YouSaid · the spoken record

Nirav Tolia

lines on the record: 74
first: 2025-09-15
most recent: 2025-09-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It's all luck. I mean, the opportunities all emerged because of luck and timing and other people. Someone hired me at Yahoo. Someone led me into Stanford. My parents paved the way for all of this stuff. Bill Gurley supported me, even when the chips were down. Sarah Leary has been my partner for 25 years. These are people that they've made it all possible. So when I've been given that opportunity, I've done everything I can to ring the bell. And most of the most successful people I've met, it hasn't been just because of skill or just because of luck. It's been some conflation. And that's kind of what makes it magical.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Open the app several times every single day because you want to know the most important things that are going on around you. And there is no easy way to know what's going on around you today. Do you know what's happening this weekend in your San Francisco neighborhood? Do you know all the power outages as they occur? Do you know the next new restaurant that's coming in after that other restaurant closed? It's the person who wants to bake fresh empanadas in my neighborhood and you can walk right over and buy one those things are what make neighborhoods feel like home. Why can't next door be the place where you continually discover those things over and over again”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, make this appointment. Okay, put me in touch with this babysitter because you know what we're realizing now, particularly in a world of AI where most consumers are going to go to one place, ask a question, and everything's going to be taken care of behind the scenes. It's not going to be you go to Google, you get 15 links, you click on all of them, you hit back, you keep searching, you keep ultimately going from one place to another to another. That's the old world. The new world is you go one place. You ask a question, you get an answer, and you act on it. And so I think this is going to be a critical part of Nextdor's evolution.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you're exactly right. I mean, the question of recommendations that neighbors make for how you would spend your money and how you would spend your time. That's been 30% roughly of all the content on Nextdoor since inception. And we just launched the new Next Door, which for the first time brought in third-party content. All of our content historically has been from neighbors. But now with the new Next Door, we have 3,500 local publishers that are publishing 50,000 articles a week, and they're real journalists. And that's really important in the same way, what we haven't built and what we should have built, which is Angie's list and Yelp and Thumbtack and many others have done exceptionally well, we haven't built the button after the conversation happens that says, okay, book this for me.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you're the former CEO, people say, Oh, I love the concept of Nextdoor. I believe in it. But when you're the day-to-day CEO, people say, hey, you know that idea that you pitched me on? That's not what I see when I open up my app. That isn't what it feels like. It's few people complaining and it's some irrelevant postings about this and that, right? And so there was a gap. There is a gap between the potential of Nextdoor and the reality of the product today. I also think no one has one local. Google hasn't, Meta hasn't, Apple hasn't, Amazon hasn't, right? Why is that? It's really hard. And it's because it's incredibly difficult to get the same outcome from one locality to another. But I think we can do it. I think we can do it with a community-centric approach. But the product's got to be way better. And that's what we're trying to do.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The goal is to make it the essential local application. And that's very ambitious. Essential means people are using it every day, several times a day. And today of our 100 million verified neighbors, 25 million use next door every week. Even every day, right? So just based on the measurable numbers, there's a lot that we can do. And we don't think 100 million is the ceiling. And so, yes, I think it is a big challenge. It was almost easier to not be the active CEO because.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do feel that if you don't take this opportunity and next door fails, at some point in the future, you can ask yourself, why didn't I do whatever I could to help it succeed? And so from there with her blessing, I jumped in. And so I ultimately brought back my co-founder, Sarah Leary, who we've talked about a little bit and was blessed that she came back to join me. And so we're both refounding or refounders of the company. And Sarah used to say, Let's go back and finish the job.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the company had fallen into a place where there was a lot of adversity being a small cap stock. There was a lot of adversity dealing with the bump of COVID that had then returned to normal. There was a lot of adversity in managing a remote organization. We definitely felt as a board, this includes Sarah, that the company needed to go in a new direction. And in particular, we felt that that direction needed to be deeply steeped in a new product. And we could have found someone external, but that would have been very risky. Or you can bring the founder back. And no, I never thought about it. I wouldn't have joined 11 boards. I wouldn't have put my kids in school here in Dallas. I wouldn't have done it. But when the opportunity arose, I love Next Door. And I went to talk to my wife about it. And she said,”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it was a magical time because it wasn't the tourist season that you experience in Florence and Rome and Milan and Venice. It was real Italy. Meanwhile, at next door, Sarah's taken over. She's building the company. She's taken it public. The company goes through a transition. Yes, I'm paying attention. I'm on the board. I'm the chief cheerleader. And at that time, my wife and I decided that we weren't going to move the family back to San Francisco. We were going to move to Dallas because I didn't have a job to get back to and she didn't have a job to get back to either. We really wanted to be close to family. And so, yeah, there was no anticipation, expectation, or even wildest dream that I would go back to next door because that was November of 21. Starting in January of 22, the whole market went down.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Experienced my own personal renaissance. I mean, I was in the cradle of the Renaissance, and I think for me and my wife and three kids, we were undergoing our own. We were in Italy for seven months and then COVID hit. So within a number of days, we left everything in Italy and we rushed back to San Francisco. Within a series of weeks, San Francisco was shut down. And so then within a series of months, COVID had run through Europe enough that there was some herd immunity. And so we left San Francisco that summer and went back to Italy and did a second year there. And during that year, the border was shut down.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have been through enough difficult transitions that I was 100% focused on leaving in the best possible way. Yes, of course, from an ego standpoint, it hurt like crazy. I wanted to be the person who could take it from day one to day infinity. I wanted to be the person to take the company public. What was driving me was wanting next door to be successful. Because it felt like the best thing that I could do professionally ever. So I didn't think, oh, the next thing I do is going to be bigger than next door, right? I thought to myself, I love next door. And so when it was clear that I wasn't going to be the person to take it to the next stage, yeah, that was a blow. But honestly, at that point, I knew it was the right thing. And I was going to make it the right thing.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was not feeling fulfilled. And as a result, I was probably not fulfilling other people. And it started to show up in the progress of the company. And so I think the board felt at some point, gosh, has he plateaued? Because they didn't think that the opportunity had plateaued. And so, you know, they have a conversation. In Silicon Valley's conversations, they're kind of interesting. They start with, hey, have you ever thought of bringing on a CEO and you can be the chairman and you're the founder and you have the great ideas, but you need someone who's got the operational rigor and discipline and understands what scalability is like, right? But you know what that conversation really means. I mean, what that conversation really means is it's time for a new leader. And I knew in that moment that what they were saying was true. And we hired a wonderful woman, Sarah Fryer, who's now the CFO of OpenAI.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, I mean, you know, Bill Campbell used to say this great expression companies are not sold, they're bought. And the idea is you don't go like putting a shingle out saying I'm selling my company. You build something so great that someone wants to buy it. But I definitely.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything was making me feel stressed. We're not growing fast enough. We're not generating revenue. Our product isn't moving fast enough. The quality of the experience isn't where we need it to be. Like everything was making me stressed, right? And it was the stress in my world that got in the way of seeing clearly, thinking clearly. And then on the emotional side, the stress is where you're short with people. So by 2018, I think I would have been totally happy selling the company.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was getting burned out. I was tired. I was not operating at maximum intellectual capability or emotional capability. So an intellectual capability is, all right, I know how to start companies. Now this company's got 200 people. We still haven't really figured out revenue. What's going on?”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one of the principles in the founder's mentality is you have to innovate and execute at the same time. You know, some people will say, this is my innovation phase. And then some people will say, well, this is our execution phase. We're not innovating right now. The books made me think, gosh, you know, you got to figure out the muscle so that you can do both. You may be 60, 40, 70, 30, something like that, but you can't be 100. And I do believe now that from the beginning, if we'd involved small businesses, it would have created a more vibrant community.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't invest enough time on the advertising side. And as I listen to your question, I think we probably made a mistake not thinking about how to bring small businesses into the conversation from the beginning. Now, because I'm pretty frugal and because the company was successful, we could raise money. We were spending zero on marketing. We were not hiring hundreds and thousands of people. I think we were sub 200 employees. We had one office. We were kind of slow and steady, but I've been reading this book since coming back to Nextdor called The Founder's Mentality.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a really hard thing to generate revenue, but in our case, it's much harder to think about establishing ubiquity of all neighborhoods and having all of those neighborhoods be vibrant. And as a startup, I think it's very difficult to work on multiple hard problems at the same time. And so it's not that we didn't feel working on the advertising product was important. It's that we were so consumed, certainly in the first five years and even today, to be honest with trying to create the most vibrant atmosphere for people who want to be part of their local community.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would be like losing a family member, right? And so that has changed my perspective completely. You know, another example that is maybe a little bit more nuanced but still makes sense is if you're in a neighborhood and they're having a conversation about some place to take the kids for ice cream. That's a great conversation if you have children. If you don't have children, you don't care. You want to have the conversation about where to get an after-dinner drink. Right, so being able to facilitate those things in the same neighborhoods, that's got to be part of what makes Nextdoor Special because we're not robots and we got to figure out a way to unite around common things and then let all those people express themselves in different ways and still feel like next door is for them.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you said exactly the thing that I was going to say, right? Which is before I had a dog, Didn't want to see any livestock postings Years ago, we got a dog. If I lost my dog,”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now it's algorithmic, but it's not algorithmic in a bad way. It's algorithmic in that based on your behaviors, we show you more of the things you like and less of the things that you don't like. It just so happens, though, that we all have different tastes. I'll give you an example. Get a lot of feedback these days on next door that there are too many posts about lost dogs.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scale and with the technologies that we have in place. But in those early days, our only real arbiter was the people we had chosen to start those neighborhoods.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question. So, ultimately, we created neighborhood guidelines. You can't discuss national politics. If you do, you can get reprimanded, right? You can get disciplined. A much harder one is when someone wants to discuss something that the local government's doing and it's relevant to the community, but other people are like, you know what? I don't care. I don't want to hear this, right? And so the real antidote in today's world is personalization. It's this idea that over time we are smart enough using technology and it's primarily machine learning to learn here are the people and the topics that Guy wants to hear from. And if he doesn't want to hear about what's happening at city hall, that's okay. We don't have to silence the entire neighborhood because there are people in the neighborhood who do want to have that conversation. So it's much more sophisticated today at our”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On next door was exactly the inverse. On day one, hardly anyone showed up. Had to find the neighborhood, the founding member and the lead. But then those people would invite two or three people. And those people would invite two or three people. And two weeks later, there would be a couple dozen. But when we started next door, 2010, the Pew report on community in America said 30% of Americans could not name a single neighbor by name. So 30% of our potential audience doesn't know any of their neighbors, even if they want to invite them. And so this was, we knew from the very beginning, this was going to take more dedication, more resilience, more patience. And in many ways, we kind of wore that as a badge of honor because we knew that it would scare away the vast majority of competitors.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know there's always pressure to have a business model. However, when you choose an indirect business model and an indirect business model is when you're not asking your primary users to pay you directly, you are making money indirectly through advertising or through some other means. When you're building that kind of business, it's not a simultaneous you attract the user and you attract the advertiser at the same time. It's a sequential build. So I don't want anyone listening to think that we started next door thinking, oh, it doesn't matter how we're going to make money or when we're going to make money or why we're going to make money. No, no. We wanted to build a successful business on day one, but we had articulated a vision where the reason advertisers would care about advertising on next door is because there were vibrant communities and community audiences. And so on fan base, a bunch of people showed up on day one. And by day two, it was slightly less people. By day three, it was less. And then that just kept happening.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the quality of content was not the real challenge with Nextdoor. The challenge was people don't know their neighbors. And so how do we get people to join Nextdoor? How do you hear about it? You don't bump up against the content. Your neighbors can't invite you because they don't know who you are. And so that led to a lot of different innovations, including we would pay for them to send postcard invitations to their neighbors that would say, hey, I'm Guy, I'm your neighbor in this neighborhood, and I really want you to join this thing that we started called Next Door So-and-So. And please join. Here's a code.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the board members said, okay, you got 176 neighborhoods. How many neighborhoods do you think there are overall in the US? Of course, no one knows the answer, right? But we said, I don't know, it's probably like a couple hundred thousand maybe, right? And the board member said, okay, so if it's taken you a year to do 176, it's going to take us 100 years to get all the neighborhoods, right? But that was kind of a very daunting challenge. But, you know, 176 then as soon as we launch though, people were starting their neighborhoods. My parents started their neighborhood in Odessa, Texas. My brother started his neighborhood in Dallas. My sister-in-law started her neighborhood in San Diego. My brother-in-law started his neighborhood in Southern California. So very quickly, very soon thereafter, we had all 50 states.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wasn't that many? I mean, I think when you're experienced enough to have laid off people and to have been part of a company that failed, I think in general, we were very cautious about hiring people about spending money. I love this old expression in Silicon Valley. More companies die of indigestion than starvation. I think we probably had 50 people or so when we launched. The idea came to us in the summer of 2010. We didn't actually launch until the fall of 2011. And that is not because it took us a year to build the thing. It was more because we wanted to be sure before we uncloaked publicly. We wanted to be sure that we were on to something. And when we launched nationally, we had 176 neighborhoods using Next Door. And I remember a board meeting where”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It kind of bears mentioning that this idea that it's okay to do unscalable things initially and so many young entrepreneurs, particularly technology ones, are always thinking, well, I can't do that. That's manual. That'll never scale. Worry about solving the scalability problem after you have product market fit. Doing manual things to get product market fit is perfectly fine. And in fact, I would say the number one learning from user generated content and online communities, the number one learning. Don't be afraid to do things manually at the beginning because it's a people business building community. And you can't do that at scale. You have to do that one conversation at a time. So most of these challenges, what do you want to talk about? What's the shape of your neighborhood? What should the interface look like? Those are all things that we would take to the neighbors.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every single neighborhood boundary was something that was drawn in consultation with someone who lived there. We asked our members and then we built a tool. I mean, in the early days, we, Sarah, my co-founder and other co-founders, maybe Prakash as well, would be looking at maps, taking a Sharpie and drawing a polygon around areas to ensure that we were getting the user feedback and then baking that into the code.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They discuss things in a little bit more of a fractious way in their neighborhoods that are much more homogeneous where politeness is the cultural custom of the neighborhood. We have 335,000 distinct neighborhoods that use next door and we needed to build a system that would be flexible enough that all of those neighborhoods could feel authentic to themselves.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think about it less as prevention and I think about it more as you build the system and the reference of the system with high quality content. Because if you see high quality content, you just assume this is a place for high quality content. It's a little bit like if you go outside and you see trash on the ground, you might actually throw something on the ground too. If you go outside and it's perfectly manicured, you're going to feel really bad about throwing a little trash there, right? So that was a very important decision. The other thing we did is every single neighborhood had a founding member and had a series of leads. And it was their responsibility to ensure that the conversation was very relevant and of the neighborhood. There are neighborhoods that are a little more fractious.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So over and over again, what we heard is well, I need to make sure that the people on this thing are my actual neighbors. And so that led us to many innovations, including looking at a map, breaking the map down into specific homes. And then we had to verify that they lived there. And so we would do very old school things like send them a printed postcard via US mail with a code and you would have to enter the code to verify your address. And so in the early days, I mean, look, we weren't thinking, what's going to happen when we have 100 million users? I mean, that's a pretty expensive postcard bill. We had 100 users, 500 users, 1,000 users, right? But we built it with quality from the very beginning because that's what the neighbors asked for. And we felt like we'll solve the scalability issue later.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember pitching him many of the ideas we had and then showing him the idea that became next door. And he said, that's the right one. And then Sarah and I said to him, okay, well, are you so passionate about this that you would join our board? He said, yeah, I'm passionate about this one. And so we had kind of the investor viewpoint. We had the user viewpoint. And then we had our own intuition.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, certainly, we had a strong intuition having built products in the past and certainly having failed at building products that this felt different, which is to say when you do user testing, people are excited. I mean, there was a time when we were changing servers, and so we went down for a couple of hours. And we got tons of incoming messages from our users saying, what happened? What happened to this thing that I'm using? It's important to me. Did you take it down? Is there a site outage, right? And it wasn't even called anything at that time. It was just called a neighbor's site. It wasn't called next door. It wasn't professional, right? But that's a very strong sign. So there was strong user feedback. And then there was another person that came on. We were very lucky to have him on the board as well, Rich Barton, the creator of Expedia and then more recently Zillow.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's Facebook for our friends. There's LinkedIn for our colleagues. There's Twitter for people whom we find interesting. But there was no network comprised of what we believed was one of the most important communities of them all. And that was the people who live right next door. Now we didn't even have the name next door at that point, right? It was more about, I think one of our co-founders, Adam Ginsberg is his name. He lived in an area in San Francisco. I'm trying to remember the name of the neighborhood now, but they had a listserv. They had a little news group that they were using to communicate. And he would show us the kinds of conversations. And it was about trying to fix potholes. And it was about letting people know if there was construction. And it was about recommending service providers. And it was actually very valuable.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ended up building this little prototype. It was drawn initially, meaning hand drawn shown to neighbors. And almost from the beginning, they resonated with this concept that I do want to know my neighbors. I do want to know what's going on around me. I don't have an easy way to do that today”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It'll look like a news feed. It'll look like a social network. It'll be more fully featured. And we felt like local was an opportunity that had largely been ignored, but coming off of the failure of fanbase, it's not like I thought of myself or my co-founders as we're awesome at coming up with ideas. The next idea we're going to come up with is going to be a winner. I think if anything, we were scared. We were anxious. What if this turns out just like fanbase? What if this also doesn't have legs? What if we put everything that we have into this thing and it ends up being a waste of time? And so in the moment, it was very scary.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Funny, there was an idea called need feed, and it was this idea that we were all looking at news feeds these days. Would you create a feed where people say, I need advice on this particular thing? I need to be prepped for this particular meeting. I need to find a trusty plumber. That was one of the ideas. We probably had dozens of bad ideas. And ultimately, there was this one idea. And it wasn't called Next Door at the time. It was called neighborly. And the idea is, can we create the next generation of a neighborhood message board?”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The energy you have at the beginning of a journey when it's brand new, it's amazing. It's just possibility. So the three of us said, okay, we're going to try to come up with a new idea. But it's not like you can schedule a meeting, 10 a.m., come up with billion-dollar idea. I mean, that's not the way these things work, at least in my experience. But we met, we crowdsourced ideas from each other. Prakash in particular said as the person writing the majority of the code, he said, I'm sitting on my hands and not writing a line of code until you can prove to me with user feedback that whatever idea we have is something that's worth building.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I took the poem back to my co founders. And I said, here's what Bill said. And Bill followed by saying, I believe in the team, come up with a new idea, see if you can do it. And if so, we'll back it. And so when you finally have the courage to say this didn't work, I'm shutting it down. Then find the activation energy to say, actually, we're not shutting it down. We're going to start from scratch because, you know.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Knowing that what we were working on had no future, but we were going to try to change it. And so it was a very, very challenging time. And so in early 2010, we say we've kind of tried everything here. Maybe we give the money back because most of it's still intact. We go take the summer off and then we think about what's next. So I have a meeting with Bill Gurley. And so I start to give him my narrative of, gosh, we've tried everything and I really wish this could have worked and I feel so bad. You took a chance on us. And he slides over a piece of paper and says, read this. And I look at it and it's a poem, actually one of my favorite poems. He probably didn't know that, but it's if by Rudyard Kipling. And it was a very powerful way for him to say, I don't think you can give up. It was surprising because I didn't have a contingency idea.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and look, you said you came to the conclusion pretty quickly. Any founder knows that you're talking about dog ears. For every year of being a founder, right? And when things are going well, the time flies by. But when things are tough, you are forcing yourself to pick yourself up off the ground and go into the office, even though you were kicked the day before. And so when I say for six months, we...”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was pretty quick after the launch. And then I think for probably the next six months, we tried everything to get this thing to ignite again. And, you know, when you try everything as an internet company, it means you change the user interface. You think about developing a mobile app if you have a web app. You think about activating a different community. You think, I mean, you think about every idea that you possibly can, and none of those worked.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we could get sued out of existence, right? So that then led us to pivot a little bit more towards high school. And what we realized about high school was it's just not nearly as big a business as professional sports. And so when professional sports was off the table, It made it very difficult for us to think about building a thriving business.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had some contributors, you know, most of these contributor communities. 100 users who visit, you only need one to contribute. So think about YouTube, 99.9% of the users of YouTube have never uploaded anything. They've never contributed anything besides their viewing hours, right? So it wasn't so much, I would say actually interesting learning from that was we probably got the contributor side right. What they contributed though was not resonating strongly enough with people who were looking for information. And part of the reason at that point, YouTube was starting to ascend. And as a result, all of the holders of professional content began to protect their licenses much more aggressively. And so what happened very quickly for fan base is if Michael Jordan fan came and said, here are my three favorite dunks of Michael Jordan of all time, and I'm going to upload them because I think it's kind of cool. If you're a Jordan fan, you want to.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The users would come in and then they wouldn't stick around. So maybe they would come again. Maybe they would come one more time. But then they didn't come back.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And by the way, let me just say one thing. I don't think that it's a fatal flaw to not have the clearest vision because there is no doubt the vision will change. What happened to us is that we had many different visions. And when none of them worked, we didn't really fall back on one of them and try to force it. And so sometimes having too much vision can be a problem, right? Because you don't stick to the simple things. And we couldn't ultimately find enough success in the simple things. But, you know, when fan base launched, in a matter of months, I think we had 10 million users or something crazy like that. So there was a lot of usage, but it just never clicked.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Prakasha had also been Eddie pinions. And so we were getting the band back together. And it's Prakash, Janakarami. He had gone to Google and was one of the early engineers on Google Maps. But he had been someone that we had known Sarah and I had known and had worked with for many, many years prior to him leaving Google.”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were people who had spent more time thinking about how to solve some of those problems than anyone else. And so we had competitive advantage, right? And I had grown up in a place, Odessa, Texas, where the idea of sports and team, particularly around football, you know, the book Friday Night Lights, that was written about the football team in my high school when I was a junior. And then the third piece was going and trying to find an area that we could build a successful business and a user generated content and online community version of ESPN. So ESPN was the old guard. ESPN had all of the professionals that were writing about these things. But where was the fans' perspective?”
2025-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT