i mean what was going on in your mind.

[Nirav Tolia]

I have been through enough difficult transitions that i was one hundred percent focused on leaving in the best possible way yes of course from an ego standpoint it hurt like crazy i wanted to be the person who could take it from day one to you know day infinity i wanted to be the person to take the company public public but what was driving me was wanting next door to be successful because it felt like the best thing that i could do professionally ever so i didn't think oh the next thing i do is going to be bigger than next door right i thought to myself i love next door and so when it was clear that i wasn't going to be the person to take it to the next stage yeah that was a blow but honestly at that point i knew it was the right thing and i was going to make make it the.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Right thing all right so you step down as ceo but you stay on the board but over the next several years a lot happened right i mean the company did end up going public happened in twenty twenty one but in in your in your personal life you actually took your family and moved to italy for a few years tell me.

[Nirav Tolia]

What you did there i experienced my own personal renaissance i mean i was in the cradle of the renaissance and i think for me and my wife and three kids we were undergoing our own we were in italy for seven months and then covid hit so within a number of days we left everything in italy and we rushed back to san francisco within a series of weeks san francisco was shut down yeah and so then within a series of months covid had run through europe enough that there was some herd immunity and so we left san francisco that summer and went back to italy and did a second year there and during that year the border was shut down yeah but it was a magical time because it wasn't the tourist season that you experience in florence and rome and milan and venice it was real italy meanwhile at next door sarah's taken over she's building the company she's taken it public the company goes through a transition yes i'm paying attention i'm on the board i'm the chief chief cheerleader and at that time my wife and i decided that we weren't going to move the family back to san francisco we were going to move to dallas because i didn't have a job to get back to and she didn't have a job to get back to either we really wanted to be close to family and so yeah there was no anticipation expectation or even wildest dream that i would go back to next door because that was november of twenty one starting in january of twenty two the whole market went down and nextdoor went down as well and that ultimately led us to where.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I'M sitting today you return in the spring of twenty twenty four and you've now been there a little over a year tell me about the circumstances that brought you back first of all what was going on and then why did you agree to do it so the.

[Nirav Tolia]

Company had fallen into a place where there was a lot of adversity being a small cap stock there was a lot of adversity dealing with the bump of COVID that had then returned to normal there was a lot of adversity in managing a remote organization we definitely felt as a board this includes sarah that the company needed to go in a new direction and in particular we felt that that direction needed to be deeply steeped in a new product and we could have found someone external but that would have been very risky or you can bring the founder back and no i never thought about it i wouldn't have joined eleven boards i wouldn't have put my kids in school here in dallas i wouldn't have done any of those things but when the opportunity arose i love next door and i went to talk to my wife about it and she said i do feel that if you don't take this opportunity and next door fails at some point in the future you can ask yourself why didn't i do whatever i could to help it succeed and so from there with her blessing i jumped in and so i ultimately brought back my co founder sarah leary who we've talked about a little bit and was blessed that that she came back to join me and so we're both refounding or re founders of the company and sarah used to say let's go back and.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Finish the job i think calling it a challenge is not an understatement it is a challenge i mean it's a very well known brand it's a brand that lots of people like and even love but i mean you're looking at the same number that i'm looking at which is the only metric but the stock price is one one metric and it's at like you know as we speak today it's like a little over two bucks a share down from its high of you know thirteen dollars in twenty twenty one i know that you're focused on revamping relaunching creating a new kind of a new face of what nextdoor will be tell me a little bit about your plan to turn it into something bigger and different well the.

[Nirav Tolia]

Goal is to make it the essential local application and that's very ambitious essential means people are using it every day several times a day and today of our one hundred million verified neighbors twenty five million use nextdoor every week not even every day right so just based on the measurable numbers there's a lot that we can do and we don't think one hundred million is the ceiling and so yes i think it is a big challenge it was almost easier to not be the active ceo because when you're the former ceo people say oh i love the concept of nextdoor i believe in it but when you're the day to day ceo people say hey you know that idea that you pitched me on that's not what i see when i open up my app that isn't what it feels like it's few people complaining and it's some irrelevant postings about this and that right and so there was a gap there is a gap between the potential of nextdoor and the reality of the product today i also think no one has won local google hasn't meta hasn't apple hasn't amazon hasn't right why is that it's really hard and it's because it's incredibly difficult to get the same outcome from one locality to another but i think we can do it i think we can do it with a community centric approach but the product's gotta be way better and that's what we're trying to.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Do yeah i mean in a sense right and we'll talk about the evolution of what you're trying to do now and sort of the relaunch but you could have sort of gone head to head earlier with like angie's list or even what yelp did you know with.

[Guy Raz]

Because at the end of the day.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Neighbors trust neighbors right and if a neighbor's like oh your lawn looks great.

[Guy Raz]

Who did that oh my landscaping guy.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Is amazing i'll give you his number right that's the best way to find people to do work around your house or contractors whatever what babysitter do you use right and so i understand the impulse that you didn't want it to be like a marketplace you didn't want it to be like just people constantly selling but at the same time if done right it can actually be really valuable and useful for people i think.

[Nirav Tolia]

You'Re exactly right i mean the question of recommendations that neighbors make for how you would spend your money and how you would spend your time that's been thirty percent roughly of all the content on nextdoor since inception and we just launched the new nextdoor which for the first time brought in third party content all of our content historically has been from neighbors but now with the new nextdoor we have three thousand five hundred local publishers that are publishing fifty thousand articles a week and they're real journalists and that's really important in the same way what we haven't built and what we should have built which is angie's list and yelp and thumbtack and many others have done exceptionally well we haven't built the button after the conversation happens that says okay book this for me yeah okay okay make this appointment okay put me in touch with this babysitter because you know what we're realizing now particularly in a world of ai where most consumers are going to go to one place ask a question and everything's going to be taken care of behind the scenes it's not going to be you go to google you get fifteen links you click on all of them you hit back you keep searching you keep ultimately going from one place to another to another that's the old world the new world is you go one place you ask a question you get an answer and you act on it and so i think this is going to be a critical part of nextdoor's.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Evolution so i know that one of the things that you're focused on also is like real time alerts and public safety and emergency flooding or if there's a power outage and things so nextdoor could be sort of a repository for all that stuff if you could sort of look out in five years from now and it was the perfect sort of expression of what you want it to be what does it look like what is my experience like when i log into nextdoor you open the app.

[Nirav Tolia]

Several times every single day because you want to know the most important things that are going on around you and there is no easy way to know what's going on around you today do you know what's happening this weekend in your san francisco neighborhood do you know all the power outages as they occur do you know the next new restaurant that's coming in after that other restaurant closed it's the person who wants to bake fresh empanadas in my neighborhood and you can walk right over and buy one those things are what make neighborhoods feel like home why can't next door be the place where you continually discover those things over and over again nirav.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

When you think about the journey you took and where you are now sort of this kind of second chance to really do something cool and interesting with this thing that you co founded how much of where you are now do you attribute to the work you put in and the grind and how much do you think has to do with just being lucky at the right place at the right time it's all luck.

[Nirav Tolia]

I mean and the opportunities all emerged because of luck in timing and other people someone hired me at yahoo someone let me into stanford my parents paved the way for all of this stuff bill gurley supported me even when the chips were down sarah leary has been my partner for twenty five years these are people that they've made it all possible but when i've been given that opportunity i've done everything i can to ring the bell and most of the most successful people i've met it hasn't been just because of skill or just because of luck it's been some conflation of the two and that's kind of what makes it magical.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

That'S nirav tolia co founder and ceo of nextdoor hey.

[Guy Raz]

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Apps so you never miss a new episode of the show and if you're interested in insights ideas and lessons from.

[Guy Raz]

Some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs please sign up for my newsletter at guyraz dot com or on substack this episode was produced by casey herrmann with music composed by ramtin erabloui it was edited.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

By neva grant with research help from.

[Guy Raz]

Kathryn cipher our engineers were kwesi lee and jimmy keeley our production staff also includes alex chung sam paulson kerry thompson chris masini rommel wood andrea bruce and.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Elaine coates i'm guy raz and you've been listening to how i built this if you like how i built this.

[Guy Raz]

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