How Nextdoor Grew to 100M Neighbors + Why Founding CEO Nirav Tolia Returned Six Years Later
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 21 November 2024
⏱️ 80 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nirav Tolia is the co-founder and two-time CEO of Nextdoor. He started the company in 2011, stepped down as CEO in 2018, watched the company go public in 2021, and re-joined as CEO the summer of 2024. He also founded Epinions which IPO’d in 2004, and before that was an early employee at Yahoo.
We go inside the decision to re-join the company after he thought he’d never come back, and how Nextdoor’s trying to act like a startup while running a public company. He also takes us back to the very early days of Nextdoor, the deliberate product decisions that made growth hard but led to 100M+ neighbors on the platform, the lessons learned operating his first company through the Dot Com Bubble, and what it was like being a guest shark on Shark Tank.
For full show notes, visit: https://highlightai.com/share/d7bcd655-9b2f-47f7-a6e3-fdf3e109c97e
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Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(02:39) Leaving Nextdoor in 2018
(07:30) Coming back in 2024
(10:31) The importance of family in career decisions
(17:37) Why you have to listen to learn
(24:47) The Founders Mentality
(26:45) “Develop and Deliver”
(32:03) Local, the last remaining consumer opportunity
(36:58) Why being a founder is so hard
(39:21) Going to the high school from Friday Night Lights
(42:07) What Nirav learned at Stanford
(46:22) Working at Yahoo from $500m to $100B
(49:37) Starting Epinions with Naval in 1999
(51:11) Operating through the Dot Com Bubble
(56:34) How Bill Gurley’s challenge led to Nextdoor
(58:16) Early product experimentation
(01:05:19) Why early growth was so hard, and scaling to 100 million neighbors
(01:10:10) The opportunity in local news
(01:12:14) Being a Shark on Shark Tank
Referenced:
Nextdoor: https://nextdoor.com/
The Founder’s Mentality: https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Mentality-Overcome-Predictable-Crises/dp/1633691160
Follow Nirav:
Twitter: https://x.com/niravtolia
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/niravtolia
Follow Turner:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
Subscribe to get new episodes + transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We've just gone stale. |
| 0:01.0 | Next door, the product has not changed as much as the world has changed. |
| 0:06.0 | It has not risen up to become contemporary and modern and indispensable to today's audience. |
| 0:13.0 | We're looking for something that looks, feels, and operates completely different. |
| 0:19.0 | And so sometimes when that's the task, bringing in someone who has the |
| 0:24.8 | credibility of having been there from the beginning, but the freshness to really make those |
| 0:30.5 | big changes, that can be an asset. Welcome to the Peel. I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of |
| 0:36.7 | Banana Capital. Today's guest is Nira Tolio, co-founder and two-time CEO of Nextdoor. |
| 0:42.3 | We talked about starting the company in 2011. |
| 0:44.3 | There wasn't a social network that was devoted to what we believed was the most important community of them all, |
| 0:49.3 | and that is the community in which you live. |
| 0:51.3 | Why he stepped down as CEO in 2018. The job of leadership is to rise up and meet that challenge. |
| 0:57.0 | And at that point, eight years in, I wasn't ringing the bell like I really should have. |
| 1:03.0 | And returning a CEO in May of 2024. |
| 1:06.0 | I knew that if I were sitting on my deathbed and someone came to me and said, |
| 1:09.0 | hey, you started that next door thing and it didn't really go as well as you wanted it to. Why didn't you get in there and do something about it? Our conversation goes deep into the early days, including how Bill Gurley inspired the pivot that led to Next Door. He looked at me and said, hey, it kind of seems like you're giving up. And he slid across a piece of paper. |
| 1:29.2 | How the book The Founders Mentality taught him to think like a startup |
| 1:30.8 | while running a public company. |
| 1:32.4 | I'm optimistic. I'm excited. |
| 1:34.8 | I believe deeply. |
| 1:36.5 | I also feel like I get kicked in the stomach |
| 1:38.7 | a hundred times a day. |
... |
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