30 Years in Silicon Valley: My Journey Since the Internet Revolution | Nextdoor, Nirav Tolia | EO

Nextdoor's cofounder on thirty years of building for neighbors

Nextdoor is a bet that the physical neighborhood is the last social graph worth connecting, at a time when nearly 30% of Americans cannot name a single neighbor. Social networks organized friends and interests, but nobody had built a platform for the people living on your street, and the problem is circular because you cannot invite neighbors you have never met. Tolia solved it the slow way, with paper flyers and postcards instead of growth hacks, and fifteen years later the network reaches most American neighborhoods.

Takeaways

• Yahoo taught him user value first. Tolia was among Yahoo's first 100 employees and watched it pass 10,000 in three years. The culture stayed flat and humble, a founder jumped his car battery in his first week, and the lesson he kept was user value first.
• Nextdoor is a public company at scale. Nextdoor is fifteen years old, live in more than 11 countries and generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. A newer version, the NextNextdoor, folds local news into the service.
• He is making Nextdoor AI first. Tolia insists leaders use AI themselves rather than delegate it, and plans to run fifteen years of conversations from 350,000 neighborhoods through an LLM to derive cultural norms from the bottom up.
• He left Nextdoor and came back. He stepped back because he was not growing with the company and it needed new leadership, spent five and a half years on the sidelines as an investor and a Shark Tank shark, and returned because he loved investing but is an entrepreneur.
• Pick teammates before the opportunity. Founders and executives are lonely, so Tolia starts with who rather than what. Alone the lows are lower and the highs are not as high, and community and trust take a long time to build.
• Bias on Nextdoor is neighborhood specific. What counts as appropriate varies by neighborhood, whether the question is discussing local politics or advertising a small business. Tolia wants to train AI on that bottom-up definition rather than impose one.

How Nextdoor grew, block by block

1. His team found Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's argument that community ties were eroding, and in the summer of 2010 saw the big social networks ascending with nothing built for the physical neighborhood.
2. They tested a paper mock-up with neighbors before writing code.
3. The founding paradox was that the service existed because people did not know their neighbors, yet you cannot invite neighbors you have never met.
4. Neighbors handed out flyers and postcards to tell other neighbors, an approach people laughed at.