How Nextdoor Grew to 100M Neighbors + Why Founding CEO Nirav Tolia Returned Six Years Later
Show notes
Nirav Tolia is the co-founder and two-time CEO of Nextdoor. He started the company in 2011, stepped down as CEO in 2018, watched the company go public in 2021, and re-joined as CEO the summer of 2024. He also founded Epinions which IPO’d in 2004, and before that was an early employee at Yahoo. We go inside the decision to re-join the company after he thought he’d never come back, and how Nextdoor’s trying to act like a startup while running a public company. He also takes us back to the very early days of Nextdoor, the deliberate product decisions that made growth hard but led to 100M+ neighbors on the platform, the lessons learned operating his first company through the Dot Com Bubble, and what it was like being a guest shark on Shark Tank. For full show notes, visit: https://highlightai.com/share/d7bcd655-9b2f-47f7-a6e3-fdf3e109c97e Recommended Podcast: 🎙️Unpack Pricing Dive into the dark arts of SaaS pricing with Metronome CEO Scott Woody and tech leaders. Learn how strategic pricing drives explosive revenue growth in today's biggest companies like Snowflake, Cockroach Labs, Dropbox and more. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1765716600 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/38DK3W1Fq1xxQalhDSueFg Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (02:39) Leaving Nextdoor in 2018 (07:30) Coming back in 2024 (10:31) The importance of family in career decisions (17:37) Why you have to listen to learn (24:47) The Founders Mentality (26:45) “Develop and Deliver” (32:03) Local, the last remaining consumer opportunity (36:58) Why being a founder is so hard (39:21) Going to the high school from Friday Night Lights (42:07) What Nirav learned at Stanford (46:22) Working at Yahoo from $500m to $100B (49:37) Starting Epinions with Naval in 1999 (51:11) Operating through the Dot Com Bubble (56:34) How Bill Gurley’s challenge led to Nextdoor (58:16) Early product experimentation (01:05:19) Why early growth was so hard, and scaling to 100 million neighbors (01:10:10) The opportunity in local news (01:12:14) Being a Shark on Shark Tank Referenced: Nextdoor: https://nextdoor.com/ The Founder’s Mentality: https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Mentality-Overcome-Predictable-Crises/dp/1633691160 Follow Nirav: Twitter: https://x.com/niravtolia LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/niravtolia Follow Turner: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak Subscribe to get new episodes + transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/
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