Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global
Many of us don’t know our neighbors anymore — and Nirav Tolia wanted to change that. He walked away from millions in stock options at Yahoo and eventually co-founded Nextdoor, the hyperlocal social network where neighbors share local news and recommendations. Along the way, he learned that for a digital service, Nextdoor demanded a ton of manual work: drawing neighborhood boundaries with Sharpies, sending individual “invite” postcards by snail mail, talking to neighbors about the information they wanted. After 8 years of grind, Nirav stepped away as CEO, only to return 6 years later to spearhead an ambitious rebrand of Nextdoor, which now has 100 million users around the world.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Why Nirav walked away from millions in stock options to launch his own business
How the failure of an early business helped fuel Nextdoor’s success
How not having an initial vision for your brand can be a superpower.
Why apps that focus on “local” are so hard to master
Why Nirav believes” local” is a massive untapped opportunity in tech.
This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant. Our audio engineers were Kwesi Lee and Jimmy Keeley.
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How Nextdoor Grew to 100M Neighbors + Why Founding CEO Nirav Tolia Returned Six Years Later
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
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Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1765716600
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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
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Recode Decode: Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia talks about adversity and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick
Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia talks with Recode's Kurt Wagner about how he and his team built a social network for neighborhoods, with a focus on trust and privacy that forced the company to grow slower than most tech startups. Tolia was previously the CEO of Epinions, which after a merger became Shopping.com and sold to eBay. After a sports startup called Fanbase fizzled, Tolia was challenged by Benchmark's Bill Gurley to try again, and today Nextdoor is worth more than $1 billion. Having faced adversity and a public image problem of his own, he also shares some leadership advice for Uber CEO Travis Kalanick: Deal with your issues quickly.
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