00:08:00 · Nirav Tolia
[00:08:00] S8: Beacon of innovation in this new field, this new .com era, it was a product that was beloved by users. I would wear my Yahoo t shirt and walk down University Avenue in Palo Alto, California, and so many people would come up to me and tell me how much they loved using Yahoo. The first thing I would say about Yahoo is it was a very humble place, even amidst its success. It was a very flat organization. And I remember the first week at Yahoo, I joined one of the most junior people, one of the youngest people, a real nobody at the company. And the car that I was driving, the battery died, and it couldn't start. Guess who gave me a jump from his car? One of the founders of Yahoo, who's gone on to become a billionaire and an Internet celebrity. But that tells you about the humility of the place, and it wasn't just in helping a new employee with a dead car battery. It was in everything around building the company. No task was too big. No task was too small. It was not a hierarchical place. It was a place where the quality of ideas and the value of hard work is what led to success. Yahoo was a place during those days where almost every day that I came to work, the metrics were better. Because as great as Yahoo was as a company, it was caught in a revolution that was even bigger than any single company, and that was the dot com revolution. And so we hear this expression, in a rising tide, all boats rise. Well, Yahoo was one of the biggest and best boats, but it was the beneficiary of that tide. And so over a three year period at Yahoo, I saw the company grow from less than a 100 employees to over 10,000. When I look back at the lessons I learned at Yahoo, particularly about building consumer technology products, there's one that stands above all the others, and that is user value first. Google, which came after Yahoo has a saying, one of its core principles, follow the user first and all else will take care of itself. That is the way Yahoo operated. And that is what I want Nextdoor to be like. You may ask, why did I leave? Why did I only spend three years at Yahoo? Well, the truth is, even though I loved being there, something was missing. And that thing that was missing is my direct influence on the impact the company was having. So after three amazing years at Yahoo, I left to start my own company. And I remember my goodbye party at Yahoo.
00:10:42 · Nirav Tolia
I was lucky enough to have Jerry Yang, one of the founders there. And he came over to me towards the end of the party and he said, You know, I wish you so much luck. I'm excited for you, but I'm curious, why are you leaving Yahoo? No one is leaving this company right now. And I said, Jerry, when I think about this amazing thing you've built, I wanna do the same thing. And he kinda looked at me with a puzzled look, and I said, You understand that, right Jerry? And he said, Yes, I do understand it. But do you have any idea how hard it is to build a company? And the truth is I didn't. And one of the amazing thing about entrepreneurs, one of the amazing things is, they don't know how difficult it's going to be when they start a company. If they did, they might not begin in the first place. But I went off, I started my own company, lots of highs and lows, ultimately a pretty good outcome. I went on to start multiple other companies. I became an investor, but all of it was because I wanted to be an entrepreneur because I felt that was the best way to have impact. Almost 30% of Americans could not name a single neighbor by name.
00:12:01 · S1, S2, S10, S11
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00:12:55 · S11, S12, S13
Ad[00:12:55] S11: Shop Black Friday all month long at blinds.com. Don't miss huge deals dropping every week. Ad[00:13:01] S12: This is Blue from the UPS Store with a very special holiday announcement for small business owners. We're open. Let's be real. Your deadlines don't take holidays. So while the other guys are checking out, the UPS Store is here to pack, ship, print, shred, notarize, and check more things off your list all year long. With over 5,500 locations, there's a blue near you at the UPS store. Shredding services are provided by Iron Mountain as is. Visit the upsstore.com/shredding for full details. Most locations are independently owned. Product service prices, and hours of operation may vary. See store for details. Ad[00:13:31] S13: The Vuori core short moves with you. With everyday versatility and classic athletic fit. It's the one short for everything your day brings. Invest in your happiness and get 20% off your first purchase at viore.com/coretwenty. That's vuori.com/kore2zero. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions.
00:14:01 · Nirav Tolia
[00:14:01] S8: So those bonds in the local community, they had been eroding. We found a book called Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, the chair of the sociology department at Harvard. And the book was about the sport bowling and its evolution in America and how the popularity of the sport has not changed, but people no longer bowl in bowling leagues. They bowl alone. And it was a symbol of the decline and erosion of community. So we started to look around in our industry, in our lives, in the world in general, and here's what we noticed. We noticed the emergence of social media services. This was the summer of twenty ten. Facebook was starting to really ascend. LinkedIn was starting to ascend. Twitter, now called X, was starting to ascend. And so there was a social platform connecting you to your friends, connecting you to your business colleagues, connecting you to people that you found interesting. There wasn't a social platform though that was connecting you to the physical world in which you lived, your neighborhood. And so as we moved from what was happening in the industry to what was happening in our own lives, we were getting a little older, we were getting more rooted in our neighborhoods, we were less likely to move away, we were more likely to invest in the place that we'd chosen to live. But technology wasn't helping us make those investments. The same way Facebook was making it seamless for us to communicate with friends that we hadn't seen in years, there was no technology service that was making it easy to speak to the person next door. Now we don't rely on that village of the neighborhood where it does take a village. We don't have it anymore. All of those things compelled us, really inspired us to think, can we create a social media service that's focused on what we believe is one of the most important parts of our lives, and that is our local community. The idea was the neighborhood is one of the most important communities of them all, And ironically, while technology may have caused us to retreat away from our neighborhoods and onto our screens, can we use those same screens to bring us back to our neighborhoods? And that was the original vision. To hear from actual neighbors what they wanted in a technology tool to make their neighborhoods stronger, safer, and happier.
00:16:31 · Nirav Tolia, S0
And so before we wrote a line of code, before we designed a single interface, before we thought about the business model, we simply drew a mock up on a piece of paper and we showed it to neighbors and we let them respond. And very quickly we found out that there were no existing technology tools that were bringing people together locally. We could use technology to speak to people on the other side of the world in real time, but there was no technology tool that would introduce us to the person right across the street. And so instantly we knew there was an opportunity, but the problem is when we started the company, the need for Nextdoor existed because people didn't know their neighbors. So if you don't know your neighbors, how do you invite them to a service? And this was a paradoxical challenge for us from the very beginning. The value we were looking to create was squarely in the way of us being able to build that value in the first place. And so we had to invest in really understanding the manual ways to get the first few people in the neighborhood and make sure they were the right few people. And then we had to invest in offline mechanisms, flyers, postcards. People used to laugh at us and say, let me get this straight. You're using real paper, like dead tree paper to advertise your service? And we would say, well, our service is about the real world. Ad[00:18:01] S0: This episode is brought to