S14E1: Nirav Tolia, Nextdoor CEO, on Building Community Platforms, Product-Market Fit, and the Future of AI in Local Networks

the power of a painkiller versus a vitamin. A vitamin's something that's nice. Did you take your vitamins this morning? Yes, I did. Oh no, I forgot to. That's okay. I'll take 'em tomorrow. But what are people gonna do for painkillers? I mean, they're gonna slither on their belly to get to the painkiller with their last ounce of energy because they need the painkiller. And so if you can build a painkiller, something that people, if it were turned off, they would scream, you kind of know you're onto something.

Welcome back to The Room Podcast Season 14. Hi, Mads. Hi, Claude. So excited to be here. So excited to be talking about everything that's going on in 2026 in tech.

There's so much to discuss each season. As you all know, we sit down with some of the most thoughtful, insightful people building on the cutting edge of the startup ecosystem and talk about what it takes for them to build and scale enduring companies.

This season, we're diving into the ideas, inflection points, and experiences that have shaped some of today's most impactful companies. And the people behind them.

From Nextdoor to the Ring founder, we are diving into suites of innovation from early product decisions to navigating rapid moments of growth to acquisitions, IPO exits, and truly the conversations that offer a window into how great companies are built.

And if you enjoy the conversations, which I think you will, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

And of course, if you wanna stay connected, we would love to have you at our community events like our annual Inside Summit, and you can subscribe to our newsletter to learn more at theroompodcast.com.

Thank you so much for being a part of the community and welcome to Season 14 of The Room Podcast.

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Welcome back to The Room podcast. I'm Claudia Laurie, and today we're kicking off season 14 with Nirav Tolia, the co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor, the neighborhood network. Designed to help people connect with communities around them. Nextdoor now spans hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods globally and millions of verified neighbors. The mission sounds simple, help people feel more connected to where they live. But as Nirav shares in this conversation, building a product around community turns to be one of the hardest problems in technology. In this episode, we talk about Nirav's journey growing up in Odessa, Texas as the child of Indian immigrant physicians and how those early experiences shaped the way he thinks about belonging. We also dive into the winding path that led him to entrepreneurship, from struggling academically at Stanford to becoming one of the first 100 employees at Yahoo. Nirav's career didn't follow a straight line. One of the ideas I love the most from this conversation is how Nirav thinks about product market fit. He talks about the difference between building a vitamin versus building a painkiller. For Nextdoor, that moment came when neighbors began relying on information in the platform for real-world needs, lost pets, safety alerts, and local recommendations and emergency information. We also discussed the hard realities of building platforms for real communities. As Nextdoor scaled, the company had to confront issues like bias and harmful behavior and rethink how the product itself could encourage more constructive interactions. The biggest takeaway from this conversation is that community isn't a soft problem in technology. It's one of the hardest. And Nirav has spent more than a decade building a product designed to mirror the complexity of real neighborhoods. So with that, let's open the door. This is The Room Podcast with Nirav Tolia of Nextdoor.

Nirav, thank you so much for joining us today here in The Room.

I'm so thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me and a big fan and excited about the conversation.

So are we, and we already got started a bit here, but we like to start at the beginning with our guests. So you were born in Texas. Could you tell us a little bit more about where you grew up and how that shaped your view of the world?

Yeah, absolutely. And technically, I was not born in Texas, even though I don't tell anyone in Texas that. I was born in Philadelphia. My parents are Indian immigrants, and so they'd settled in Philadelphia, but we moved to Odessa, Texas, which is a small city in West Texas, when I was very young. And so I tell people that I'm from Texas because I am, but I was not technically born there. And it did shape a lot of not just my childhood, because I was in Texas until I came to Stanford for college. It has shaped really almost everything I've done professionally, and I'll give you the reason why. So I was one of the only Indian Americans in a town of 100,000 people, kind of in the middle of nowhere. Odessa is 300 miles west of Dallas. It's about 250 miles east of El Paso. So it really is quite far from a big city. And because my parents had immigrated, I'd say reasonably early in the cycle, they'd come to America in the early '70s, I was one of the first children of immigrants in that area. My parents were actually the second and third Indian physician that had moved to Odessa, Texas because there was a great opportunity there to be a doctor and it was booming because of oil. It's an oil town, but it was a little bit challenging for me because I was different. I had a different name. Nirav is not a West Texas name or even an American name. My parents were Indian. They were vegetarian. I ate meat because I don't think I could survive in Texas if I didn't eat meat, but they were vegetarian. And so growing up, I did feel at many points lonely and I felt like I was different and children never really want to feel different. You know, that's the one thing that's very, very difficult to get over because you're always thrust into these situations with other children. You want to feel like you're like everyone else. And I just wasn't. I didn't look like everyone else. My name wasn't like everyone else. My parents didn't sound like other people. And I think that awakened in me a genuine desire to be part of a group, to feel like I belonged. And that ultimately led to a real passion for, and really a need in many ways, to seek community. And community is the through line in my life, both personally and professionally. It's the thing that gives me the most joy. Outside of work, and it's the thing inside of work that I've worked on over multiple decades for multiple companies. And it's a thing that I believe in very deeply as a core value.

Absolutely. And that is a great tip-off for what is to come with the Nextdoor Story Community being, of course, a key pillar of Nextdoor. And thank you for sharing a little bit about how that unique growing up experience, which is felt by many, really kind of shaped that inner compass for you. It speaks very much to the heart of our podcast, which is inspired by Alexander Hamilton, The Room Where It Happened. Many of us want to be in the room, but perhaps are not for different reasons or finding ourselves tiptoeing into the room and asking what's going on. And so I'm curious in that vein of early identity and upbringing, did you always think you were gonna become a founder?

Boy, what a great, great question. No, I never thought that, not for a single minute or second. I didn't even know what a founder was and, you know, you bring up this really interesting concept in terms of wanting to be in the room, because if you grow up in a place like Odessa, Texas, particularly pre-internet, there are none of those rooms in Odessa. They just aren't even there, right? So the room may be in New York City, it may be in San Francisco, it may be in Los Angeles, maybe in DC, right? It, it's in these places that you hear about. And when I grew up, you're getting all your information from television. If you live in Odessa, those aren't rooms that you're a part of. And so interestingly, while I did not ever think that I would be a founder, and I'll give you a little bit more context on that, the reason that I ultimately felt like the internet and this set of technologies that creates virtual spaces is so powerful is because the rooms online, are open to anyone regardless of where they are physically. And so you could be on an internet connection and you could feel like you were on Wall Street, or you could feel like you were in Hollywood, or you were in DC in the middle of politics, right? And so these rooms you're talking about that I think we all aspire to be part of, the accessibility of those rooms pre-internet was largely determined not by socioeconomic class, They were determined by where you lived and what you were exposed to. And the reason that I'm such a lover of technology, and in particular the internet set of technologies, is I believe the internet has really democratized our access to those rooms. You asked me about being a founder. Both my parents are physicians, as I mentioned. And so as a good dutiful son of Indian immigrants, I really had no choice but to be a physician myself. And I wanted to be a physician. And so I grew up thinking I'm gonna be the third generation of Dr. Tolias because my grandparents, both of my grandfathers were doctors as well, right? And so that was the only room that I knew existed, and that was the room that I thought I would be part of. But getting out of Odessa and going to Stanford really kind of changed everything for me.

So from aspiring third-generation physician to English major at Stanford, I have a few questions about connecting those dots and ultimately joining Yahoo as one of the first 100 employees. Can you pave that road for us a bit more?

Yes, I'll tell you a bunch of funny stories, but you know, my, my wonderful mother, who is one of the most inspirational people in my life and an Indian physician herself. And so I'll just speak about my parents for a second. First of all, for my mom to be a working woman in her generation was extremely unique. In addition, my parents met in medical school and they fell in love, and they were of a generation in India and of a culture where one's parents determine who you marry. It's arranged marriages. That was actually the norm back then. And so they had what's called, cutely, a love marriage. They fell in love, and even though they were very similar in terms of their caste, their religion, their vocation— they were both going to be doctors— both of their parents were not quite in favor of them marrying each other. And so when they got married, and ultimately my mom moved into my father's family's home, because that's how it was back then, it became pretty clear that she wouldn't be able to really pursue her dream of practicing medicine in the same way because she was expected to be a housewife. And so the reason that my parents immigrated to America is because my mom said, hey, look, it's not like we need a job. So we're not going to America because it's opportunity and we need jobs. We're going to America because we want to create our own our own culture. I wanna work and we wanna be equal partners in this experience, right? And India at that point was a very patriarchal society. And so my mom is a very inspirational person in my life for all of those reasons and many more. But when I told my parents I was gonna be an English major, of course my parents' response is, don't you know English? Do you need to study the language? Right? And I would explain to them, look, I'm gonna take all the pre-med courses. So yes, I could be a biology major, but I enjoy reading literature. And so this is actually English literature. And I had met someone my freshman year at Stanford who's a dear friend of mine today, and he was an English major. And I found that freshman year that when we had discussions about classes on any given day, what he talked about was way more interesting than the organic chemistry and biology that I was learning. And so, I decided to go and pursue English, but it was really about literature. And at the time, I still believed that I would be a physician. It turned out that I wasn't nearly as good at the pre-med stuff as I wanted to be. And, you know, you show up at Stanford and, you know, again, to use your metaphor of the room, I went to a public high school. There were no AP classes at all. I think I was the first person to ever apply to Stanford. Many people at my school thought that Stanford was a junior college in East Texas. Even after I was accepted. And so when I finally showed up at Stanford, I probably did feel like I had finally made it into one of these rooms, right? And yet you get there and you realize pretty quickly there are a lot of smart people here. In fact, most of them are smarter and they're better prepared than I am. And so to get there and to start to fail, that was a blow for sure. And I still wanted to be a doctor, but I wasn't excelling the way that I wanted to. And it was only through my extracurricular activities, one in particular. I hate to admit this, but I'm, I'm proud of it, but I don't like to admit it all the time. I was in one of those singing groups, you know, kind of like the movie Pitch Perfect. So I was in the Stanford Fleet Street Singers, which is an all-male a cappella group. And I was the business manager in the group one year, not knowing anything about business, literally not knowing anything about business, but I found that it came naturally. To me. And so to transition from being a pre-med to business to technology was extremely, extremely unpredictable relative to what I had wanted my entire life. And it was just almost random. But if I look back on it, it wasn't random because I was seeking success and I wasn't successful as a pre-med. I found some success even serendipitously as a business person, and then I discovered technology because I had an Ethernet jack. In my dorm room at Stanford, and that unlocked going online. And when I went online, because my experience growing up was so marked by geography, not being bound by where I lived and being able to experience virtual spaces, that resonated with me so strongly immediately that I got it. Even though I couldn't maybe articulate it as a business opportunity, I immediately understood, my gosh, there are so many people like me. And when they come online, they're gonna realize that where they live doesn't matter because they can go online and experience everything they wanna experience. And so I ultimately begged my parents before going to medical school, which was my path, can I please go and work at this company called Yahoo, which was not the behemoth that it became. And so I was one of the first 100 employees there. At the time, there was a chocolate milk company called Yoo-Hoo. They may still exist. Yoo-Hoo chocolate milk. And so yes, there was a moment where my poor mom went from thinking, why is he studying English when he knows how to speak the language, number one? And number two, is he gonna deliver chocolate milk to people? Right? So I definitely put my parents through the wringer, but it was like winning a lottery ticket that I was able to join a company like Yahoo at that stage. And that's really the thing that launched everything that came afterwards.

Well, first of all, what an incredible inner compass to know, hey, this is not clicking in the way that I want it to. And I actually have these other strengths. Let me go petition my parents to actually get out there and try this. Of course, you couldn't have picked a better first internet company to join at the time. I guess maybe there was like one better one that you could have joined, but other than that—

No, there weren't any better ones. And you know, the funny thing is, in and your listeners know this, in retrospect, it looks clean and it looks really strategic and it looks like I had some inner compass, right? At the time, it was all about anxiety and it was all about struggle and it was all about being incredibly insecure and it was all about surviving, frankly. And so I could say, oh yeah, I had this master plan and it was exactly the opposite. It was failure leading to learning, which led to serendipity, which led to opportunity. And then once that opportunity existed, boy, I think that I took that little seam that I had and I ripped it open into a giant gash that I could walk through, right? But no, it was not planned. And when I think back on it, I'm such a planned person today. I'm really surprised that this happened. I mean, I, I feel like it's an incredible blessing. You know, I said it was like I won the lottery, right? I wouldn't chalk this up to skill or hard work, which I think a lot of success does come from skill and hard work. I would chalk this one up to luck, and I'm not above saying that I think luck is more powerful than skill and hard work.

Okay. Well, I think we can debate that, but I, I wanna get into the, 'cause that sounds like you have a lot of skills under the hood here and you're being modest, but as it relates to that experience at Yahoo and then of course yourself being in inspired to join this thing, entrepreneurship, call it being a founder, with Opinions, your first company with an E. We can talk about what happened there and how it merged into Shopping.com and acquired eBay. Like, all of that is good, but I, I'm worried we're not even going to get into Nextdoor. There's so much to talk about. I just, I think I want to orient our listeners to like the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Bay Area of that time. Kind of how was your journey and what was then, and I guess today known as the early dot-com era, kind of coming about and, and what drew you into that founder moment?

I think I'd probably go back to community, but just to give the listeners a sense of what it was like back then, the internet was just emerging. There was no mainstream trillion-dollar internet companies that had gone public, right? Even Yahoo. I mean, think about the fact that Yahoo had the name Yahoo. There was a company called Yahoo. Today that's completely mainstream. The wackiest name is completely fine, right? But back then, It was hard for people to be taken seriously. Once these companies began to go public, then there was a lot of attention on them, and then everyone was watching CNBC and they were day trading and this and that. And so people started to move to the Bay Area in droves. And instead of going and joining banks and joining consulting firms, the brightest people, not just engineers but business people, were coming to the Bay Area because at that time as well, there was mass centralization of these companies in the Bay Area. There was Amazon and Microsoft in the Pacific Northwest, and there was maybe a few in New and a few dotted across the landscape in other places, but it was largely happening in Palo Alto, not even San Francisco, frankly. And so being at Yahoo was incredible and it was definitely like winning a lottery. There was only one issue, which is, you know, every day I worked at Yahoo and I was there for 3 years and I was one of the first 100. By the time I left, there were 10,000 people. When I joined, the market cap was less than a billion. When I left, it was over $100 billion. I think there were probably 10 million users of the product when I joined, and by the time I left, there were dozens of products and probably a billion users, right? So imagine living through that, which was just an unbelievable privilege to go to work every single day and the numbers go up. I've never been able to replicate that, and I don't know many people who have, but there was this truth that dawned on me the longer I stayed, and this is what kind of opened my mind to being a founder, which is Being at Yahoo was an unbelievable privilege, but I knew that if I happened to not look both sides of the street before I crossed and I was run over by a truck, I don't know that anyone would even notice that I was gone. None of the success that Yahoo experienced, you know, all those metrics that I talked about, none of them were being driven by me. And I felt that I really wanted to be one of the people that was creating the value. And that is definitionally what a founder is. And so on the side, really nights and weekends, I got together with 4 other aspiring entrepreneurs. And you know, this time again, to set the landscape, no one would leave Yahoo. I mean, the stock was doubling every 3 months, right? I mean, it was crazy that someone would consider leaving my co-founder of Nextdoor, someone that is like a sister to me, Sarah Leary. She has this great expression, don't leave a good time looking for a good time. I left a good time looking for a good time because I wanted to be a founder. So me and 4 other folks started this nonprofit called Round Zero. Round Zero was a name, kind of a geeky name that refers to prior to seeking round 1 financing. There's round 0, and that's when you're thinking about, do I have the right idea? Do I have the right co-founders? Do I even need a co-founder? How am I gonna make a market entry? How am I gonna raise money? How am I gonna talk about this idea? Who Who are the competitors? What are they up to? And you realize pretty quickly that you can't answer those questions by yourself. You need community around you, and it's so much better when you're talking to people who are trying to do similar things. And so we put together this group that would meet once a month, and that was really my first startup. I was the president of this thing, Round Zero, and we would bring people together. And that was also where, from a networking standpoint, Reid Hoffman and Elon Musk and Larry Page and And many of the giants of today would attend Round Zero, and that gave me the courage to then go and start ePinions, the company that you're referring to, in 1999. So I joined Yahoo in '96. I started ePinions in 1999. That company was one of the hottest at the beginning and then was one of the near busts, I think a couple of weeks from going out of business. Ultimately, we merged with another private company. There were lawsuits. I had to leave. The company ended Ended up going public. It was successful. It was sold to eBay. Lots of learnings, lots of highs and lows. And then I took a little bit of time off and lived in my favorite city in the world, New York, which I know Claudia, you're originally from. And then I came back to the Bay Area, became an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital. They had funded Epinions, the first company, and that ultimately led to Nextdoor.

Well, I'm excited to dig deep into the Nextdoor story. So let's orient ourselves. You are in the Bay Area. It's, you know, almost 9 years later from your previous startup, and you're co-founding Nextdoor with your co-founders Sarah, Prakash, and David, aiming to build a hyper-local social network grounded in real identities. Tell us, what was the aha moment? What sparked the idea?

Well, the first funny thing to tell you is Nextdoor is even been a kind of phoenix rising from the ashes story, right? And so when I went back to be an EIR at Benchmark, it was me and Sarah Leary, uh, the person who I've worked with most closely for the last 25 years. And again, someone that I consider a sister, one of the most important people in my life. And we started a company first out of Benchmark as EIRs, entrepreneurs in residence, called Fanbase, which was about community, but about sports community. And that company after 2 years didn't And so we were gonna give the money back. It was a failure. It actually was not gonna be one of those startups that succeeded. And we knew how hard it is to build a successful company. It's equally hard to build an unsuccessful company. And so that's something you don't want to do. You know, that's the, the corollary to don't leave a good time looking for a good time is if you're having a bad time, get the heck out. Right? And so we were getting the heck out. We were gonna give the money back. And Bill Gurley, another really influential person in my career, one of the most influential. Said, hey, look, we, we believe in the team. And at that point, the team was also Prakash, who you mentioned, David Wiesen, and a number of others, Adam Ginsberg, Madison McIlwain, Garrett Gonzalez, 7 of us as a matter of fact. And we spent the summer of 2010 coming up with new ideas. And one of those was Nextdoor. Now, to answer your question, how did we come up with the idea? Right? Well, first of all, there was a fair amount of desperation because we were coming off of a failed thing. And we had told the employees of Fanbase, hey, look, we know Fanbase isn't working. So we're sunsetting this thing that you've joined, like you're here because you've joined, because you wanna build this thing, Fanbase, that's not working. And we admit that. And so we're gonna take a summer and try to come up with a new idea. And if we do, we're gonna pursue that idea with the funds that we've raised. If we don't, we're gonna return all the money to our investors and we're not gonna take any severance or anything. If you don't want to do that, which is you didn't join this company to be a founder, but you're about to be a founder of something new. If you don't want to do that, we'll give you severance now so that you can feel like, you know, you got something. And I think we had maybe a dozen people and 5 of the people took the severance packages and then we were left with 7. And I joke with people, it's not like you can put on your Google Calendar, 10:00 AM, come up with billion-dollar idea. Like it's just not the way it works, right? I mean, founders tend to either have, have spent years thinking of ideas they want to pursue and then they finally have the courage to do so, right? Or they do something that's a little bit more rigorous. They worked at a particular company and they saw an opportunity at that company that the company wasn't pursuing, so they went off to do it themselves, right? Rarely is a company founded because the original idea that you're passionate about is not working. Right? That's a tough pivot. I mean, that's a true pivot and it's a tough pivot. And yet we had the desperation. We knew we wanted to work on community because that was something that we were passionate about, that we felt like we were good at. And we ran across this article in the New York Times about the decline of community in America and how almost a third of Americans could not name a single neighbor by name. And that was not the way that we grew up. I mean, going back to Odessa, Texas, you know, I talked about how it may not have have the influential rooms, but what it does have is a really strong sense of community. People really care about each other. They look out for each other. The neighborhoods are wonderful places to grow up. And I really took that for granted because if I fast forward to the summer of 2010, I'm living in Pacific Heights in San Francisco, the center of the tech universe, and there's no sense of community in my neighborhood. I don't know any of my neighbors, right? And so we felt that viscerally what the article was talking about. Then we found a book called Bowling Alone. By Robert Putnam, who'd been the chair of the sociology department at Harvard. And the subtitle of Bowling Alone is The Decline of Community in America. And that's when we started to do a little bit of research around what's happened in neighborhoods. And by the way, technology, not just internet technologies, but televisions have played a pretty big role in this decline. And we started to think, can we use the benefits and beauty of technology to recreate a sense of community online and help bolster the real sense of community offline. And that led to things like verification of identity and neighborhood boundaries and all of the things that have become true innovations relative to what Nextdoor is and what I think it can become.

Thank you so much for telling the story of How, you know, the first idea wasn't the one that worked out and you made the hard decision to, you know, switch gears, pivot. I think, you know, a lot of the founders that we talk to, and I'm sure a lot of folks in our audience, often have a hard time balancing the tension between being tenacious and continuing to try to figure out how to make things work versus knowing when something's structurally not going to work and their opportunity cost is too high and they should be doing something else. So it's just incredible. Helpful to hear that narrative.

Well, and look, I think it's worth spending a minute on that because today I am lucky enough to work with lots of different entrepreneurs and founders. And that dilemma you're talking about, which is you're working really hard on something, there's a little bit of daylight, but not as much as you know you need. And either you can't recruit a co-founder, you can't go raise the money, and you always think as a founder, it's right around the corner. If I just do this one other thing, if I just sign this one customer, if I just release this one feature, if I just hire this one person, if I just make this one part of the app better, right? And I don't know the magical answer of when you say enough, let's move on to something else. Or when you say it really is around the corner, I don't know the answer. What I can tell you is The reason that we ultimately put Fanbase to rest is because we didn't have the energy every day when we woke up to work on that problem. And so I don't think we ever really know when's the right time to keep going versus when's the right time to quit, you know, unless we run out of money, right? But even then, you can work without money.

Right?

But what we do know, and it's almost like a metaphysical thing, we do know when we wake up in the morning, are we getting more energy out of working on that problem or are we giving more energy out of working on that problem? And we had felt after 2 years, we can't spend more time on fan base.

That's such a helpful framework. You know, as you're saying, definitely part art, part science, but oftentimes your gut instinct is, is pretty accurate. And I'd love to parlay that into, um, just sort of the energy you were getting out of building Necro. Um, the platform officially launched in the US in October of 2011. Tell us, what were the early reactions from users? What did you learn during that launch phase? And how did you know you had signs of product market fit?

It— those are all great questions. You know, I'll, I'll start with, with the first, which is how did we know we were onto something? And, you know, I'll contextualize it the way that I have, which is we had an even higher bar for whether we were onto something or not, because it's not like we did Fanbase thinking that we weren't onto something. In the early days of Fanbase, we thought we were onto something as well, and clearly we weren't, right? So the last thing in the world we wanted to do was waste 2 more years before we found out that the thing we were working on was not gonna happen, right? And so the first thing I'll say is, whenever we described the concept of Nextdoor, And this includes literally hand-drawing wireframes and showing them to people in neighborhoods, right? Before writing a single line of code. Whenever we describe the idea, the idea is very simple, which is technology has done a lot of great things, but it's also in some ways isolated us. It's also made us more likely to sit at home and scroll through feeds than to go outside and meet people in the real world, right? We know more about Taylor Swift than we know about the person who lives across the street. Week, you know, that kind of thing, right? And that's well known. However, we spend the majority of our time and our money in a, call it, 5-mile radius around where we live. That's just a fact. And so why isn't technology doing a better job of strengthening the connections in that very small radius? And if it could, through a social media interface, is that something you would enjoy using? People are like, oh yeah, I do want to know. My neighbors. I do want to know the best thing to do this weekend. I do want to know the best place to get fish tacos and the best place to go to get a teeth cleaning done. And you know, the person who can actually put my Christmas lights up in the right way. I mean, I do want to know all those things and it doesn't exist. You know, at the time there wasn't even Google, there was Yahoo, but it doesn't exist on Yahoo. It doesn't exist on Google today. It doesn't exist on ChatGPT. So I do want that. I do want the collective intelligence of my neighborhood. Very accessible, and I want to get to know those people who have the collective intelligence. So the first signal was there was a movement bigger than us that wanted to bring back a sense of community to the neighborhood. We didn't meet that many bah humbug people who said, oh, I hate my neighbors. I never want to talk to them.

Right?

There are people like that, obviously, but the vast majority of people said, you know, I do actually. Want to contribute and be part of my local community. There are so many ways our neighbors can help us. I just don't know how to interact. Like, I can't break the ice. I don't know these people. And so that was the first side. We would then take the discussions to wireframes and we'd show them wireframes, and it was very clear that that was something they would use. It was a utility-centric thing from the beginning, meaning it wasn't so much about entertainment. Enjoyment. It was about solving problems. My dog is lost. I need a recommendation for a dentist. Did anyone hear that loud noise? And then when we started building a very crude product that wasn't even called Nextdoor, it was called Lorelei Neighbors. It was in the Menlo Park neighborhood of Lorelei, and it was just called Lorelei Neighbors. We were doing site maintenance one day, and so the site was down and we started getting all these emails from people who lived in the neighborhood. What happened to my neighbor's website? What, what's going on here? Did you all take it away? And you know, at that point, the power of a painkiller versus a vitamin. So a vitamin's something that's nice. Did you take your vitamins this morning? Yes, I did. Oh no, I forgot to. That's okay. I'll take 'em tomorrow. But what are people gonna do for painkillers? I mean, they're gonna slither on their belly to get to the painkiller with their last ounce of energy because they need the painkiller, right? And so if you can build a painkiller, like something that people, if it were turned off, they would scream, right? You kind of know you're onto something. And that's what we were getting in the early days. And honestly, I would say from the summer of 2010 until, gosh, even when I left the company at the end of 2018, that was a pretty consistent arc. By the time I came back in 2024, I'm sorry to say that even though we had over 100 million verified users, Many of those users were telling me, oh, I used to use Nextdoor. It just wasn't that great. So I don't use it anymore. Right. But in those early days, the signal was, it was, it was very, very clear. And, and the product market fit piece was clear as well. What I don't think we did in those early days is the potential of the idea was always here and the product was always trailing it by a pretty significant margin. And the best companies are built because you have massive potential and then you have these incredible products that match that potential, and then that creates magic.

Well, I'd love to dig a little bit into one of those sort of like painkiller features/personas that jumped off the page in the early days. Um, you know, from the start, Nextdoor's crime and safety features took off, even sparking public safety collaborations. Um, certainly resonant, you know, here in San Francisco. But the platform also had to grapple with the challenge of being a product that had many different types of users and different types of communities. How did your team navigate those complications while remaining true to your mission?

Yeah, it's such a great question. And the idea of using technology and neighborhood-centric communication to create a safer place for everyone, that's not something Nextdoor invented. The idea of neighborhood watch is something that existed long before Nextdoor, right? We just created a digitization of the neighborhood watch. And so we knew from the very beginning that it's a lot more efficient. If you see something that you think other neighbors should know about because it doesn't look safe, it's way more efficient to just put it out on an online platform versus go neighbor by neighbor or call a phone tree or all the ways that we did it in the past, right? But I think what you're referring to is I remember I was actually taping a segment on, I think, Dr. Phil, if you remember that TV show, about this amazing story that had happened on Nextdoor when neighbors were helping each other. And an article came out that said that Nextdoor was a place where racial profiling was happening. And I remember seeing the article and thinking, wait a second, I'm brown. Like, I am not, I'm not white. I am a person of color. In what universe would I have created a product that would racially profile people? Right? And that was a real wake-up call. And I think many, many, many entrepreneurs need to think about this and have had the wake-up call, particularly in, in the, the modern era of technology, which is you can build amazingly powerful things that have unintended consequences. And if you don't try to anticipate some of those consequences upfront, it's very difficult to then refactor the product after it's already been built, particularly if the product is about user-generated content and online community, because you're essentially just building a container and then your users fill the container up, right? And so in lots of cases, I would say less than 1% of total content, but we would say internally, even one case is too many, even if it's less than 1%. But in those cases, Someone would see someone who looked unfamiliar in a neighborhood, either because of their skin color or the way they dressed, right? Or some of their style choices. And in cases, it wasn't a criminal. It wasn't someone that was trying to do bad things. It was just someone who looked different. And we all know, I mean, diversity is the spice of life. I mean, it's, it's totally okay if people look different and, and they, they do look different. That doesn't mean that they're bad people, right? And it was particularly, I would say, powerful for me because I grew up in a place where I looked different than everyone, and it would've been easy for people to racially profile me growing up in my neighborhood in Odessa, Texas, right? And so that led to this realization that we are responsible even for unintended consequences. And the idea of racial profiling, it's actually about unconscious bias, which is a very difficult thing. Unconscious bias means I don't even know that I'm stereotyping, yet I am. And so if people don't even know they're doing something, how do you teach them to do the right thing, right? But I think we have to be, we have to be challenged to come up with ways that we can help people be the best versions of themselves. Online and offline. And so this led to a lot of sleepless nights, honestly. I mean, no company wants to, wants to wake up in the morning and say, I'm going to go work on something that's going to racially profile people, right? Even if it's less than 1% of the, of the content, right? And you're attacked. And, and that becomes the story because as you know, you know, in the press, if it bleeds, it leads, right? So like it's the controversial stuff that gets amplified, but it inspired us or, or really created a desperation for us. Around ensuring that we were doing everything we could to ensure that neighbors using our platform were responsible and they weren't racially profiling. And there was a lot of great learnings in that phase.

Thank you for bringing us into the room around, you know, creating a digital third space that has unintended messy, complicated side effects, which is just probably true about building community in general, right? Because at the end of the day, when you're putting a group of people together, um, who might not all come from the same background, there are gonna be these emotions that come up and fears that ultimately create challenges. And of course, for you, challenges that are at scale, given the way that Nextdoor has exploded in being the platform of choice for these local community-led moments and movements. And, you know, thinking about how you got to that, it was really a classic tale of Silicon Valley, sort of. You mentioned Benchmark being one of your earliest supporters through being both an EIR there, but Nextdoor has gone on to raise over $450 million in private capital from places like Benchmark, Greylock, Tiger Global, Coastal Ventures. I mean, these are tier one incredible investors, and ultimately this led to your IPO via SPAC in 2021. Um, so could you draw us in a little bit more to those early conversations and ultimately scaled exit for your company?

I certainly would not call an IPO an exit. I think the notion of exit, like most entrepreneurs, I think their hope and dream is that they're working on that problem forever because there's an infinite horizon for the opportunity to get bigger and bigger. I haven't seen that many. There are obviously lots of successes in terms of acquisitions, like true exits, right? But I would urge entrepreneurs to be be thinking about a limitless horizon and to pick ideas that the better they produce a product, the more opportunity there will be and the more passion they will have to work towards that. But yes, I mean, in many ways, you know, I joke and say if you looked up Silicon Valley entrepreneur in the dictionary, I'm pretty stereotypical. An Indian guy who went to Stanford, who started, you know, companies funded by those people that you mentioned. Where two of the companies went public. And so we, we have been very, very, very fortunate. But what people don't ever see, and all the founders who are listening know this, and this goes for the most successful founders, I'm sure Elon Musk feels this way. Success as an entrepreneur tends to be 999 failures leading to one massive success. So when I think about that IPO, yeah, I think about some of the great moments, but you also think about the fact that Nextdoor was founded out of a failed company and that we had deal with the racial profiling and that, you know, there were many times where we were trying to hire a person or we were trying to raise money, we were trying to do a business deal, and the answer was no, because that is the daily life of building one of these things. But ultimately, our conviction in the potential of the idea compelled us to keep going. And the world's desire to have something like this gave us the opportunity to generate that amount of business success. The other side of it is, speaking very candidly, post-IPO, we lost a lot of the mojo that had enabled the IPO to begin with. We didn't improve the product the way that we should have. We didn't address the shortcomings that had already existed even prior to the IPO. And this isn't just when I wasn't CEO. I mean, I made thousands of mistakes as CEO, right? And you ultimately have to address those. Oh, you know, or they're gonna come, they're gonna come home to roost. And when you become a larger platform, whether it's because you're public or because in Nextdoor's case, you have over 100 million verified neighbors, 99% of neighborhoods in America, 10 other countries, right? That's a big scale. And so when there's a leak in, in the dam somewhere, right? The size of the dam at that point is pretty massive. And so the leak can actually blow things up, right? Which is unfortunately what began happening post-COVID, because during COVID obviously people leaned on Nextdoor more than they ever had because there was no way to interact with people in, in real physical space. And so coming out of COVID like many internet companies, we realized that we were at an artificially high point. And then the question is, okay, when you fall, do you do the short-term things that help you kind of maintain that artificially high point? Or do you acknowledge the fact that you have some plumbing that you need to fix and you're gonna fix the plumbing? And in the midst of fixing that plumbing, your results may not look that great. As a private company, that's hard. As a public company, it's near impossible. It is near impossible. And that happened to us. That happened to us.

And you've stepped back in to lead this company in the public arena. You're calling out the fact that COVID really was a moment of opportunity and a moment of challenge for your platform. Speaking as a Nextdoor user, my favorite Nextdoor experience during COVID was that I got a free table and I spent an entire Sunday sanding it and restaining it to become my own dining table. Shout out my friend friends who helped me with that project. But it really was a community moment, right? We were all stuck at home and therefore had time to do different— um, how was your experience stepping into that moment from the transition of Sarah having been CEO, uh, you know, things hitting the fan for the world, um, and then ultimately for you returning back into this role as leading the helm for Nextdoor?

Yeah, well, first of all, I give Sarah a lot of credit because not only did she navigate the company through an IPO. She had to navigate the company through COVID. And then on the other side of COVID the whole idea of hybrid work. Those were things operating as a public company, operating during COVID and operating in a hybrid environment I'd never done. So stepping back into the company, I immediately had 3 pretty steep learning curves that I had to get under control, right? Not to say that I have them under control even today, right? But the company was very different when I came back. Not only was the stock down 80%, but the way to operate the company had changed because public companies are different than private companies. And COVID did change a lot of the ways that we think about community and the way that we see community, right? And, and finally, because a lot of people moved out of the urban centers during COVID we had a bunch of employees who weren't in San Francisco, which had been the headquarters of the company, right? And so there were just a lot of challenges outside of the main challenge, which is the product wasn't delivering enough value. And that ultimately, for a technology company, you can't really thrive if your product isn't creating enough value because it either means that users don't want it, or it means that someone out there is providing more value than you. Users are getting it somewhere else, right? And so there were a lot of challenges facing the company, even kind of post-COVID and all the changes that COVID brought. If anything, I believe that the COVID moment made us crave community even more. I, I feel like the opportunity for Nextdoor post-COVID is honestly even bigger, but we have to do our part and we just hadn't and, and we still haven't. We still need to make the product better.

Well, just jumping in on the community point, I think you're in an incredibly amazing position. Given you have the user base that you do and how much adoption— you mentioned 99% penetration of neighborhoods across America, which is just frankly unheard of. And then in the same time, we're hearing today about these platforms that are B2C that are getting to millions or hundreds of millions of users overnight. Those growth curves compared to when you first got started, how are you thinking about continued sustained growth and retention in Nextdoor in this time? It's this rapid ability to obtain new users given where the internet penetration is today.

Yeah, it's really, really a, a, a true statement that we should have more than 100 million. I mean, when the other platforms have billions, like why don't we? Right? And I think it speaks to the opportunity for the product to improve. I don't think so much about those rapidly growing networks as, as, as something that we should emulate because Nextdoor, while it may seem like one big platform, and if it's one big platform, network effects and increasing returns to scale and all of the things that these companies do to grow really rapidly, those can be taken advantage of. Nextdoor is over 300,000 unique neighborhoods, and if your neighborhood in the marina is doing a great job, that doesn't actually benefit my neighborhood in Highland Park in Texas. So there's no network effect, right? Which is the thing that really enables that rapid growth. Now, I think we should ask ourselves the question, we should hold ourselves accountable. Why don't we have every person in the marina using Nextdoor? Why don't we have every person in Highland Park? Why isn't there a mini network effect? So we need to create 300,000 individual network effects, right? But one of the reasons why Facebook tried something called Facebook Neighborhoods and then and put it to rest, and many other big companies have tried efforts like this, but they haven't worked, is because they tend to think of them as how quickly can we get to 100 million users plus? And that's solving through quantity. I believe we have to solve through quality, and that's something that won't change from the early days and, and it won't change now.

You've spoken about the unique positioning of Nextdoor and our local communities coming out of the pandemic, but you know, 5 years later we're in another another equally interesting, if not more interesting, time with the AI boom, especially in the Bay Area. Um, we're seeing AI transform search, social, and discovery, and I think it's really important to keep in mind kind of that quality piece as well in the lens of AI. Um, how do you see AI reshaping the way people interact with local communities and information over the next 5 to 10 years? And how are you thinking about embedding AI into Nextdoor's Boy, 5 to 10 years is a really long time horizon.

I mean, you'll get a lot, you'll get a lot of arguments about whether AGI, which is like real sentient beings using AI, will even exist. I'll try to move it more towards the 3 to 5 year timeframe. So I'm hugely bullish on AI. I think of all the technology revolutions that I've seen, AI is without a doubt the biggest, and that's internet. Or sort of nothing to internet, internet to World Wide Web, World Wide Web to cloud, mobile, whatever you want to call it. Now, AI, I think, is the biggest of all of them. I really do. I think we'll get unprecedented leverage as human beings from AI tools. That said, I always think about AI as an advisor, not as a principal. And what I mean by that is humans are still the drivers. AI is whispering in your ear. It's kind of like that little advisor you have on your shoulder that's helping you go faster or drive safer or get to your destination in a faster, more economical way. I do not think AI is actually the driver right now, even with Waymo, right? Waymo starts with real humans in the car driving around, and then at some point the humans will pass off to to the Waymo that's actually doing the work, right? So I don't believe that AI will replace humans in any way, shape, or fashion. I think it will make us way more efficient. And in much the same way that internet spaces democratized access, I feel the same way about AI. Think about having a tutor. You know, I think about my children. I have a 13-year-old, a 12-year-old, and a 10-year-old. And they come home now from school and responsible use of AI gives them an unlimited resource to help them learn more quickly, more comprehensively in a personalized way, almost as if they're going to school with someone who knows everything about them and is teaching directly to them. And it's $200 a month or whatever ChatGPT costs, right? I mean, that's kind of unprecedented. So that's just one example. So I'm hugely bullish on AI. I do believe that when it comes to social media, we will need to be very careful with content that's created by AI because it's not humans. And how do you actually know the difference? You've probably seen those amazing companies that can take videos that are created about real people. It could take, make a video of the three of us having this discussion, Madison McIlwain when we never had the discussion, right? I mean, it's amazing technology, but it's a little scary because you don't want to be in a position where you say what's real and what's not. So I believe some of the kind of founding principles of Nextdoor around verification of identity and authenticity and the fact that you're talking to your real neighbors, I believe that's a great set of ingredients for creating really valuable AI because there should be a good neighbor AI in every single neighborhood on Nextdoor that you can ask questions to. Some people don't want to post publicly. Some people think the question's already been asked 100 times. Some people just want to know what's happened in the past, right? They can feel like it might be annoying to ask their neighbors those questions. So there should be a good neighbor AI, but that good neighbor AI in our case is going to be completely built off of what real neighbors have said. Not crawling the web and looking at different things and then munging them together, right? So I would say responsible AI is, I think, one of the greatest forces for good that will occur in my lifetime. I believe that not just for Nextdoor, although I believe it deeply for Nextdoor. I believe it generally, but irresponsible use of AI is like any other really powerful technology. It can lead to a lot of unintended consequences that will make it more difficult for us to constrain some of these problems because technology is an amplifier.

Yeah.

If you think about that great advisor, what does that advisor do? It helps you be the best version of yourself. It amplifies you so that you can actually be more effective, more powerful, right? But if it takes the parts of you that are not great, it can amplify those as well, right? I mean, think about anonymity online. Do people treat each other well? If they can be anonymous, not nearly as well as if they have to actually be tied to their identities. And so we have to think about these things before we unleash the AI on the world. But I'm certainly not of the camp that we should wait, regulate any of those things. I think we just need to be thinking as much about responsible AI as we think about powerful AI, and I think we'll get to the right outcomes.

I love that intersection of the core principles of Nextdoor really tackling an existential challenge that is arriving for any end user that is interacting daily in the AI ecosystem. Claudia, when you have to drop, please feel free to. I'll close this out here. But just like maybe a final question and kind of thinking about scope and scale for Nextdoor in this next— I love that you bring up both like the word social media and community, and there hasn't really been like a breakout social media platform yet in AI native. I don't think chat really qualifies, even though it's a breakout consumer product. How are you thinking about this next decade of— and I say decade because I feel like, as you, you saw firsthand, there was, you know, the social medias of the 2000s, then there was the mobile social medias and video-first social medias, and now I'm kind of like sitting here wondering how that integrates next and where community trust is coming. Um, for the Nextdoor roadmap, how are you thinking about like leaning in or leaning out on like traditional social media and potentially how AI integrates to that, to that experience?

It's a great question. We call Nextdoor a social network because the, the architecture of Nextdoor is the whole thing is built on a social graph, which is actually a neighborhood graph, which is we know you, we know where you live, we know where your neighbors live, and we connect you. And so that's why we call ourselves social media. In reality, what we're trying to build and what we have built is a lot more like Reddit. Reddit than it is like Instagram and Reddit. If you think about each subreddit as a kind of neighborhood, right? Reddit is about community. And so I think maybe a better lens that we can view Nextdoor through is what happens to Reddit in a world of rampant AI, right? Well, I think we know that we are gonna trust more the content on Reddit that's coming from real people. Right? And so that's gonna be the case with Nextdoor. But at the same time, we know that reading an entire subreddit takes a lot of time and effort. And so if AI can summarize and get you more quickly to the right answer, you embrace that. And so I believe that ultimately for Nextdoor, AI can be a very powerful force in taking authentic neighbor conversation and making it more powerful. Because it can package it, it can summarize it, it can leverage it in a way that is way better than just the question-answer format. When we talk about agentic AI interfaces, what we're really talking about is conversations. And most social media is not a conversation. It's a post, and then you react to the post, right? Reddit is a conversation. People come up to a subreddit, they post something, they say, what do you think? Or they ask a question, right? And The responses are almost more important than the original question. Nextdoor is the same way. It's neighbors asking their neighbors questions or neighbors posting information that they want their neighbors to respond to. So we call ourselves social media because we do have a social graph. We have a graph system. But in fact, the building of community is a lot more like subreddits. And within the subreddits, whether they're on Reddit itself or on the way we think about our neighborhoods on Nextdoor, work, authenticity's really important, but you don't want authenticity without leverage. And so the authenticity comes from the real verified identity. The leverage comes from AI. And so that intersection, as you talked about, it's almost like intersecting community and social media. Social media or a social graph is a powerful piece of technology because it tells us what can be relevant for you. And that's what AI can do as well. But community, community is human. And, and frankly, even at Nextdoor, we would rather you get off the app and go into the real world and meet your neighbors in real life. We think if we introduce you to one new neighbor who you become really good friends with, you'll, you'll be passionate about Nextdoor for the rest of your life, right? We don't want you to doom scroll forever. That's not, that's not actually our intention.

This relationship between URL and IRL is definitely one that's constantly evolving. Um, only getting harder to manage personally, but made powerful when there are platforms that allow us to get offline alongside our local communities. So I'm really excited about the ways in which you in this role as CEO are leading Nextdoor into this next generation of user experiences and connection. And we're curious to hear, you know, you've been 18 months in this seat of public company CEO after having founded the company. What's next for you and what's next for the company?

Again, you know, speaking as a founder, we, we live in the moment so much that, that I find when you start thinking too much about what's next, you can't keep your eye on, you know, what's right in front of you. We're trying really hard to make 2026 the year when the Nextdoor product feels and operates and performs in a transformatively better way. And that is my, that, that is my kind of unyielding priority and focus. It's a privilege to be back in Nextdoor. You know, one of the reasons it's a privilege is I've been able to reunite with my great friend and, and almost sister and partner of 25 years, Sarah Leary, who I think the world of. And so to be able to work on this problem with her, she's one of the original founders as well. What a blessing. What an incredible privilege. And to be back with many of the employees I worked with before and a whole new set of employees that I'm delighted to be with, right? So I'm very much enjoying myself. I mean, my dad used to tell me all the time, the journey's the reward. I think that's true. I mean, you have to remember that you gotta smell the roses along the way, but if you've gone through what I went through, which is you're the CEO and then you're not the CEO, and then you come back, you realize how fragile these situations are and you wanna make the most of them. So I'm not really thinking about what's next. I'm thinking about earning the right to think about what's next by making right now great.

Incredible way to reframe what is oftentimes too tempting to think about what's coming down the, uh, with Undervaluing what you can do today. So thank you for reframing our own question and giving us a bit of inspiration as we're recording this just into the new year, and we'll be releasing it in 2026 to really look forward with an exciting momentum from today. We have a hero question that touches on some of the many amazing themes you've already mentioned in terms of people who have had an influence on your life.

But that question is, who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your I mean, there are so many, and the truth is, I mean, women have had the most profound impact, starting with my mom, who I talked about, moving to my wife, who is my best friend and, you know, the inspiration of all the good things that exist in my life today, including my children, right? But professionally, I would say Sarah Leary, who I've mentioned several times. I mean, she is someone who has made it possible for so many of my dreams to come true professionally and she's a person who makes all the highs so much higher and makes the lows not as low. And ultimately, when you're seeking partnership, friendship, you know, mentorship, anything, and she, she does all of those things. She makes me a better person, right? You want someone who amplifies the good stuff and can put the not so good stuff into perspective, right? And, you know, Sarah used to say to me, I think you're a good egg, even though I know you're cracked. Right. And so that, that idea that someone knows you well enough to acknowledge your flaws, but loves you in spite of them, that gives you incredible power because you can be authentic. You, you could, you don't have to put up a, a kind of mask or a shield where you're a perfect version of yourself, right? You can just be authentically who you are and you know that person's gonna support you through success and failure. Sarah's done that. You know, in addition, she's probably the most successful person that I've worked with, not just as we've worked together, but in every part of her professional life. She's someone who I really look up to and I learn from, and she's just fun. You know, so I, I often say you want trust, respect, Trust, the person is high integrity. The person has your back. Respect, the person can teach you things and make you a better version. And finally, like, you want a person who's fun. Sarah is all three of those things in a way that no one I've ever worked with professionally has been, and, and it's a privilege to work with her.

What a trifecta for partnership. And I, as you're saying that, I'm reminded of my own partnership with Clint, um, and the ways that after half a decade, we have some of those abilities to have the hard conversations alongside riding the wave together and exciting momentum. So thank you for providing that model of leadership and partnership that is building community both inside of Nextdoor and of course outside of Nextdoor, broader ecosystem in which you live. But Nirav, this was absolutely a delightful conversation. Thank you so much for making time with us and sharing your story today on the—

I'm so delighted to have been here with you, and I'm so inspired by what you and Claudia have done, and I wish you all the best. And to all your listeners, keep tuning in. This is a good one. This is a good one.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast.

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