Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar | Tech to Reflect the World

Hi everyone. Welcome to Gray Matter, the podcast from Greylock, where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. I'm Heather Mack, head of editorial at Greylock. In today's episode, we're featuring audio recorded during Greylock's virtual speaker series, iconversations. In this session, Greylock general partner David Z talks with Nextdoor CEO Sarah Fryer. Nextdoor has long been a popular online hub to connect real life people, organizations and and businesses to their neighborhoods. But the company took on an even greater role during the pandemic and the subsequent era of major societal change. In this conversation, Sarah breaks down how Nextdoor responded to these events, how the company is evolving alongside its communities, and what she sees for the future of online networks. Enjoy.

Hello everyone. Welcome to our latest episode of iconversations, the Greylock speaker series, where we invite icons in tech, media and finance who are influencing the way that we work, play and interact with each other. We're really excited today to have Sarah Fryer, the CEO of Nextdoor, joining us. Thank you, Sarah, so much for joining us.

Thanks David, for having me. Really appreciate it.

I'm really looking forward to our interactions. Sarah joined Nextdoor in 2018 and previous to that she had been the CFO at Square, and before that was the Senior Vice President in Finance and Strategy of at Salesforce, and before that for a long while was the leading industry analyst at Goldman for covering enterprise software. So Sarah's had an amazing career and we're so pleased to have her and we're incredibly excited to have her as the CEO of Nextdoor. She also is a member of a number of boards including Walmart and Slack, among others. And she's the co founder of an organization, Women who Launch, which supports women entrepreneurship across the world. So Sarah, when you took the reins of Nextdoor, you know, it had recently reached the sort of classic kind of unicorn status of a billion dollar valuation. But there was a lot of change just to make it neat to get to the next level and to really reach the opportunities that we see today and beyond. I'm really excited about talking about that. As a virtual private interface for communities, I think Nextdoor has proven to be incredibly important, even more so today than ever. And it's built around real people living nearby each other and that depend on each other and in some cases don't actually know each other that well. So it's a very different kind of social network and we'll talk about those things. It's not always easy to scale something like that. And in the pandemic, that really Changed things, turned everything on its head and really Nextdoor became incredibly important as the world became very local. So a bunch of the topics that we will get into, but first I'd love to sort of talk and set the stage to that point for looking back at where you came from, your childhood, how that influenced your sense of the importance of community and neighbors, local businesses, and how that sort of influences where you are today and how you think about Nextdoor.

Great. Well, thank you, David, and thank you, the Greylock team, for having me. And we love having Greylock as an investor in the company. Just incredible help, coaching, mentoring, and it's also terrific to have David on our board. So I get to spend a lot of time with David in terms of that question about community. It was so interesting coming to Nextdoor and then reflecting back on somewhat the arc of your life until that point. For those who don't know me, I grew up in Northern Ireland. I grew up right on the border between the north and the south during the Troubles. My whole childhood was the Troubles. There was never anything I didn't know that wasn't that time. And in fact, I was recommending a book to someone the other day. If you want to understand some of it or just want a great read. Say Nothing by Patrick Radon Keefe is excellent. And in reading really was a journey, a voyage through some of the major happenings that happened. Unfortunately, more of the dark side. And I think why community became so important is we were a society very much divided along religious grounds. It's the first thing if you go to Northern Ireland, even today, my family's all still there. The first thing someone will try to find out about you is your religion, because it's actually how they get a little comfortable with how they're going to interact with you. But what I saw happen where I grew up in this little village was how much of the community my parents really were, community activists, and how important that community was to them. So in two ways, my mom was the local nurse. So if there was anything wrong with you, you came to get my mom. She was actually the midwife, so she delivered a lot of kids at home. And. And then my dad was the personnel manager of the local mill, which was the whole reason why the village existed. And so he was the people. He was the head of people for the village in some way. And that meant that whatever your problem was, like, maybe you needed a job, maybe you needed some money, maybe you were dealing with domestic issues at home. Whatever it was, you showed up at our back Door. And so instilled from an early age was this fact that you could bring people together and that actually, often the humanity of people is their common ground. So while you have religious differences, if you need a job, you need a job. And if you have religious differences, but you have marital problems, you still have marital problems. And you just need to find another human being to connect to, often someone who's going through that same cycle. And that was what I learned there and what I want to bring now to Nextdoor, because while I on Nextdoor, those relationships often start online. We very much want them to transfer into the offline world because we think great, strong communities are created when people come together in person.

Yeah, it's funny you say that. It was one of the things that attracted me to Nextdoor, also when we first invested was this idea that we'd gone through a phase of social networks, and there was this sense that there's this feel of us becoming isolated from the real world, that we're receding into our computers. And so the power of a social network platform to connect us and then bring us into those connections in the real world was something that was really appealing. And clearly those experiences, again, I can't think of a more important combination of two parent focal points in a small community than that. It's a very cool story. So you clearly understood the value of networks, the value of communities and the connections that happen and the way we can find common ground in spaces when we're together. But interesting enough, when you started out in your career, it was not really in that domain, it was in a different domain. You went to Oxford that I did know. What I did not know until now is that you studied metallurgical engineering and became a metallurgical engineer. And I said that twice correctly. I cannot believe that. And you actually worked in a gold mine for a while, so not exactly what we think of as sort of central casting for a leader in Silicon Valley. Talk a little bit about those experiences and. And I find even when they're very different, they sometimes can still lead or bring things to you in this time in surprising ways. I'm interested to hear about that time.

I loved sciences, so I knew I wanted to study something in the sciences. It was very atypical growing up in a small community. Right. If you were into sciences and kind of relatively good in school, you went to medicine. My brother's a doctor. God bless. Thank God. Essential workers. Or maybe you went into accounting or. I mean, those were kind of the two big roles in a way. And no one had heard of engineering. The reason I studied metallurgy was really couple of things. Number one was it was actually metallurgy, economics and management. And I had taken a year out and kind of found this love of business. So I knew I wanted to bring engineering together with business. And that was a course that Oxford offered that was very unique. The second reason was, frankly, when I got to Oxford, Oxford's kind of an interesting, even acceptance process for the UK because you actually go interview, which is atypical in the uk. And when I got there, I realized, like, whoa, this place may not really be for me. I am a public, what we call state school pupil. I have no idea about these private schools that are the feeder schools for Oxford. And engineering was particularly male. When I went to interview, there were no women at all. And what I really liked about metallurgy, frankly, is it was a smaller school. You kind of realize how important people are. It goes back to why community is so important. The head of the department was so welcoming in a way that I hadn't found in the broader engineering school. So talk about the weird buffets of life that kind of pop you down a particular path. I did end up interning on a gold mine in Ghana. It was actually my first experience. And it was pivotal too, actually, because I also realized that it wasn't a very welcoming environment as a woman. So I came back and said, okay, love this engineering thing, but I cannot be successful. I do not. The whole you can't be what you can't see was very clear to me. And so that actually pivoted me into actually join McKinsey. But because I'd worked in Africa, McKinsey sent me off to South Africa. And it goes back to community, right? South Africa was just coming out of apartheid. It was 1996. Mandela had become president in, I think, 1991. And the whole country, it still gives me goosebumps. There was this amazing feeling of hopefulness, of how communities that had been so divided again. It was this division that kept coming back. I'd seen the troubles, and now I was experiencing a society and that had seen incredible racism, the apartheid system. And I was actually just talking to my daughter about this. I used to listen every night when I was driving home from. I was on this mine. Mining clearly was a theme up in a place called Segunda. And I had to drive about an hour, an hour and a half to get home to Joburg every night. And I would listen to the trc, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, on the radio. And Again, it was about when people are able to speak speak their truth, even if that truth is not palatable to every side. There is something really cathartic about being able to just say it and recognizing that communities, you're not necessarily going to make people agree, but sometimes what you have to do is let people be heard. And again, it comes back to they can find common ground in other places, not necessarily in politics or religion or color. They'll find common ground in other ways around community. But you've also got to let them speak out and be heard. So it's kind of an amazing in some ways, vein that you don't realize where life is taking you because all of these things could look like there is no pattern here. What is this woman doing with her career? And yet now I look back at it, I'm like, wow, it just felt like this big buildup to something like nextdoor.

And talk a little bit then about your experience at Goldman Sachs and coming out to the Valley from there and what were things that contributed to maybe your leadership title today and including your previous employers, both in the salesforce experience and square. Because I think it's fascinating the things that we pick up each step along the way that we build on, some things we double down on, other things we say, well, we learned the wrong lesson, we need to change it. And you've had an incredibly interesting set of companies and experiences as well as also people to interact with. If you think about a Marc Benioff or you think about a Jack Dorsey, I'd love to talk a little bit about that transition and how that's affected you in your leadership style.

Sure. So post that McKinsey experience. The good thing about McKinsey is they kind of insisted that you go do a graduate degree, which again, you know, girl growing up in Northern Ireland in the Troubles, the UK had never really bought into graduate degrees. So even that was a bit of a strange thing to go do. But it was great. They sent me off to Stanford and, you know, I was at Stanford in 2000, so the bubble was cresting and you just had this amazing feeling again of entrepreneurship happening now. You might wonder, why didn't I go join a startup? You actually, the dean of the school at the time was irate that I wasn't going to start up. Because he's like, this is meant for you. You're kind of just naturally. You have such natural curiosity. You're a builder, you can bring people along. It's like great kind of fundamental building blocks to be in a startup and to be in startup leadership. The risk factor for me was twofold. Number one, I was totally broke. I needed to pay for that education if I was not going back to McKinsey. And number two, I needed a visa. I needed to be able to study. And so Goldman was a very safe path. And people always ask, what would you tell your younger self? I think I had a lot of that kind of risk averse thinking because I look at where I was coming from, I was already taking what they perceived as massive risks. And so to layer even more risk on top was not a natural inclination for me. And it took later in my career, which is fine because sometimes you're just building up to it. But it does come back to, you know, we somewhat tend to kneel at the altar of youth in Silicon Valley and doing these things early and I think we need to allow. Sometimes people have had to start in a very different place. So I always, you know, even when I recruit, I tend to look not where someone is, but what's the trajectory they've been on. So what's the shape of the curve for them? You know, you're right. I got to jump finally out of a place like Goldmann where I did learn a lot of great skills, particularly that curiosity, inquisitive skill about technologies. How do technologies form, what to look for for actually great stock calls but great company calls. It's wonderful talking to. As you know, Mary Meeker is on our board ex research analyst. Bill Gurley is on our board ex research analyst. So it turns out it is actually a very good school for knowing, you know, what makes a company successful. Being able to kind of spot early signs. So I shifted gears finally into that operator mode. Garth Saloner at Stanford was happy and I worked for Benioff at Salesforce and then ultimately Jack at Square. And you know, they're both incredible entrepreneurs, incredible operators. The common theme between the two of them because they couldn't be more different. One is a massive extrovert, one is a massive introvert is how they are able to take what they're doing and really get it into a sense of a purpose where people line up to go to battle behind it. If you think about CRM software, you really wake up in the morning passionate to go sell Salesforce automation tools. But Mark made it all about this shift to the cloud and it was almost the white Knights or he loves Star Wars. So it was like the Jedi versus the dark side of enterprise on premises software. So you felt like you were joining a movement, right? If any of you have ever attended something like Salesforce's Dreamforce, it feels like you're in a cult, almost like people are so believing. And with Jax similarly, if you think about square, right, no one really shows up in the morning to build a point of sale system. You're not going to get the best and the brightest out of Silicon Valley to come do that. But if you kind of can turn it into economic empowerment and really help draw the thread for people of how their work shows up in the world and changes people's lives, in the case of square small businesses, that is when you get people to run through walls for you. So I think my biggest learning of all may be just this kind of really building purpose for people in their work, which will far supersede how much money they make, even sometimes the people they work with, which I think is probably the most important thing. But purpose driven employees go so much above and beyond that. You can build incredible companies. And it's not just your employees. Your customers get on that journey with you, your partners get on that journey, your investors, because they really believe in this greater good that you're building around.

Yeah, I think that's really powerful. I'd make a couple side comments. There's so many great comments in that. Going all the way back to talking about your experience in Northern Ireland and, and the risks you could take or not take. I think it's really hard for some of us who've been lucky enough to been born in America, grown up in this system not to understand some of the challenges that are faced by people from other cultures. I remember when we started some investments in India, one of our Indian partners went over there and had to explain to us that every hire that any of his startups made, the parents came to interview him because they weren't going to a big company where the Koreans felt safe. They were going to go to this crazy startup and it was just mind boggling. But you don't understand that that's the culture they came from. So risk taking was so different and we have to be appreciative of what context someone comes from to allow them to move into, to take the kind of risks that unlock human capital and creativity. So I really appreciate that and I've always appreciated that about you and your background because I do think it plays out in so many interesting ways, including as related to some of the things you were talking about, both Mark and Jack, in terms of values and a vision and a sense of purpose. I see that in you and how you inspire people and, and that that takes them beyond the micro stresses of the day or the small things that they might get caught up on. And it's really powerful. I want to give you a chance to talk about what I think is an incredible thing that you do with your time. One of the other things that no one can miss who's worked with you is not only your incredible iq, but your incredible horsepower and energy. And one of the things that I think you have this sense of in terms of purpose is giving back. And one of your passions that I've seen that I also love as a father of two daughters is empowering women and encouraging them to take risks, encourage them to engage in entrepreneurship and not see it as something that isn't available to them, but something that they should be willing to do. So I'd love to talk a little bit about the mentorship we've sort of touched on and how you've taken mentorship in 2013 in the Co founding of Women who Launch. And I've seen it, you know, you travel all over the place and you mix it with your work with Nextdoor, which is great in our national work, but, but you make the time to go and invest in Ladies who Launch. And so could you tell us a little bit about how you got involved with starting that and sort of where it is today?

Sure. So Ladies who Launch is effectively a one stop shop for women who want to come, women global entrepreneurs to help them thrive. So we want to provide the best educational resources, we want to provide the most accessible funding programs and we want to give them the inspiration to keep their bellies for full of fire and passion to grow their business. So we have strong pillars that we've built on. It really came from where I think a lot of startups come from, just a shared experience, like something that you went through. So way back around, on International Women's Day, I think eight years ago, we held an event at Square. I was super gung ho to do it because I had met with a lot of small businesses, but particularly the female owned small businesses. And one of the things they talked a lot about was they lacked education. Like where do we go to find out about how to start this business, run this business? They lacked a sense of community. Women don't get that same benefit of peer mentorship that men don't even think about because frankly, it's just happening to you all the time because you're surrounded by male colleagues and so on. And then the third thing was inspiration. You know, we're going to do this summit, it's going to be amazing because our secret weapon is Jack Dorsey, because he's going to show up. The really astonishing thing was the survey afterwards. The women were like, yeah, Jack's great, but like, they loved everything else. I'm sorry. I mean, that was such respect to Jack because he is great. But I kind of realized that actually the normal summits that you go to, that wasn't what they were looking for. They really appreciated that extremely intimate connection with other women. And it wasn't often the success story that they wanted to hear. They actually wanted to hear more about the tough times because then there was a feeling of not being alone. Someone else has been through this, but they've actually gotten to the other side. And sometimes getting to the other side was actually going through the pit of despair. Your company went belly up. Like you had to restart and maybe you restarted two or three times before you found the thing that actually worked, maybe more than that. And so there was such like a deep kind of customer insight in that moment. Like, I really subscribed to the jobs to be done framework for. For building companies and products and features. And that was a great. Clayton Christensen would have been so proud moment where we just had that insight when we watched the women that night, kind of taking in what was around them.

It's such a great story, by the way, because I think another example why women are smarter than men, because I think there's just the tendency to look at success and always focus on success and obsess on that. And in truth, most lines to success, when you're going through them, are not straight lines. There are crazy ups and downs. And by the way, you learn the most, I think, from the harder times and how to get through them. So that's really amazing.

So true. And even that definition of success, right, it's really built around fame, money, power, which is a very male definition, frankly. It doesn't mean those things aren't important. But I do think women look at it differently. In fact, one of the things, the reason why I love with ladies who launch, for example, last year we launched our own launch program, which was the first time we really put grants out there. It was that moment where we kind of felt like, okay, we want to be allies. We're constantly talking about how we're there for you. What do women need right now? During COVID 19, you know what? They just need money. So let's go get that to happen. And in the midst of that launch program, we put out an application process we had over 1,000 women apply. We ultimately funded 11 because we're starting small. Like I want to fund the thousand next time. But in almost every single one of those businesses, what really stood out was how much they were already giving back to their communities, even from their startup moments. And these are not tech companies, frankly. Ladies who Launch is really geared more at Main street, right? Think about the woman maybe making jewelry, making bags, running the cupcake store, running the local kind of tax advisory service. You know, they have all kind of different types of businesses. It's also a place where you really start to see the systemic bias come through. So we have also leaned a lot more into underrepresented minorities, black communities, LBGTQ communities, Hispanic. These are areas where funding is even more at a premium to get. So the big thing was the launch program. And then of course today people, people are interested. You can go to the Ladies who Launch site. We have a ton of educational resources, we have a phenomenal newsletter. And if you want to fund it, you can also donate there too. But it is something I am extremely passionate about and again, it's a little bit my side hustle, but I think you said it well. One of the things I love about where I am with Nextdoor is the things I have been really passionate about. Feel like they all interlock now instead of having to think about like how much time can I apportion here versus here. The fact that Nextdoor is so focused on small businesses means that I don't feel like I'm cheating on one entity versus the other if I spend time on both. Because actually a lot of my learnings from Ladies who launched have been really fundamental in how we've built and developed our products at Nextdoor. And then conversely, I can bring a lot of what we were doing at Nextdoor to those women and saying, hey, have you used this platform? You know, it's a phenomenal platform to get the word out.

And I've seen that in the write ups that you've been so generous to share at times when you've gone on those, in those meetings. It's really amazing. So I encourage everyone to both go to the website that's in the chat and learn more and please also, as she said, donate and support. It's really an amazing thing and thank you for doing that. So turning back to sort of the next steps in your career, you went from Salesforce to Square and you got the experience of Square, sort of the rocket ship with all its ups and downs as we've discussed also along the way and Complex moments. But the rocket ship, hyper growth, going public, being a public company cfo. Let's talk about how you then went from there and decided to come to Nextdoor. What made you attracted to Nextdoor and what made you think you were excited about taking that leap in that way.

It was a really hard decision, but in hindsight it feels easier. You're right. Square is an amazing company. I will always bleed Square. I'm a huge supporter still coach, mentor a lot of people who worked with me there who are still there. But what I loved about Nextdoor is kind of threefold. Number one was this purpose and mission. I felt it was incredibly important in the world. You can get very kind of nerdy academic about what you talked about that in a world that's never been more connected, we've never been more alone. The founders of Nextdoor, that amazing stat from the Pew institute that that 28%, I think it's almost a third now of Americans say they don't know a single neighbor which is so different from how most of us grew up. So there was just a really big mission purpose. And I also felt my research analyst hat on it also covers the world. Everyone is a neighbor. When people say what's your tam? I'm like we should just be a global platform for the world. Frankly there is a really big company that their graph is friends and family. Not everyone has family or friends, but every single person is a neighbor. Even Ted Turner living in the middle of whatever half of America, somewhere there's a border where he has a neighbor. Secondarily was the people back to that point about purpose driven people will run through walls for you. I could see that in the team that had been assembled starting with the founders. Nirav clearly still on our board but extending through the DNA of the company and that is a great foundation to build on. And then third, frankly, I think it's a great business. It is one of those businesses where you don't need to worry so much about monetization because you already have a huge proxy out there in the world of other platforms that show if you build it and they come you will be able to build a revenue stream off it. So some of that is ad related. But I think where Nextdoor is more interesting even than some of the platforms that have come come before us is this. No one has ever done local right and gotten it right. We have built a two sided marketplace and over time we're just going to be able to extend more and more I think offshoots of business Models that aren't so closely linked to growth of the platform. You know what I mean by that is imagine a business that comes in and pays us a monthly fee to get access to leads, for example, which is what's say a plumber will care about that business doesn't if we never add a new member. There's still just a groundswell of people that unfortunately, if you're very unlucky once a year you need a plumber. And so there's just a groundswell of leads that are always in the system. And so I think there's phenomenal businesses, business models that we can build around that platform as we scale it. So in hindsight, easy. I'll give you one little anecdote though in the back and forth of like, should I do it? Should I not do it? Should I do it? Ladies who launched came to bear because I stood in front of so many women saying, women need to take a step, we need to lead. You can't be what you can't see what I learned in that mine in Ghana. And I have a 16 year old daughter, so like you, a daughter looking up to me and a son who's 13, frankly. And that was the tipping moment where I was like, okay, I have have to do this. The world has told me we need women leaders and I am not pushing myself to take enough risk if I'm going to sit in what had become closer to a comfort zone at Square. And I would have had a long great career and loved working with all the people, but I wouldn't have kind of tipped myself out into that risk mode that I think is just a good thing to do generally in the world as well.

I'm so glad you told that last anecdote because I remember that so distinctly. And it is such a powerful thing, right? You're up there and you've taken this leader position and you're telling these people and trying to inspire them and then you're like, I remember you going like, wait a minute, I went home and I looked in the mirror and I said, this is talking to me too. I can do this. And this is meant for me in these ways that you just described. So I loved that story when you told it to us when you joined as well. Let's talk about that joining moment. It's always an interesting thing when, you know, you join a company that's gotten to a certain point. You know, I've seen this again and again in many companies, LinkedIn, et cetera, you know, they have success and the Valley propels them along of that success and builds them up in these great ways. And they're kind of like, you know, a big St. Bernard puppy. Right. They've gotten to a certain scale that's not small anymore and it's quite visible, but they kind of haven't. Don't know what to do in their size and their skin and they're growing into it. And it takes a special kind of person to be able to come into an organization. And it takes some really important instincts and decisions on what to do. Like how did you decide what you did first and what order of the things that first Sort of, that sort of classic, like what's your first 90 days that you. Of course, I'm sure we all asked you. I can't remember. I'm sure we asked you that in our interviews. I don't remember the answers. I'm just curious. How did you think about that and how did you approach coming into nextdoor?

I love that metaphor of the St. Bernard pup. That's a good one because that's exactly right. Right next door had already gotten to massive scale. I think at the time we were in eight countries. Now we're in 11 countries and people really depended on us. So in terms of what to do first, it's people. So it's both your customers and then also your team. Most leaders will give you a 30, 60, 90 on the team. It's like I'm only in listening mode. I'm not going to make any decisions. I'm going to meet with everyone. I actually wanted to get out on the road and really talk to our customers around the world. So I actually traveled in 2019, back when travel was a thing. I went to 10 of our 11 countries. Italy is the only from a next door perspective country I've not been in. And it was really again looking for that customer feedback. Like what were the commonalities of what people were saying was our mission purpose really resonating? And it was. I mean, I think on the good news front there was just so much that I could see that was really working and bringing people to an online platform, connecting them and then letting them kind of find that community. Right. We often say come for the utility, stay for the community. So there was a commonality in the utility. People were finding a small business, asking a neighbor, like all of that didn't matter where you were in the world. But what was really astonishing was the community piece. The groups that were forming, people that were taking their online connection out into the offline world. This Great woman in Australia, Darlene, who had started because of Nextdoor, a weekly lunch. I actually went to her weekly lunch. It was incredible because it went from 20 somes to I think she might have had an 80 some. She was a 40, 50 year old. She had a pretty kind of tragic story in a way on what had happened to her family. And so she was really looking for this friendship and community around her. And again, that's not something that can happen online because if you want to go lunch with people, they've actually got to live fairly proximate to you. So that was actually really my first year at Nextdoor was the customer development. So really having a point of view on what product we wanted to build. I think from there also building the team. So you're right. Nextdoor had gone from that gangly startup moment into really needing to be in the growth stage, which to me is when you start putting structure around an organization. One of my favorite interview questions, I'll tell it now, so anyone ever interviews with me going forward will have the right answer. But it's the what helps a car go fast? Might be back to my metallurgical days. And people come up with everything. They're like the tires, the road, the, you know, the paint, the lightness, what the car's made from, the driver. I've heard everything. And actually I think the answer is the brakes. So there is no way you will ever hurdle yourself down an autobahn or a freeway at over 100 miles an hour if you don't think you can stop. And so that to me is what a lot of the infrastructure is in companies. I think of it as the thing that allows you to suddenly accelerate because you actually have this kind of more scalability around you. Not everything is its own special snowflake each time. So there was a lot of that build too. And then it was really the understanding the ecosystem of Nextdoor. Right. 2019 was understanding that we needed to really ensure engagement. We were actually great at bringing people in at the top of the funnel from a growth perspective. But we really needed to help them see the value once they got in the front door. Things like personalization, things like adding in more neighbor voices, so the business context, the public agency context, and then going back to growth once we felt great on the engagement front has really been the more of our 2021. And in fact probably one of our biggest unlocks that we're looking at is the shift from the singularity of the Nextdoor I joined, which was the private social network for your Neighborhood to the multiplicity of Nextdoor is now the place you plug in to the neighborhoods that matter to you. And there's a lot in that statement. But I think we really have understood that people want to browse, follow more than one neighborhood. I used to always hear it, sorry if I'm gonna be rude, but people would be like, I have a second home. And I'm like, yes, you're the 1%, so not gonna build a product right now just for you. But Covid really showed people care a lot about other neighborhoods. They care where their parents are, maybe where their children are. They might care about their work neighborhood, the place where their small business sits, like, what's going on there. They care about neighborhoods they might wanna move to. And. And so Nextdoor is so incredible in terms of our information at a local level. Like, it's unlike anything else out there, and yet we have never allowed anyone to peek in or see it in different ways, except if you fully verified in that one neighborhood. And we held you very kind of locked into that one neighborhood. And so I think this is a really big unlock for us generally, as a platform to think much more broad about all this information that we have available on neighbors, but how to serve it up in a way that maintains that high trust that people also really, really care about on a platform like Nextdoor.

I think you captured brilliantly the opportunity and the challenge of Nextdoor. What makes it so differentiated and so important is this sense of being micro communities and privacy and local in its nature. And yet having that information in some of. Like you said, some information is valuable across boundaries, and people want to connect around information across boundaries. And so some of the unique challenges that Mech stores face and that you've helped tackle and lead in growing relative to sort of, you know, come one, come all, everything's open kind of social networks that existed in the past. Let's talk about a specific subset of that and you've touched on a little bit, but we'll speak about it explicitly because it's obviously a massive deal. The pandemic, when that hit, it was obviously a seminal moment for the world, but I think it was a seminal moment for Nextdoor. Talk a little bit about what that moment felt like and how you guys experienced it and what some of your responses were. Because all of a sudden we went to a world where we were worrying about, you know, things hundreds of thousands of miles away, whatever, and to a world where, like, we were didn't know information was so real time. There was all no one knew what was right or wrong or real. And, and there was so much fear and everything shrunk down to sort of like, you know, right in front of your, two inches from your face. It really was a pretty important moment, I think, for the world and also for nextdoor. I'd love to hear how you experienced that.

Yeah, I mean, Covid for us really brought to this fore this idea that local is incredibly important in your life. Right. It's never been more important, in fact. And if you think about the three reasons people turn to nextdoor, number one is to receive trusted information. So that's kind of trust. Number two is to give and get help, and that's the local perspective. And then the third is this idea of building real world connections to those that are nearby. You might be your neighbors, your local business, maybe the local public agency like the local fire department or the library. Right. So those three things, if you overlay that with COVID you can kind of see how our response has happened and why. So on the trusted information, the first thing we wanted to ensure is that people were getting the most up to date real time information from the sources that mattered. So working with the cdc, the WHO in the uk, working with the National Health Service, the French Ministry of Health, you name it, across the globe, WHO has the most trusted information at that moment in time. And even that changed, right? Everybody was learning, but it was important that sometimes neighbors will share information and you really need to make sure that they're not adding their own editorial, for example, like what is the source of this information? The second thing was how much people wanted to help. And so immediately we worked on actually help map and then help groups to allow people to feel like they had some agency, right. In this crazy world where you were suddenly being told to go stay home, you're like, well, I need to do something with all this energy I have. So we had a massive surge of trying to get those connections happening. So help groups, help map were obvious and yet much, much needed. And in fact, we saw some great work even happen with some of the brands on our platform, Walmart, since, as you know, I said on the board, but I was really proud of how they sponsored a whole series of Walmart help groups to allow neighbors to go shopping for other neighbors. And it was interesting because it also solved a problem for Walmart in that case, which is not wanting as many people in stores. So if you could aggregate shopping kind of the pinduoduo or whatever, less about the pricing, but at least the aggregation of shopping into one Basket instead of multiple. That actually helped them. It helped them show up for their community as a brand that cared and it helped the community feel like they could do something. And then finally on the real world connections that brought us back a lot to local businesses. And if I think towards the tailor end of 2020, we put a lot of effort into what are the tools that local businesses need. Forever they have wanted to be able to post on our platform and actually we have held them back because we were always concerned about too much commercial intent on top of a community platform. But we recognized that neighbors were saying, I want to hear from that local business because I want to know how you, you know, my local restaurant, how Holly and Dan are doing, like, and what can I do to help them in this moment where they can't actually serve food in their restaurant? Like I've bought groceries from them even though it's not per se the most efficient way for me to go buy groceries. But I need to get kind of economics into the system to sustain because I want to come out the other side of COVID and see my community still thriving and healthy. And that's again why we spent so much time on business tools and even tools for nonprofits to help them do things like raise money in a more online way. Because again, you know, the car wash, the 10k run, like whatever you had done historically in a community was somewhat off the table, although hopefully it's coming back as we begin to emerge out of the pandemic. But those three things, trusted information, give and get help, and then finally how do we create real world connections, right? Those three things were good for Covid, they're good for coming out of COVID they're good for decades in terms of this platform that we're building.

And another thing I think I want to give you credit for is a lot of times the moment you join and we talked about joining a company at a certain stage, one of the things that happens I've seen is a lot of consumer based companies, social network based companies start very much from founders that are focused mostly on the consumer user side of it. And there's a next level maturation where you bring the business side of it, in some cases an advertising based business, sometimes local businesses, in the example of Nextdoor, and you really elevate them up to a first class citizen in the system. And your background as you talked about in Northern Ireland, your parents experiences in running small businesses and Square all the way through Square, I think that was a thread that's been really powerful to have you and your background weaving those two things together, because they really are, as you were just describing, a first class citizen and one that we been able to really be important to in this really tragic and hard time for all but particularly small businesses. Let's talk about another aspect that's really obviously important in this time and nextdoor's role in it, which is, you know, we've seen a lot of upheaval in this time as well. You know, there's been incredibly important events around racial equity, around LGBTQ equity. There's been all kinds of information. And one of the great things about Nextdoor as you touched on it, is it's TAM is the world. And for example, in the United States, it's in over 90 plus percent of all neighborhoods. And so it reflects all those neighborhoods too. All the goods, the bads, the complexities of it. Talk about how the things around the elections and social demonstrations, how that was seen and experienced and how nextdoor reacted and how you see nextdoor's role in that world.

Yeah, I mean, I think it was the second crisis of last year was clearly when George Floyd's murder happened. Black Lives Matter really kind of came to the fore. And obviously this is not some new thing. It's been happening in history from the beginning of African settlers being brought to the United States. Right. But for me, it was a moment of like, wow, okay, we really have a lot of work to do. People talk about allyship all the time. Right. You talked about how I feel about female founders, for example. I was reading a great quote this morning about south saying allyship is not a moment in time. It's a lifelong lived experience. So it never stops. And I think from a nextdoor perspective, we learned last year that we have to lean into this. As you say, we reflect the world. We're in one in four households in the United States getting pretty close to one in three. So whatever is going on is happening on our platform. So we took action. We had been doing work since. Since 2015, actually, with one of my favorite people in the world, Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt from Stanford, and her team is called Spark. Around things like how do we prevent racial profiling happening on the platform? And the key is slowing people down. We are all born with biases. You can't help it. Like, I have a bias around religion, that I can't help that when I meet someone more at home, like I said, I have this 10 of just wanting to be sure what religion they are before I start talking to them. But when you can move from here, which is where your biases all sit up here, where your lived experiences, your education and so on can kick back into gear. That is a big part of where I think technology can be a force for good. So we built on what we had done, actually back in 2019, we had rolled out something called kindness reminder. And so we continue to build in, even on that, which is a little interstitial, that pops up when we see a post that we can tell has a very high propensity to be reported. We actually give people a chance to edit their words. So instead of me saying, David, you moron, of course, da, da, da, da, I can be a little gentler and say, well, I really don't agree with what you just said. Here's a different way of thinking about it. So kind of helping people slow down in the moment, take some of the heat and temperature off the platform. And by the way, it's a little antithetical because in most social platforms you're told, number one, never inject friction. And number two, heat has often been actually embraced and then sometimes supercharged because heat causes engagement. And so we've been willing to take a tougher path which impacts our growth, there's no doubt about it, because we think it's the right thing to do around building communities. I mean, going beyond that, actually, just yesterday we rolled out a next iteration, what we call our anti racism notification. So we're being very precise with language on the platform. We've talked a lot to different groups of neighbors, particularly black neighbors. And what we heard back is that terms like white lives matter are just deeply offensive. White supremacy sort of terms. We ban that. Just outright banned it. But then we spent a lot of time talking about terms like all lives matter and blue lives matter, recognizing that sometimes people use them perhaps in a way. Like I saw a post recently, like my uncle who was in law enforcement for 40 years, he passed away. BlueLivesMatter. That's a post that actually I think is fine in a neighborhood. Or sometimes people will post All Lives Matter. And then it's actually the important conversation that comes comes back. Because if you aren't even told about your own ignorance and why that particular phrase can cause pain, you have no ability in some ways to educate yourself. And that to me is the beauty of neighborhoods. Right? There were two moms in San Diego, black mom, white mom, both moms of teenagers where when they got together, that black mom being able to explain just her fear of her son just being out randomly in the community. And Something terrible happening. Which as the mom of a white 13 year old, I don't experience that same sense of fear because of the privilege that I have. And so being able to engage in those conversations, we think is incredibly important. So in those cases, you get a pop up if you put in Blue Lives Matter or All Lives Matter, which explains how that phrase could be hurtful. And are you using it appropriately if it's used as a retort, particularly to something like Black Lives Matter, we just remove that content. But we're trying to be more nuanced. And it's something I've learned a lot in working with the Jennifer Eberharts of the world. Derek Johnson from the NAACP sits on our neighborhood Fatality Advisory board. The world is more nuanced. We really need to kind of find a path through that instead of becoming more binary. And by the way, way at the beginning of nextdoor, one of the researchers that they spent a lot of time with is also Mark Dunkelman, who talks about the middle ring. So your inner ring are your friends and family. Your outer ring are kind of your professional acquaintances. That middle ring is your neighbors. It's literally the friends you have from school because they're parents, kids of the same age, or it's the local barista. And when that middle ring disappears, our ability to kind of of dehumanize people and give them labels really increases. And so that comes back to why I think next door and what we do is so important right now, because otherwise we are falling back into this kind of labeling and that, you know, Northern Ireland, I could label people a religion, dehumanize them and create a war. And that can't be where we end up. There has to be a better way.

Yeah, totally agree. In some ways for all of us, obviously, the last few years have been a crisis, but I also feel like there's been incredible learning and growth and some of the ways you've talked about it Nextdoor, we've learned and gotten so much better at things and how to help things and things that we need to be on top of. And some of those things you touched on and who knows if we would have learned them as quickly. And so there's really been power in that. I'd love to just touch a little bit more on one. You've touched a little bit on it. But I think it's so important and it gets down to your point of sort of the connectedness of us all and the humanness of us all, which is the pandemic also has had an incredible exposure of increased loneliness, increased isolation. How did Nextdoor experience that? What has nextdoor's response been? And what do you think the role of Nextdoor is in that?

Sure. So you know, from that trip around the world, that was actually, unfortunately, one of the other areas of common ground I saw was that isolation. And it caused us to reach out and really start building around us a set of academics in the space. Julianne Holt Lunstad is literally the best at this in the world. She's based here in the United States in byu. Michelle Lim, I've spent time with down in Australia and then Pamela Coulter out of Manchester. And we picked those three because of their depth of experience on this topic of loneliness. And in fact, we went out and started to do research last year before COVID hit and we thought maybe we should pause. And they were like, no, no, no, no. Covid is really amplifying these feelings, so let's keep going. And what we found is that knowing six or more neighbors dramatically decreases the sense of social isolation, anxiety, and even things like financial outcomes for people. And I loved Julianne's comment because she said, you know, for years I've been doing this research on loneliness and at the end of a conversation like this, people always ask, what's the antidote? Or what can I do? Right? It's like if you were having a conversation about your health, there would be some sort of conversation at the end about exercise or eating better. And she said, it's really phenomenal that we finally found something statistically significant. And it's about this interconnection of local so that you can actually feel humans in the flesh. And that's where I think from a next door perspective, it's how do we grab a lot of those research findings, turn them into products that actually can do really good things in the world. So groups is a good example. Because of a lot of that research, we really invested in our groups product understanding that at a local level, groups are a really wonderful way to connect people and they really lower the bar to participate. So if you are someone who might be a bit more introverted, taking that first step can feel hard. But if you find a group of people who are trail hikers, or a group of people who are interested in gardening, or a group of people who are parents of six year old kids, whatever it is that you have. But the local point is the important point because as Julianne's research has often showed, even connecting online is okay, but it can again amplify this feeling of ultimately Being alone versus being able to come together as a parent of a six year old child. And maybe the conversation starts about what are you doing with homeschooling, but it may end with like, you know, what do you make for dinner at night? Or I've got all these avocados like growing on a tree literally right now. And I just did a barter trade with a neighbor who has like greens. Like it can really kind of create these much more rich conversations versus, if you think of the world of online, it's very much about narrowing conversations and specificity versus how humans in real life interact. Like we're just not like that.

Yeah, I think that's really powerful. Sort of last question and taking it up to a broad level, looking at boards, you know, sit on the notable ones. We mentioned Walmart, we mentioned Slack. You've just joined Operation Hope, which is wonderful. You've also seen boards as senior executive, you know, square, et cetera. And now you're working with the board as a CEO and the joys of that, just curious, like, I think be instructive, like what's your sense of the role of boards and what have you learned and how can they help? And one thing I would also want to give you credit for is if you look at your executive team and you look at your board, it really stands out in terms of diversity, both of gender and in terms of racial diversity. It's very impressive. I'd love to hear your thoughts on construction of boards, roles of boards and those.

Yeah, I'll start with the construction. Right. Because you got to have the people before you can start the role piece, like what they're going to do. And it's not by accident that you end up with diverse boards. Right. It's like anything in life. Right. If you don't measure it and you don't set out with goals, you have to be intentional. Yeah, so you're right. Last year we added, because actually I had been very focused on gender and kind of look at me, I got almost like a gender equal board. And I had not focused on, for example, the black community. So I added two members last year. John Hope Bryant, who is also, as you know, the founder of Operation Hope, amongst many other things that he has done and is doing in his career. And then Andrea Wisham, who spent about two decades working as Oprah's COO and today works actually with Melody Hobson at Skywalker Properties. So Andrea is an incredible storyteller. It's not just though about people because they're diverse. It's what are they going to bring you from a business standpoint? So also being incredibly intentional there. We love working with you, David, because of your LinkedIn experience and having seen social networks grow and grow to scale. So being very intentional about what each board member will bring. For me, as I thought about even then, what are the boards I want to join In Walmart's case, I really believed in this. Back to societal good. If you want to do something big, if you do it behind something big, there's a phrase, but if you want to do good in the world, give something big a push. And I think Walmart was exactly that for me because there were two topics that I cared on a lot about. One, on the women's rights front, being able to do things with Walmart, like, for example, having paid maternity and paternity leave, making sure that women generally were climbing through that organization, right, they employ 1.8 million people. Those were important things. And the second was around minimum wage because again, you can spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the government. But if you persuade Walmart to keep upping associate wages, every supplier, everyone else in the industry will follow along. And so you can do a lot around. And frankly, they employ a lot of underrepresented minority communities. So you're actually impacting those communities. And I think Doug McMillan is just a phenomenally inspirational leader on that front. In the case of something like Operation Hope with John, the reason why kind of I ended up he's on my board, but then I joined back, is what I loved about Operation Hope is they are a doer, not a talker. John is maybe the most quotable man on the planet. So first of all, he's a listener. He's like, you have two ears, one mouth, because you should be listening twice as much as you talk. But he also is forcing people into just doing so, not kind of putting a flag up that you're there to support minority communities. What does that actually mean? How many businesses do you agree to coach and mentor this year? And again, we all can get overwhelmed, overwhelmed by the scale of the problem. But if you don't start small, like, if each person, like, I funded 11 businesses last year through ladies who launch or we funded, you know, 11 feels so small, like, oh, my God, that's like nothing but, like, do I want to stop? No, it's, how do I take 11 to 100 this year, then? How do we take 100 to 1,000? How do we take 1,000 to, like, 10,000? That really starts to have the momentum that you want. And I think that's what I love in a board setting is how do you push people from talk into action? Boards, I think can fall foul of a lot of talk in the boardroom and then, you know, 90 days later you show up and it's kind of Groundhog Day. So you have to find that balance, but push on giving your executive team the courage to take those bigger risks because they know you have their back. I think that's really important in a board context. So probably my best advice to board members and getting people trapped in 90 day cycles is the worst thing that you can do. Like you set this goal for Q2 and you are 10% below it is a bad conversation. It should be, how did you think about it? How are you thinking about it over the next 12 to 24 months and show me how that 90 day cycle got you further along that path. That's a much better board conversation.

I totally agree. And by the way, it's also the biggest thing for success in companies. The most consistent challenge I've seen where companies fail, regardless of whether small, medium or large, is when they start focusing on the next quarter, the next month, the next year and they're not thinking about where they need to be 3, 5, 10 years and integrating that into a whole chain. So this has been wonderful. I'm going to end with a quick little lightning round, so I'm going to shoot three questions at you and we'll just get your quick reactions. So here we go. Ready? Question number one. What have you learned about yourself in Covid that you probably wouldn't have learned otherwise?

How much? I need green space to be mentally healthy and I'd gotten myself unhealthy. When you drive to work all day, stay inside a work building and come home. And I think being able to merge being outside a lot more with my day to day work has actually made a huge difference to, I feel like my psyche, my happiness, my health.

I love that. I think there's so many interesting lessons that are going to come from this. I hope we can figure out how to integrate them into the future of all our work lives. Question number two. What's the first thing you're going to do when the pandemic is over? Whatever that means. Exactly, let's say.

But so easy. I'm going home. I miss my parents hugely. It's been a tough year and a half of not seeing them. I can't wait to be back in Ireland and then I can merge my greenness with my mental health. Too.

Yeah. My two of my brother in laws live in Dublin and we're stuck with the same thing. We're about talking. Particularly because Ireland in particular is not in a great place. Miss that too. Three, what would you be doing if you weren't doing this?

I gonna sound so weak, but I actually love what I do so much with Nextdoor. It is so I, you know, for those of, I don't know if any of you subscribe or know this icky guy, right? What, what are you good at? What does the world need? Where can you make money? You can't remember where the fourth overlap is. And in the center you have flow. I have flow with Nextdoor because I feel like I can live it every day. There's no dissonance. I don't feel, you know, it's like what we talked about, this interconnectivity. Like even at Square, I used to feel a little guilty sometimes about spending time on ladies who launch or you know, when I joined the Walmart board, there was this feeling of like, ooh. And next door I don't feel any of that. So I'm actually going to give you the pathetic events of like I can't imagine. Because I love what I do right now.

I love that. Thank you. Because we love having you doing what you're doing. And on that note, by the way, I will note that Sarah, one of the wonderful things she does each section of the board deck, she starts out with a little anecdote of a story from nextdoor around the world. And they're simply so inspiring. If anyone in this audience needs to be inspired or feel connected and feel happy about a world when it's tough, I encourage you to look at the Nextdoor feed and a lot of the PR and marketing, they'll use some of the same anecdotes and they're truly, truly inspiring. So I'm glad you love what you do and we love that you're doing.

It in the feed. Right now we have this concept of popular posts, which are the hundred most popular posts from around your country. And I am totally obsessed by those. And they're popular because people have reacted or commented and so on. So there's kind of a wisdom of the crowd and they are, my God, they are just like good for you every single day. It's like taking your vitamins. Like I'm taking my popular post today.

Everyone should do it. The first thing you do, wake up. I feel that. So much so it helps. By the way, it helps reading the big board book as well too to be inspired in every section. Thank you Sarah so much for taking time. Generous. So generous with your time as always. So incredibly insightful as always. I get to see this and experience in the board. I'm going glad we've been able to share it with others in the Greylock community. And thank you all for joining us. Please keep an eye out for the next iconversations. That will be with Brian Chesky of Airbnb. You can also hear all of these conversations and Sarah referred to Melody Hobson. I encourage you to listen to her conversation with Reid Hoffman. Talk about inspirational, talk about amazing. You can see these at the Greylock podcast Gray Matter. We have all of them there archived and again to finish up. Sarah, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate you taking your time because as we've seen you work 247 and are so passionate about what you do. So thank you so much.

Thanks David. Thanks Greylock Team.

That concludes this episode of Gray Matter. If you enjoyed listening to this conversation and want to hear others like it, please subscribe to gray matter on SoundCloud, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find new episodes and blogs on our website greylock.com and of course you can follow us on Twitter reylockvc. Thanks for listening.