Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia on bowling alone, AI bots, and why the heartland is happier than the coasts

Nirav Tolia is the co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor (NYSE: NXDR), the neighborhood social network with over 105 million users across 350,000 communities worldwide. After stepping down as CEO in 2018, he returned to lead the company in 2024. In this episode of Summation, Nirav and Auren discuss: Why success kills innovationThe death of physical communityWhy Nextdoor had to change their stock tickerInsider vs Outsider entrepreneursYou can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Nirav Tolia on X at ...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Auren Hoffman?

  Well, fellow data nerds, my guest today is Nirav Tolia. Nirav is the co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor, a neighborhood social network with over 100 million users across 345,000 communities worldwide. After stepping down as Nextdoor CEO in 2018, he returned to lead the company in 2024. Nirav, welcome.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  It's a pleasure to be here. And you did not mention that not only am I one of the founders of Nextdoor, I am a friend of Orin Hoffmann for multiple decades now. So this is a nice little reunion.

• 0:30Auren Hoffman?

  We're almost 30-year friends. I mean, that's how old we are. We've been around for a long time.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  I saw that in the notes. I was hoping that you wouldn't actually give the amount of time we've been friends specific shape, because that ages us, but we're okay.

• 0:43Auren Hoffman?

  That's a good point. It's a good point. Since we were three years old. And by the way, disclaimer, I'm also a Nextdoor shareholder, so I want to just disclaim that for everyone to know that. Now, you spent your career like, you're kind of like the OG of communities. You know, you did Opinions back in the day. Now you're doing Nextdoor. What do you think like the internet still hasn't figured out about communities and identity?

• 1:05Speaker 01

  It's a great question. And I don't know that I think that the internet hasn't figured it out per se. I just think that different eras of the internet required different things when it came to creating online community. And Reid Hoffman has this expression, or maybe it's a theory, that entrepreneurs tend to work on the same problem their entire careers. And that has certainly been true for me. The reason that I'm even working on the internet is because when I was an undergrad at Stanford, I was exposed to Usenet, which was the internet pre-web browser. So Usenet was a series of news groups where people would come together and talk about things that interested them.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  And that was the earliest implementation of online community. Then, of course, there was the web. We actually had the explosion of chat. We had social media services, right? So I think that there are a couple of trends that I would point to in online community that I think are worth mentioning. The first is, the internet originally was anonymous when it came to online communities. Identity tended to be more around your login name, LonelyGirl13, if you remember that. That was a little meme way, way, way back, right? And then progressively, particularly with the introduction of Facebook. You had to verify who you were. You had to use your real name. And in the case of Facebook, you had to have a university email address,

• 2:31Speaker 01

  which gave you some credibility. And so I think this trend of going from anonymity to verified identity, that is one of the biggest and most important things that has happened when it comes to community. Because as I often tell people, if folks know who you are, you have a reputation to protect. And if you have a reputation to protect, you will act a certain way versus if you feel like no one knows who you are and your reputation can't be harmed by what you do, people will act very differently.

• 3:03Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. Or if you can burn it, which is like, you know, if your reputation gets bad, you could just start a new one all of a sudden. Like if I could just keep changing my name and get a new identity every month, it'd be different.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. One of the things I learned very early on when we were starting Opinions is that the notion of incentives is a very important one when it comes to building online community. And to your point, if your incentive is to protect your reputation, then you will actually try to be the best version of yourself online, the same way that we are offline. If there is no incentive because the reputation is not harmed or frankly even benefits from what you do, then you can act very differently. You may be flippant. You may not care if you do things that offend people, right? So this arc of people caring deeply about their reputations, that's nothing new. What's new is on the internet, for a long time, you couldn't tell who people were.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  And now you can. I think what's so interesting about that trend is with the emergence of AI now, and in particular AI agents and bots, I'm hearing crazy statistics like 30% of the tweets or the responses to tweets and 30% of the responses to LinkedIn posts are created by AI bots. And so now you have this notion of identity that's not even really human, which I think is is kind of problematic and will continue to be problematic. The other big trend that I would point to is community. Originally was thought of as almost a set of hobbyists that are getting together because they're really passionate about sports or DIY or technology.

• 4:41Auren Hoffman?

  Some subreddit somewhere or something like that.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Exactly, but it's gone very mainstream now. And not only has it gone mainstream, but in many cases, brands are built now not by companies, but by individuals. And those individuals build their brands by amassing massive online communities that they speak directly to. So, community at its simplest level is really powerful because it makes us feel like we belong. Then you add on these two pieces that are very internet centric. One is identity, right? And verified identity is most important. And then the second piece, which is the community becomes your audience that you can activate to do things that you want to do.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  That gives you a lot more leverage than if you're just an individual that lives somewhere and you can't amass all of these people to go do what you believe needs to be done. So, community is now a very powerful force, whether it's moving a stock or creating a kind of movement or an anthem to do something in the world. And the internet has made it almost seamless to do that because it creates this virtual space for that community to congregate.

• 5:50Auren Hoffman?

  As people get richer, it seems like they're almost opting out of certain communities. Like it's become much more about the nuclear family. They're not engaging as much in their kind of broader community. And that does seem antithetical to people's happiness and meaning and stuff like, why is that happening and how do we kind of reverse that?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you've mentioned, you know, if one big trend is identity and another big trend is influence, using the community's influence, you've now actually talked about the third major trend that's going on in terms of the evolution of community, which is We've really pulled back from public or quasi-public communities into very private ones. And so what we may have used Facebook for before, communicating with our friends, we now are primarily using WhatsApp, which is very different because it's a private group that's not discoverable, right? Or even SMS, which is even more one-to-one versus many-to-many, which has been kind of the traditional definition of community.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  The reason for that is because I think we realize that when we join a large group, number one, we don't know all the players in that group. So we're a little bit more cautious about expressing ourselves. The second thing is, the internet has memory. And so if you go to one of these subreddits, for example, and you're engaging in the conversation and you say things, those things that you say, which are then created as bits on the page, that may last for decades. Whereas when you're just SMSing with a friend of yours, telling jokes or a family member, talking about things that don't really matter, that just goes off in the ether and is forgotten the same way as if you had a conversation. Whereas if you think about what you and I are doing right now,

• 7:34Speaker 01

  we are creating a written record that will be referred to, if it needs to be, for years and years and years and years. And so as that happens, again, the incentive of being part of one of those broader communities, it changes. What is the incentive? Well, it could be that that's your community and you're activating that, right? You're a big brand, you're Mr. Beast, you're talking to your community, you're an influencer, right? But if you're not an influencer and you're just coming in and you're asking a question about something, or you're chiming in with an opinion, what's the upside of that being documented for the rest of time? And so we have retreated to some sense to more private communities, more atomic communities.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  And then to your second point, which is, does it make us feel more lonely? I think it does. I think if we're around the same people all the time, not only does it create an echo chamber, but we're missing a lot of the beauty of the world, whether that's where we live, or where we visit, or who we interact with at work. I think community, at least for me personally... Is the most powerful thing to really feel human because you're connecting with other people. You're not by yourself. It's about we, not me, when it comes to community. And if you start to limit the number of communities that you're part of and retreat to that atomic community that you have every day, which is your direct family, your nuclear family,

• 9:00Speaker 01

  I think you're missing out on quite a bit.

• 9:03Auren Hoffman?

  And, you know, when we walk around, we have like the AirPods on or whatever. And so like, at least for me, like, I'm rarely ever talking to someone at the coffee shop. I never talked to my Uber driver. I used to talk to the cab driver. I used to talk to this person sitting next to me on the plane. I never do that anymore. It is kind of like we're moving into much more of like an individualized world in a weird way, right?

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, community initially, I think particularly online, was thought of this many to many form of communication. And what you're describing is what the internet and technology has become, particularly with mobile phones, right, which we can carry around, which is one to many. And I thought what you said was really interesting about putting your AirPods in and not talking to the Uber driver. Waymo is obviously now something that a lot of people have experienced and that they prefer. And one of the reasons that I've heard they prefer it is, quote, "And I don't have to talk to anybody." Right? And so the problem, though, is if we are relying on this thing and we're just interacting with people through this thing, two things happen. One is that's a two dimensional experience.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  It's not actually a fully human experience because you're just interacting with people that are behind screens. The second thing that's happening is we're losing our ability to be part of multiple groups, express different viewpoints, hear about different viewpoints. And so our aperture really narrows. And when we have these narrow apertures, I think we become a little bit more fixed on our own views. And we can't connect with more people. We can't help them. They can't help us. So I think it's very limiting. Ultimately, like you, I'm a huge believer that one's network is one of the most valuable assets. Because if you need something, or if you feel the need to help someone, right?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Two things that happen when you know lots of people. If you shrink that network, the number of nodes to some extent is directly correlated to the value of your overall network. And so we are shrinking our networks or we're expanding our networks, but the nodes are people we've never met. I mean, the, one of the inspirations of Nextdoor was we know more about influencers on YouTube that we've never met, that we will never meet than we do about the people who live across the street or right next door. And that's not the way it should be because in a time of crisis, the influencer is not going to be able to help you.

• 11:32Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  But in a time of crisis, the person next door can come and help. And so I, I think there are pretty significant societal ramifications to us retreating inward. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't engage with online platforms. That's not what I'm saying at all. I just think there needs to be a balance. There needs to be more integration versus either being a Luddite and saying, I have no presence on social media. I'm not going online at all. Right? Or going to the other extreme and saying, I'm only interacting with people that I can interact with virtually.

• 12:07Auren Hoffman?

  Even like things like churches changed, like 30, 40 years ago, you go to church, you're going to a smaller church, you're, the way you build communities, you're complaining that your pastor is super boring or so. Today, like when people go to church, they're going to church with like 10,000 plus people. It's like the pastor's always great, is always amazing because it's super well-produced, but you're not, you're, it's like harder to meet a lot of people when you go to like a 10,000 person gathering.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Well, probably the best is, is an intimate enough set of people, but it's large enough that you feel like there's freshness there.

• 12:43Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  The next best is a very large congregation, the super churches, you know, the mega churches, the 10,000, right? But I think what's really happened societally is a lot of people don't go to church at all.

• 12:55Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  And so, and so I would rather them experience it virtually than not experience it at all. And when I go back to the founding of Nextdoor in the summer of 2010, There was a book that that kicked off a lot of our thinking and that book is by a really famous Harvard professor. I think he might have been Chair of the Sociology Department, Robert Putnam. And the book is called Bowling Alone. And you bring up the example of churches, but he used the example of bowling leagues, which the popularity of the sport of bowling has increased over time in America, but the percentage of those bowlers that are bowling together versus bowling alone has gone down. We now bowl the way that we did and maybe even

• 13:36Speaker 01

  more than we did, but we now bowl alone. And Robert Putnam made the point, and we believe this deeply, we believed it when we started Nextdoor and we still believe it today. It's why, why we get so much purpose out of working on Nextdoor. Putnam believed that well functioning communities were a backbone of well functioning societies. And he drew a direct link between well functioning communities and specific things such as longevity and literacy and happiness. And so, far from just being a typical Silicon Valley company where we say, oh, we're changing the world, right? Every Silicon Valley company wants to change the world. I don't know

• 14:19Speaker 01

  that we necessarily want to change the world, but we want to strengthen it. We want to make it better equipped for whatever society becomes. And we have a very strong belief, bordering on an obsession, I'd say, that community is really good for the world. And in our particular case, that's local commuting.

• 14:39Auren Hoffman?

  It's interesting because even your ticker is K I N D, kind.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  We changed it, actually.

• 14:44Auren Hoffman?

  It was kind, yeah.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  It was K I N D because we believed very strongly, not only in well functioning communities, but in collaborative communities that support each other. But ultimately, in today's world, when you put something like that out there, it's more a reason or becomes a reason for people to attack you versus something to stand for. And so, we changed our ticker to N X D R. In a way, because we said, look, the ticker is not the representation of Nextdoor. The representation of Nextdoor is the experience that you have when you're on the service. And so we didn't want to, some very, very cynical people would say, having a ticker symbol, K I N D, is virtue signaling. And we didn't want to do any virtue signaling.

• 15:28Auren Hoffman?

  I thought that was a great thing. I'm kind of sad that you changed the ticker.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  It was, it was a very courageous thing to do because we knew that it would have some backlash. And ultimately, particularly when I came back and we're in the middle of a turnaround, a transformation of Nextdoor, we just didn't want that to suck up the oxygen. Like, what we want to suck up the oxygen is, this is a product that can get a lot better, that can make people feel better about where they live and better about who they live around. And that should transform into a successful business.

• 16:00Auren Hoffman?

  No, speaking of communities, like, the way you and I met, and I don't want to date us, but it was back in the 1990s, and you started this, this community of founders called Round Zero. We would meet in Palo Alto. We would have these kind of like small group discussions there. Like, what did you learn from that kind of first community experience?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Well, as I said earlier, community's been a through line for me in both my personal and professional life, pretty much from the beginning. And one of the first explicit manifestations of that was I was working as an early employee of Yahoo in the late 90s during an unbelievable time in Silicon Valley. It was the emergence of the dot com boom. And I really wanted to start my own company. I wanted to be a founder. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to follow that Silicon Valley mythology. And yet, there was no training that I could get for that beyond talking to other founders and entrepreneurs. And so, a small group of us, five people, we had a dinner together in Palo Alto, and

• 17:02Speaker 01

  we talked about, gosh, if we started a company, what would it be like? We weren't even going to start a company together, but each of us individually were dreaming about being founders. And it was so powerful to have that mini-community of people that wanted to do the same thing. You didn't feel alone. You had people that, that were empathizing with, gosh, how do I do this? Because I have a job, and I know that if I start a company, I'm not going to have a job, and 99% of these things fail. And how do you hire people? And how do you know if you have a good idea? And how do you test the idea? And all the things that entrepreneurs have to think about. We had that discussion as a small table of five and over a series of a few months, we had more dinners until ultimately we realized, you know, creating

• 17:44Speaker 01

  an explicit community of entrepreneurs and we called it round zero because it was prior to round one financing, right? And we had a kind of definition or mission statement, you know, it was, it was a, you know, a forum for entrepreneurs to discuss experiences and technology trends. And so it wasn't just about what am I doing? It was also what's going on in this industry? What's going on that we can learn about so that we can be better equipped to start successful companies? And it was very organic. It was done on the side. We all had day jobs, but it became very, very special. And the reason it became special is not because of something we did as founders. It was because of what you just said. We brought people together. They met, they became friends.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  In many cases, they went off and founded companies together. They learned from each other and those connections that were created are still actually pretty vibrant. Today I mentioned Reid Hoffman. Reid was one of the people that came to round zero in those early days.

• 18:45Auren Hoffman?

  I met Reid, that's where I met him the first time. Was that round zero?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and you know, on a personal level, round zero, because I was running it with four other people. That was kind of a trial run for me as an entrepreneur. That was a, a beta test of what it might be to be a founder and CEO. And that gave me the confidence to ultimately a few years later, start my first company.

• 19:08Auren Hoffman?

  I met so many interesting people there, many of which I'm still friends with today. It's an amazing community. Love that you started this thing. Now going back to next door, I remember when you started it and then you guys were like, it was a sports thing originally, and then you kind of pivoted a few times and we even like, we were in the same office for a while. What'd you learn from those times? Like kind of going through the idea maze and stuff?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, we weren't just in the same office. You were my landlord. So we'll, we'll actually talk about that story, but I started a company after round zero called Opinions and, and that was a company that was all About online community and it was about expressing opinions and it became expressing opinions about products. So it became a product review site, one of the first mainstream examples of user generated content and online community. After that company ended, I took a little bit of time off and then I became an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital. And Benchmark had funded Opinions and so I went back to Bill Gurley, the one who had funded my first company. And we were brainstorming along with my co-founder Sarah Leary, who I had worked with at Opinions.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  We were brainstorming about what are other popular online or offline communities where we think we can build interesting businesses. And the idea that we came up with was we looked at ESPN, which was this incredible asset, all about the world of sports. And we said, hey, there isn't really an online analog of ESPN where fans can come together and create community around the teams and players that they love. And it was particularly personal for Sarah because Sarah had been a national champion, an all-American lacrosse player at Harvard. And it was particularly personal for me because I grew up in Odessa, Texas, which is where the book Friday Night Lights is based. And the book is written about a football team from my high school.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  It was actually written about the class that was, it's a nonfiction book, written about the class just above me. So I was very, very familiar with the power of sports, even though I wasn't a football player myself. And so we started this company Fanbase, we brought a third co-founder on, Prakash, and he's also someone that we'd worked with at Opinions. So we got our little community back together and Bill Gurley funded the company.

• 21:22Auren Hoffman?

  Fanbase is such a great name, like, and I love the whole idea of it.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Well, it's a great learning as an entrepreneur that you can have a compelling name and a compelling idea and just have an absolute clunker of a business. And that was our fault. I mean, that was our fault. So we started this thing and it just didn't work. And you know, that in and of itself is okay because a lot of brand new companies don't work, but that's when you start iterating. And you start going through what you call the idea maze, right? You're, you're trying to figure out based on the feedback, can we make it better? Can we fix the things that aren't compelling? Can we make the things that aren't compelling more compelling, right? And we went down that path for about two years. I'd say really more like a year and a half. And we just hit a wall at the end and we realized this thing's actually not working.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  And one of the things that we had to acknowledge was that the way that we'd spent our last 18 months was not going to lead us towards a successful company. And we kind of knew that after a year. So it was a year of realizing that our original premise was not going to work. And then it was six months of trying everything, throwing every single thing against the wall to see if anything would stick. And during that time, we realized, man, we may need to really conserve the capital that we raised because, you know, we're not in a position to raise more capital. And so we went and looked for a smaller office space. And what you typically do in Silicon Valley is you use your network of fellow founders and CEOs and say, hey, does anyone have any space that they're not using?

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Can we do what's called a sublease, right? And you were kind enough to let us sublease one side of the floor that you had taken on. We didn't even have restrooms, right?

• 23:03Auren Hoffman?

  That was really fun, yeah.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  We had to come over and, and use your restrooms.

• 23:07Auren Hoffman?

  I remember one day I'm like at the urinal and Bill Gurley, who's a very tall guy, was like right next to me in the same urinal. I'm like, whoa, Bill Gurley's in our office. That's cool.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  You know, I, I'll tell you a great story about being in that office because it, it ended up being a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful place because not only was it the birthplace of Nextdoor, because as we ultimately realized that fanbase wasn't working, we had two options, give the money back and quit, or use the money to come up with a new idea. And so the initial brainstorms of Nextdoor in the summer of 2010, we're all done in that office. 667 Mission, you probably remember the address, right?

• 23:44Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  And so, and so that'll always be a really special place. But here's another reason why it's so special. I have a very good friend, Jim Lanzon, who's now the CEO of Yahoo. You may have met Jim as well because he's been in the industry as long as we have. He came over to visit me one day. And on his way into the office, his wife called him and they had a conversation and he mentioned that he was visiting me. And his wife set me up with the woman who is now my wife.

• 24:13Auren Hoffman?

  Whoa.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  And that all happened prior to Jim coming into the office and it never would have happened if he wouldn't have come to that office because. As he was talking to his wife, his wife said, what are you doing? Where are you? And he said, oh, I'm going to visit Nirav. And that's when his wife said, oh, Nirav, I have someone for him to meet. And that's how the whole thing happened. So not only is 667 Mission an amazing place because I got to spend more time with you. It's also the birthplace of Nextdoor and also the birthplace of where I ultimately met, you know, a lot of my life.

• 24:44Auren Hoffman?

  Wow, that's, that's incredible story. Now, I, I wrote this piece a couple of years ago called Nirav or Naval about insiders and outsiders. What do you, what do you think I got right about that? What do you think I got wrong about that?

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a, it was a great piece. Uh, I, I'm not sure it was entirely accurate because I, I think, I think of myself, you know.

• 25:04Auren Hoffman?

  Most things I write are not entirely accurate. Yeah.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I think of myself as an outsider in many ways as well. But you know, one of my co-founders, Eddie Pinnions, the person who actually had the initial idea for opinions is this brilliant guy, Naval Ravikant, who I also met at round zero. You probably met him at round zero as well. And he's had an extremely successful career. And yet, uh, as co-founders, we are very different people. And, and I think to people, we may represent different ways of doing things. And your essay, your tweet storm, whatever you want to call it, was, or your, your, your thought piece was about Naval being an outsider and kind of rejecting the orthodoxy and coming at things in a very independent way.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  And me being an insider who, you know, if you look up entrepreneur in the dictionary, okay, maybe you might see someone who went to Stanford and is Indian and has started multiple consumer internet companies, right? And, and that happens to be me, right? And, and so you made the point that, that there are things that outsiders do to be successful and there are things that insiders do to be successful. And I think the, the takeaway for me was there are actually multiple ways to skin the cat. You can be successful as an insider and you can be successful as an outsider. It's not that you have to be one or the other.

• 26:26Auren Hoffman?

  Most people are a mix of two, right?

• 26:28Speaker 01

  I, I think below the surface, you know, what you realize is for the most part, to be an entrepreneur, you are an outsider. I mean, I've never worked for a long period of time at a big established company. Because I don't think of myself as the institution. I think of myself as the revolution. Right? And I think Naval thinks of himself the same way. He just tends to be a little bit more of a contrarian. And I tend to be someone who may go with the flow a little bit more. He's less worried about what people think. And I care more about what people think. There were some of those things.

• 27:05Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  I, I, I think the, the bottom line though, is he's super successful. And I'm trying to be successful as well. So maybe, you know, just find the way that is authentic and resonates with you. And don't try to be someone you're not. That's, I think, the most important takeaway.

• 27:24Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, exactly. And it's interesting because we change over time too. So who we are today is maybe different than who we were a decade ago.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's a really good point because in a lot of the comments, the point was made that I was not an insider from the beginning. Right? I mean, I came from Odessa, Texas. I've had lots of failures. I've made plenty of mistakes. I've hit rock bottom multiple times. Right? And in those cases, to build back up, I've had to be an outsider, not an insider. Right? And the same is true of Naval. I mean, I'd say in many cases Naval with his massive following on X and all of the accolades that go his way. It's hard to paint him as an outsider today because of all of his success.

• 28:05Auren Hoffman?

  Cause he has so much influence.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  And so, and he has so much influence. Right? But I think again, it's, it's about when do you choose to be a part of the establishment? And when do you choose to go against the grain? And it doesn't have to be something that defines you every single time. But in those moments where you have to make a decision, that's when you really, you really kind of earn your reputation and who you are.

• 28:29Auren Hoffman?

  Going back to our neighbors, like why, I, why is it so rare that people even know who their neighbors are? Like it's, it's a, maybe in certain communities, you kind of know everyone on your block, but it seems increasingly nowadays, you don't know everyone on your block.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Well, if we go all the way back to the beginning of, of civilization, we're tribal. I mean, in our DNA is this idea that we need to mass with other people like us. And the simple reason for that is. Everything becomes more efficient if we are with other people, right? We can actually pool resources. We can trade. We can lean on people. They can lean on us. What has essentially happened as the world's become more industrialized? And then, of course, the technology revolution has come even after that. We've become pretty self-sufficient. You don't need to get food from a farm that you create with other people anymore. You just go to the grocery store.

• 29:26Auren Hoffman?

  You press a button and it shows up at your house like a few hours later.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Or now, now it's even, you don't even leave your house, right? You don't have to go someplace on foot with a group of people and make sure that you are protected because you're with other people now. There is a police department that protects you and you have a home with a gate or a lock or whatever the case is, right? So what has happened is the, the pure utility, the explicit utility of knowing the people around us has gone down. We don't need to know the people around us just because we need them on a daily basis. But the thing that's gone missing there is it wasn't just about utility. It was also about fulfillment. It was also about the emotional need, which is people don't want to feel alone.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  In fact, again, you know, Putnam says, "Community leads to really good outcomes. Loneliness leads to really bad outcomes. Loneliness leads to heightened suicide rates. Loneliness leads to heightened depression rates, right? We don't like to be lonely and it affects our biochemistry, not just the way that we feel emotionally. It literally affects our health. And so while it's become much easier to survive and be self-sufficient on our own, we've started to miss that connection. And you know, it's, it's become almost socially awkward to be that neighbor that is sitting on a foldable chair in the front yard waving to people, right?

• 30:58Auren Hoffman?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  In fact, if someone smiles at you or waves to you, you think it's kind of weird. And if someone shows up at your door with, with a cake to welcome you as you moved into a neighborhood, you wonder what that person wants in return. And I find that to be so distressing and such a bummer. I spent most of my adult life in Northern California. I love San Francisco. I love the Bay Area. I went to school there. I lived there for a long, long, long time. And then ultimately, four years ago, my wife and three kids and I moved to Dallas, Texas, which is where my parents are, where my only sibling is with his family. And I grew up in Texas. You know, I mentioned Odessa, Texas.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  This is where I grew up. When we moved here and we moved into a neighborhood, we had multiple neighbors drop off fresh baked cookies on our front door. Now, it's the middle of the country. It's a suburb. It's not this amazing mecca of innovation and metropolis known as San Francisco, right? It's very different here and I miss the energy sometimes and I miss the excitement of being in San Francisco, but the sense of community here is palpable. And it's something that people really rely on. And you know, I'll never forget when I was in San Francisco during some of the really heady days of the dot com evolution. And there have been many of those. Now there's another one with AI.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  People around me were so successful, but they weren't actually that fulfilled or happy. They were worried. They were anxious and you see this in the data. And actually even at Nextdoor, because we're used by 99% of the neighborhoods in America. We know which neighborhoods have neighbors that are fighting versus neighbors that are collaborating, right? And it's not all or nothing, right? But we know which ones are a little spicier versus a little bit more supportive. And the ones on the West Coast and frankly, on the coasts in general, the East Coast, those tend to be a little bit more spicy, whereas the heartland, neighbors are helping each other. And we felt that viscerally when we moved from San Francisco to Dallas. I still love San Francisco. I think there's so much goodness there.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  So a little bit like this insider outsider thing, I don't think there's a right answer that is zero sum, right? But there's no doubt that even growing up in Odessa, Texas, there wasn't a lot to do there. It wasn't the center of the AI revolution. There wasn't a lot of money. There wasn't a lot of sophistication. If you've ever visited West Texas, there's not a lot to look at. But the sense of community was powerful and people were happy because they were supported by the people around them. And I think there's a tremendous opportunity to rediscover that around the world. And that's why I think Nextdoor is not just a throwback, which a lot of people say, oh, it's a throwback getting to know one's neighbors,

• 33:48Speaker 01

  right? No, I think it's an unbelievably powerful tool in a world today that is seeking authentic connection.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Because that's what Nextdoor does. Nextdoor is not about doom scrolling endlessly and just staying on the feed. Nextdoor is about using the internet and social media technology in particular as an icebreaker that will get you out of your home in real physical space with your neighbors. And every time that happens on Nextdoor, and it happens thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, or even millions of times, every time it happens, people are touched in a positive way. And that's special for us.

• 34:30Auren Hoffman?

  You see these movies like in the 50s in Brooklyn, and you know, it's like the summer and the kids are in the street playing stickball and there's ladies on one side and they're kind of gossiping and there's guys in their undershirts and they're talking with each other with the beers and stuff. And then, of course, they're outside because it's like, it's too hot in their house, right? And then we get richer, we get some air conditioning, and then at least they go to the front side of the house, and then we get even richer, and then we can go to the backside of the house, and we get even richer, go to the backyard, and then you don't even see your neighbors anymore. Like, when I walk around my, my neighborhood, I don't see my neighbors, even though they might all be home, because they're, they're in the backside. The, everything is face the back, it's not face the front anymore. It's, it's interesting how like we evolve as we get more wealthy.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Well, and I think that there's an interesting definition. I heard you say richer several times, and then you, you use the word wealth, right? What about emotional richness?

• 35:24Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  What about emotional wealth, right? I mean, okay, there's our bank account, right? But it's a proven fact that those people who know more neighbors, they're happier. They live, they live more fulfilled lives. And so I think it's great for us to be successful financially. Ultimately, I think money provides freedom. It's not self-worth, it's not, I, I don't think it makes you a better person if you've made more money, but it does help you live in a way that you want to live, and provide for the people that you care about in a way that you want to provide. But emotional richness and emotional wealth, I mean, when you're sitting there on your deathbed, do you care about how much money you have in your bank account? Or do you care about how many friends you have that are sitting around

• 36:09Speaker 01

  the table, supporting you as you pass? It's without a doubt the latter, and we all know that, right? We all know that. In fact, for you and me, since we're over 50, I hate to out us on that, but I will, right? I'm sure you feel the same way I do, which is increasingly the most important thing in my life is my relationships. It's not items or any kind of checklist that I've made for myself professionally, right? It's the depth of relationships that I have with my family, with my children, with my friends, with my business colleagues, right? Those things are priceless for me. And so I think at some point, we do actually shift to our emotional wealth from just our

• 36:54Speaker 01

  financial wealth. And I hope Nextdoor can be a part of that.

• 36:59Auren Hoffman?

  In my case, like we know our neighbors, we love our neighbors, they're great people. We do see them like come over and we'll grill some steaks together or something like that. But we would feel like it would be imposing to drop by unannounced. If I told my wife, hey, we're going to drop by the neighbors unannounced, she'd be like, whoa, that's, that's crazy, you know? And of course, and they feel the same way, they would never just like show up. But I remember back in the day, at least, it seemed like people were just showing up and they were just like, hey, just dropping by, even, you know, ringing the doorbell. Like, why has that evolved?

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Well, for sure, as transportation has gotten easier and then you can take kind of the work from home and that puts this on steroids, right? We don't see the people around us, and you use this very interesting metaphor of being in the backyard versus front yard, right? We don't see these people nearly as much as we used to. I mean, remember before, I mean, when I went to school, I took, I took the yellow dog, the public school bus to school. And so I was not going from my room to the kitchen, to the garage, to the car, and then being driven to school the way my kids are, right? I was leaving the house and going to where the bus picks up multiple kids. And I was seeing those kids and in many cases, I was seeing their parents who had dropped them off. And that was happening every single day. I was seeing them, right?

• 38:14Speaker 01

  We don't do that anymore. Where I think Nextdoor has become interesting and where it was interesting for us from the very beginning is it is a much better icebreaker to run into someone metaphorically on Nextdoor than it is for that person to come over to your house if you've never met them. And if you've run into them on Nextdoor, then to your point where you said, oh, maybe someone texts you and says, I have a couple of extra states come over, right? If you've interacted with someone on Nextdoor.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  It's a great opportunity for them to interact in the real world because you can say, "Hey, didn't I see you on Nextdoor?" And then all of a sudden, there's that feeling of connection. And it's not about the anxiety of, "Hey, who's that person? I don't know that person. What does that person want from me?" Right? Which is unfortunately, one of the realities of the world we live in. It's much more, "Oh, I know that person. That person's on Nextdoor. That person responded to the lost dog post." Right? And so, you know, getting to Nextdoor for a second, because we started the company and we were so bullish about its prospects and everything went extremely well. And even after I left, the company went public, had a successful IPO. But now I'm back because the stock's down 80%

• 39:28Speaker 01

  and the company has not been growing the way that it should. And I think we realize that while Nextdoor is still 20 million people a week, actively using it for things they need, whether it's, "I need a recommendation for a plumber or a dentist," or, "What was that loud noise? Did anyone hear anything? Because what's going on in the neighborhood?" Or, "I've lost my dog." And by the way, those needs that people use Nextdoor to satisfy, it is just amazing to me. It blows me away every time I think that there is a platform in this crazy, divided world, where people will go to rely on the kindness of strangers. Because if you lose a dog, where do you go to find that dog? Right? You have to go to a place like Nextdoor.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  And you don't know all your neighbors, but your neighbors still help you. So those episodic needs are very powerful. And I think Nextdoor does a really good job of providing a place for neighbors to help each other. But it turns out there's so much more. There are so many ways our neighbors can help us. Our neighbors can invite us over when they're having the barbecue. Our neighbors can tell us what's cool about the neighborhood, whether it's a new restaurant, or a new attraction, or a new person who's moved in. Right? In fact, we believe, and this is a big thrust of Nextdoor moving forward, your neighbors are the best ones to help you discover what's really great about your neighborhood. What they love is what you will probably love. And we have this idea of neighborhood favorites.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Wouldn't you want to know the favorite things in your neighborhood? Whether it's a business, or a service provider, or something to do, or a school, or an activity, right? And that information... Is all word of mouth. It doesn't exist on ChatGPT. It doesn't exist on Google. It's not, it's not on some website somewhere, whether it's a review website or whether it's Wikipedia, right? That exists in the minds of your neighbors. And we as Nextdoor, because we're connecting you with your neighbors, we should be able to take that and digitize it in a way that it becomes really useful and really delightful for you. And our goal is using Nextdoor should make you love your neighborhood and love your neighborhoods more, like love your neighbors more. It should,

• 41:39Speaker 01

  it should make you discover what's great about where you chose to live.

• 41:45Auren Hoffman?

  Now, you, you mentioned going public. Um, now you're in this almost like refounding moment where you get to, you're, you're, you're accelerating and doing all these new things. Is in some ways, is being a public company, is that a, is that a feature or a bug in this moment? Is it, would it be easier if you were a private company to do, to kind of like move and operate? Or how do, how do you think about that?

• 42:10Speaker 01

  I think there are lots of pros of being a public company. And I think there are lots of cons. That's not really what is defining the challenge for Nextdoor. I mean, ultimately, we need to build a better product that delivers more value to our neighbors. And we can do that whether with public or private. Now, obviously, if you're public, it can be a little bit more difficult to have a long-term time perspective, because you're on that quarterly drumbeat, right? But I don't think that's an excuse to not innovate. I, I think you have to make the most of the circumstances. And by the way, public company gives you an amazing platform to get the word out, right? You're a lot more visible and you're a lot more relevant and, and you can move

• 42:52Speaker 01

  faster in some way. So I think it's less about, should we be private or should we public? Because we're public now. That's where we are, right? And we, we benefited from going public because we raised a lot of capital. It gives us lots of resource to go and do what we need to do. But it's really more about, given that we're public, and given that we have a big challenge ahead of us, how do we fit those two things together? And so that's what we think about. I, I, I'm just not a fan of bemoaning one's circumstances. I'm more a fan, and I think this is very entrepreneurial, just figure out what's going to work best. Don't, don't worry about the things you can't control. I mean, You know, can we control the fact that we're public? I mean, I suppose we could go private, but what a massive distraction that would be.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  And there's no value our neighbors, our 100 million registered neighbors are getting no value. They don't care if we're private or public. They just care if the product works for them. Right? And so the thing we got to be focused on is not, are we public or private? We need to be focused on how do we build a better product? That's all that matters.

• 43:53Auren Hoffman?

  In some ways, this is like what companies always need to focus on. Right? In the end, like the product is the most important thing. And, you know, as companies, the longer the company's been around, the more state the products are. Even products that are really good that I use every day, like LinkedIn. I mean, it's just like, God, that product is so slow. It just hasn't changed forever. Salesforce, similar like, you know, and, you know, they, they benefit from just having customer lock in. So people have to use it. But for like things like B to C products, like people can move much faster between things or they've got other alternatives.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Well, as you know, sometimes in Silicon Valley, we're looking at things like, who are your investors? And what was your last round valuation? And how much money have you raised? And who's the celebrity person that you've just hired? Right? And at the end of the day, those may be inputs into the output, which is a great product. But ultimately, success is what you said. It's the output of the product, the service, the offering that your customers are taking advantage of. Right? And so all of that, it's not to say that how much you raise and who your investors are and who you hire are not important. They are important inputs, but understand them as inputs, not outputs. The output is actually the thing that's going to ultimately stand the test of time.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  And to your point, I mean, we're in an industry that's so, it's so challenging and exciting because permanence is not one of the attributes of the technology industry. Right? In fact, if you remember Microsoft and Apple. You've got Microsoft and Apple, two of the big trillion dollar market caps now, both of them almost died. No one could have predicted when we were at round zero in the late 90s, we talked about Apple dying because that was the era when Michael Dell famously said, if I were the CEO of Apple, I would give the money back to the shareholders. Right? And then 10 years later. Everyone felt that Microsoft was completely irrelevant. No one was using Internet Explorer. No one cared about Windows, right?

• 45:51Speaker 01

  And then Apple goes on this crazy tear where they invent the most lovable products known to man. Right? And Microsoft does this incredible evolution into the cloud. Right? And so those two are real exceptions. But the point is, and I think you articulated this implicitly. If you don't evolve your product to fit the environment of the time and the needs of your customers today, not yesterday, but today. If you don't do that, there almost certainly will be someone who does it and takes your customers away. Right? Someone's going to drink your milkshake if you don't stay current. And to your point about lock-in, which happens a lot.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  I found that in many cases, success is not the right environment for innovation. Because success is something people want to hold on to. Whereas failure and struggle is when you have that expression necessity is the best form of, you know, invention or whatever the expression is, right? If you're struggling, you have to make changes. If everything's working fine, you kind of take your hands off the wheel and say, why would I want to mess anything up? Right? But then before you know it, that creative destruction happens, right? You almost have to enact the destruction yourself. Because you know that someone else is going to do it. And it's actually one of the hardest tricks in all of business. I mean, think about Netflix, right?

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Netflix just announced that they're trying to buy Warner Brothers, right? You never could have predicted that. But Netflix started as mailed DVDs. And you probably remember they had this failed attempt towards streaming. Right? Where their customer said, no, no, no, no, no. We don't want digital delivery of these assets. We want the physical CDs. Right? But ultimately, that was where the industry went. So one of the really fun things, and I think you're going to ask me about. Common wisdoms or sayings that I don't believe in. So I'm going to just tease the one that I'm going to choose, right?

• 47:55Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah, we can dive into that. Yeah.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  But you know, I, I, I think, I think a lot of times, I mean, I'll, I'll go to the one right now, right? I mean, we have this, we have this truism, if you will, in our industry that, you know, follow the data or listen to the data or rely on the data. And I think data is very valuable. But in some cases, data is either misinterpreted because it is about the interpretation of the data or it misses the next dislocation that's going to happen, right?

• 48:26Auren Hoffman?

  The data is very hard to go from zero to one, right? It's, it's kind of like, it, it doesn't always, it often will tell you what happened in the past, but it's, it's, it's, it's not the best about the future.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Data is a great support system for decision making, but data should not be the thing that's driving the decision itself. And it's one of the things, particularly in our industry, as quantitative as we are, I think data is extremely powerful and I would never make a decision without looking at the data. But I wouldn't just look at the data. I would need to interpret it. And I think, again, contextually, as you said, there are times when the data should be more central to the decision and there are times when you're looking for something the data can't tell you. And particularly as you were early in doing something, the data is just different. The data may be qualitative, not quantitative, right?

• 49:18Speaker 01

  I mean, the early days of Nextdoor, because we were coming off of a failed company Fanbase, right? And by the way, in the first few months of Fanbase, we had 10 million people come and visit the service. The data would tell us that we were on to something, right? But then the data also showed that none of those 10 million people stayed, right? And so the data was not telling us why they weren't sticking around. We had to go and get qualitative insights and talk to people and understand, wait a second, you came, we gave you a pitch, you liked the pitch, you came, but then what did we not deliver on? The data wasn't telling us that, right? And so I think this truism of the data is always going to give you the answer, that's just shallow. And increasingly greatness to me is created by depth

• 50:03Speaker 01

  and really thinking deeply and critically about something and data is. An asset in that process, but it's not the only one.

• 50:12Auren Hoffman?

  It's interesting because in in tech companies, to me, the the the organizations and tech companies that seem to use the data the most are like sales and marketing and the ones that use the least, even though you would think they'd be the most data oriented, are engineering and product, because the data is often just not that useful in these in these other kind of in the kind of the creative parts of the company.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  It's not that it's not useful. I think it's actually always useful. It's that

• 50:40Auren Hoffman?

  Sure, yeah.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  You not only have to develop the muscle of including data in your decision making, you have to develop the muscle of analyzing the data the right way. That's why there's been the emergence of this of this group of people in a company called data scientists, right? Because in the early days, you would just have engineers do SQL pulls and you would just get raw data. And then the product managers would look at those and maybe the marketing people would look at the numbers and this and that. And ultimately, we realize is, gosh, you need people who are trained in really interpreting data and thinking about trend lines and understanding what the right query should be. And that became its own discipline called data science. And so I think if you have a data scientist,

• 51:25Speaker 01

  well, that's a different story, right? But we think of building product.

• 51:29Auren Hoffman?

  Just so, would you, I found that most in most organizations, and most at least the tech companies, like, the average engineer is very talented and the average data scientist is not. And so often, when someone is a data scientist, like, it's just like they they can't hack it or something. But you're saying that they are very valuable to these companies.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  I mean, look, we we tried not to hire anybody who's average, to be to be frank, right? But but I think what I found, and we're very lucky because I think we have talented data scientists. And and this is a very big challenge next door for data scientists because we have a community platform, but it's actually over 300,000 individual communities, right? So if you look at the average numbers on Nextdoor, for example, you might say, okay, yesterday, we were up 3%. And so you might think, okay, you're up 3%. Maybe it's kind of just a little bit like inflation. It's just a natural growth of what's going on. Right.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  But then a data scientist digs in and says, okay, the neighborhoods on the East Coast were up 22% because there's a snowstorm and neighbors are talking about the snowstorm. The neighborhoods on the West Coast are actually down 12% because Christmas break has already started and they're off on vacation somewhere. Right. And so this idea that every neighborhood, all the 300,000 neighborhoods have their own dynamics, that requires a real data scientist centric approach. I, I think what's maybe more interesting than, you know, what does the average engineer contribute versus the average data scientist? I think what's more interesting to me is product innovation today and building product today is now a kind of collaborative effort between an engineer, a product manager, a

• 53:16Speaker 01

  designer and a data scientist. And those final two participants, the designer and the data scientist, you and I know because we've built products for decades, that's relatively new. The power of design and acknowledging that with a seat at the table as you're building, and then the power of data science and acknowledging that with a seat at the table, that's relatively new, but all of the great products that we see today, right? Those were products that were created by a fusion of amazing technology, product management, data science to understand what was really the unlock and then obviously design to delight consumers. Right? And so it's a collaborative effort.

• 53:57Auren Hoffman?

  Okay. Since we just talked about our last question, um, the, the second last question we ask all of our guests, I'll ask you now is what is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

• 54:07Speaker 01

  I don't consider myself much of a conspiracy theorist. Uh, I, I have, you know, three kids under the age of 13 and I'm trying to bring Next Door back. I mean, I don't have much time to think about things that are, that are, you know, conspiracy centric, but I do believe that COVID was something that was not.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  Organically created from a wet market in Wuhan. And I have a little bit of a personal perspective because COVID hit during the time that I'd left next door and before I came back.

• 54:42Auren Hoffman?

  And so you were in Italy at the time.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  My wife and I were taking a kind of sabbatical. We were living in Florence, Italy.

• 54:47Auren Hoffman?

  And that was like ground zero for COVID, right?

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Well, at the end of February, we were skiing in northern Italy in the Dolomites and with our, with our three sons. And we came back to Florence where we were living and we noticed that there were Asian tourists that were wearing masks. And that was really striking to us because we were not familiar at all with anyone wearing a mask. And then obviously days later, we realized that there had been this outbreak in Wuhan. And a lot of people had come from Wuhan to Milan, Italy, which was the north of Italy, right? And then obviously it started to spread from there, right? And it was an amazing experience actually to be in Italy during COVID because at one point the borders were closed. We were in Italy and there were no tourists.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  And so to be in a place like Florence or to visit Rome and have no tourists around was kind of a once in a generation. I don't, I hope that never happens again, right? I mean, it was, it was unbelievable, right? But I do think that it felt a lot less like a strange coincidence and a lot more like a lab leak. And I feel like that's not even really conspiracy theory anymore. I think most people believe, you know, that that's kind of what they believe. But even from the very beginning, I remember thinking, this doesn't look like it's what we're being told. And it was quite important because if you think about COVID, that's something that affected every single person on the planet.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  And to think that there was a conspiracy and no one knew the truth about where it came from, that's actually pretty crazy.

• 56:18Auren Hoffman?

  Well, this has been great. I knew it would be great. I mean, we've been friends for a long time. This has been amazing. I really appreciate it. Uh, thank you so much for being on the, on the podcast.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  So I so appreciate you and I appreciate being on the podcast and I will say for your listeners that as someone who's worked in community my entire career and cares about it deeply, not just professionally, but personally, Orin, you've always struck me as someone who cares deeply about community. And I know that you may call it a different name, you may call it network, right? You have tirelessly cultivated that network of friends and now the folks who listen to this podcast and the folks that you work with. And so I've learned a lot from you. I appreciate it and it's a real privilege to be your friend.

• 57:00Auren Hoffman?

  That's very nice. Thank you so much. One more thing before we go. I wrote a blog called Summation. It's the same name as the pod. Been writing it since I was 14 years old. It's a non-obvious idea, sharing on business, on talent, on data, longevity, on random contrarian takes. And every month I put out something called five links, which is something I'm reading or watching or listening to that I think are worth sharing. If you like the conversations on this show, you'll probably like the blog. It's free. New content comes out twice a month. You could subscribe at orin.substack.com. That's orin.substack.com.