S14E1: Nirav Tolia, Nextdoor CEO, on Building Community Platforms, Product-Market Fit, and the Future of AI in Local Networks

the power of the pain killer versus a vitamin.

A vitamin something that's nice.

Did you take your vitamins this morning?

Yes, I did.

Oh, no, I forgot to.

That's OK.

I'll take them tomorrow.

But what are people going to do for painkillers?

I mean, they're going to slither on their belly

to get to the painkiller with their last ounce of energy

because they need the painkiller.

And so if you can build a painkiller,

something that people, if it were turned off,

they would scream, you kind of know you're on to something.

Welcome back to the room podcast season 14.

Hi, Matt.

Hi, Claude.

So excited to be here.

So excited to be talking about everything

that's going on in 2026 and tech.

There's so much to discuss.

Each season, as you all know, we

sit down with some of the most thoughtful and insightful people

building on the cutting edge of the startup ecosystem

and talk about what it takes for them to build in scale

and during companies.

The season, we're diving into the ideas,

inflection points, and experiences

that have shaped some of today's most impactful companies

and the people behind them.

From next door to the ring founder,

we are diving into suites of innovation

from early product decisions to navigating

rapid moments of growth, to acquisitions, IPO exits,

and truly the conversations that offer a window

into how great companies are built.

And if you enjoy the conversations, which I think you will,

make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

And of course, if you want to stay connected,

we would love to have you at our community events

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And you can subscribe to our newsletter

to learn more at theroompodcast.com.

Thank you so much for being a part of the community

and welcome to season 14 of the room podcast.

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Welcome back to the room podcast.

I'm Claudia Laurie, and today we're kicking off season 14

with Nerov Tolia, the co-founder and CEO of Nextor,

the neighborhood network designed to help people

connect with communities around them.

Nextor now spans hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods

globally in millions of verified neighbors.

The mission sounds simple.

Help people feel more connected to where they live.

But as Nerov shares in this conversation,

building a product around community turns

to be one of the hardest problems in technology.

In this episode, we talk about Nerov's journey

growing up in Odessa, Texas as the child

of Indian immigrant physicians

and how those early experiences shaped the way he thinks

about belonging.

We also dive into the winding path

that led him to entrepreneurship

from circling academically at Stanford

to becoming one of the first hundred employees at Yahoo.

Nerov's career didn't follow a straight line.

One of the ideas I love the most from this conversation

is how Nerov thinks about product market fit.

He talks about the difference between building a vitamin

versus building a painkiller.

For Nextor, that moment came when neighbors began relying

on information in the platform for real world needs,

lost pets, safety alerts, and local recommendations

and emergency information.

We also discuss the hard realities

of building platforms for real communities.

As Nextor scaled, the company had to confront issues

like bias and harmful behavior.

And rethink how the product itself

could encourage more constructive interactions.

The biggest takeaway from this conversation

is that community isn't a soft problem in technology.

It's one of the hardest.

And Nerov has spent more than a decade

building a product design to mirror

the complexity of real neighborhoods.

So with that, let's open the door.

This is the room podcast with Nerov Tolya of Nextor.

Nerov, thank you so much for joining us today here

in the room.

I'm so thrilled to be here.

Thank you for having me.

And a big fan and excited about the conversation.

So are we.

And we already got started a bit here,

but we'd like to start at the beginning with our guests.

So you were born in Texas.

Could you tell us a little bit more about where you grew up

and how that shaped your view of the world?

Yeah, absolutely.

And technically, I was not born in Texas,

even though I don't tell anyone in Texas that.

I was born in Philadelphia.

My parents are Indian immigrants,

and so they'd settled in Philadelphia.

But we moved to Odessa, Texas,

which is a small city in West Texas,

when I was very young.

And so I tell people that I'm from Texas

because I am, but I was not technically born there.

And it did shape a lot of not just my childhood

because I was in Texas until I came to Stanford for college.

It has shaped really almost everything I've done professionally

and I'll give you the reason why.

So I was one of the only Indian Americans

in a town of 100,000 people kind of in the middle of nowhere.

Odessa is 300 miles west of Dallas.

It's about 250 miles east of El Paso.

So it really is quite far from a big city.

And because my parents had immigrated,

I'd say reasonably early in the cycle,

they'd come to America in the early 70s.

I was one of the first children of immigrants in that area.

My parents were actually the second and third Indian physician

that had moved to Odessa, Texas

because there was a great opportunity there to be a doctor.

And it was booming because of oil.

It's an oil town.

But it was a little bit challenging for me

because I was different.

I had a different name.

Nirov is not a West Texas name

or even an American name.

My parents were Indian.

They were vegetarian.

I meet because I don't think I could survive

in Texas if I didn't eat meat, but they were vegetarian.

And so growing up, I did feel at many points lonely.

And I felt like I was different.

And children never really want to feel different.

That's the one thing that's very, very difficult to get over

because you're always thrust into these situations

with other children.

You want to feel like you're like everyone else.

And I just wasn't.

I didn't look like everyone else.

My name wasn't like anyone else.

My parents didn't sound like other people.

And I think that awakened in me,

a genuine desire to be part of a group,

to feel like I belonged.

And that ultimately led to a real passion for

and really a need in many ways to seek community.

And community is the through line in my life,

both personally and professionally.

It's the thing that gives me the most joy outside of work.

And it's the thing inside of work

that I've worked on over multiple decades

for multiple companies.

And it's the thing that I believe in very deeply

as a core value.

Absolutely.

And that is a great tip off for what

is to come with the next door story,

community being, of course, a key pillar of next door.

And thank you for sharing a little bit

about how that unique growing up experience,

which is felt by many, really kind of shaped

that inner compass for you.

It speaks very much to the heart of our podcast,

which is inspired by Alexander Hamilton,

the room where it happened.

Many of us want to be in the room,

but perhaps are not for different reasons.

Or finding ourselves tiptoeing into the room

and asking what's going on.

And so I'm curious in that vein of early identity

and upbringing, did you always think

you were going to become a founder?

Boy, what a great, great question.

No, I never thought that not for a single minute or second.

I didn't even know what a founder was.

And you know, you bring up this really interesting concept

in terms of wanting to be in the room

because if you grow up in a place like Odessa, Texas,

particularly pre-internet,

there are none of those rooms in Odessa.

They just aren't even there, right?

So the room may be in New York City,

it may be in San Francisco,

it may be in Los Angeles, maybe in D.C., right?

It's in these places that you hear about.

And when I grew up, you're getting all your information

from television.

If you live in Odessa, those aren't rooms that you're a part of.

And so interestingly, while I did not ever think

that I would be a founder,

and I'll give you a little bit more context on that,

the reason that I ultimately felt like the internet

and the set of technologies that creates virtual spaces

is so powerful, is because the rooms online

are open to anyone, regardless of where they are physically.

And so you could be on an internet connection

and you could feel like you were on Wall Street

or you could feel like you were in Hollywood

or you were in D.C., in the middle of politics, right?

And so these rooms you're talking about

that I think we all aspire to be part of,

the accessibility of those rooms pre-internet

was largely determined not by socio-economic class.

They were determined by where you lived

and what you were exposed to.

And the reason that I'm such a lover of technology

in particular, the internet set of technologies is,

I believe the internet has really democratized

our access to those rooms.

You asked me about being a founder,

both my parents are physicians, as I mentioned.

And so as a good, beautiful son of Indian immigrants,

I really had no choice but to be a physician myself

and I wanted to be a physician.

And so I grew up thinking I'm gonna be

the third generation of Dr. Tolya's

because my grandparents, both of my grandfather's

were doctors as well, right?

And so that was the only room that I knew existed

and that was the room that I thought I would be part of.

But getting out of Odessa and going to Stanford

really kind of changed everything for me.

So from aspiring third generation physician

to English major at Stanford,

I have a few questions about connecting those dots

and ultimately joining Yahoo as one of the first 100 employees.

Can you pave that road for us a bit more?

Yes, I'll tell you a bunch of funny stories,

but you know, my wonderful mother

who is one of the most inspirational people in my life

and in in physician herself.

And so I'll just speak about my parents for a second.

First of all, from my mom to be a working woman

in her generation was extremely unique.

In addition, my parents met in medical school

and they fell in love and they were of a generation

in India and of a culture where one's parents

determine who you marry.

It's arranged marriages.

That was actually the norm back then.

And so they had what's called cutely a love marriage.

They fell in love and even though they were very similar

in terms of their cast, their religion,

their vocation, they were both going to be doctors.

Both of their parents were not quite in favor

of them marrying each other.

And so when they'd got married

and ultimately my mom moved into my father's family's home

because that's how it was back then,

it became pretty clear that she wouldn't be able

to really pursue her dream of practicing medicine

in the same way because she was expected to be a housewife.

And so the reason that my parents immigrated to America

is because my mom said, hey, look,

it's not like we need a job.

So we're not going to America because it's opportunity

and we need jobs.

We're going to America because we want to create our own vibe,

our own culture.

I want to work and we want to be equal partners

in this experience, right?

And India at that point was a very patriarchal society.

And so my mom is a very inspirational person in my life

for all of those reasons and many more.

But when I told my parents I was going to be an English major,

of course, my parents' response is, don't you know English?

Do you need to study the language, right?

And I would explain to them, look,

I'm going to take all the pre-med courses.

So yes, I could be a biology major,

but I enjoy reading literature.

And so this is actually English literature.

And I'd met someone my freshman year at Stanford

who's a dear friend of mine today and he was an English major.

And I found that freshman year that when we had discussions

about classes on any given day,

what he talked about was way more interesting

than the organic chemistry and biology that I was learning.

And so I decided to go and pursue English,

but it was really about literature.

And at the time I still believed that I would be a physician,

it turned out that I wasn't nearly as good at the pre-med stuff

as I wanted to be.

And you know, you show up at Stanford

and again, to use your metaphor of the room.

I went to a public high school.

There were no AP classes at all.

I think I was the first person to ever apply to Stanford.

Many people at my school thought that Stanford

was a junior college in East Texas,

even after I was accepted.

And so when I finally showed up at Stanford,

I probably did feel like I had finally made it

into one of these rooms, right?

And yet, you get there and you realize pretty quickly

there are a lot of smart people here.

In fact, most of them are smarter

and they are better prepared than I am.

And so to get there and to start to fail,

that was a blow for sure.

And I still wanted to be a doctor,

but I wasn't excelling the way that I wanted to.

And it was only through my extracurricular activities,

one in particular, I hate to admit this,

but I'm proud of it, but I don't like to admit it all the time.

I was in one of those singing groups,

you know, kind of like the movie, Pitch Perfect.

So I was in the Stanford Fleet Street Singers,

which is an all-male Acapella group.

And I was the business manager in the group one year,

not knowing anything about business,

literally not knowing anything about business,

but I found that it came naturally to me.

And so to transition from being a pre-med to business,

to technology was extremely, extremely unpredictable

relative to what I had wanted my entire life.

And it was just almost random.

But if I look back on it, it wasn't random

because I was seeking success

and I wasn't successful as a pre-med,

I found some success even serendipitously as a business person.

And then I discovered technology

because I had an Ethernet jack in my dorm room at Stanford

and that unlocked going online.

And when I went online, because my experience growing up

was so marked by geography, not being bound by where I lived

and being able to experience virtual spaces,

that resonated with me so strongly, immediately,

that I got it, even though I couldn't

maybe articulate it as a business opportunity,

I immediately understood, my gosh,

there are so many people like me.

And when they come online, they're gonna realize

that where they live doesn't matter

because they can go online and experience everything

they want to experience.

And so I ultimately begged my parents

before going to medical school, which was my path,

can I please go and work at this company called Yahoo,

which was not the behemoth that it became.

And so I was one of the first hundred employees there.

At the time, there was a chocolate milk company

called Yahoo.

They may still exist, Yahoo chocolate milk.

And so yes, there was a moment where my poor mom

went from thinking, why is he studying English

when he knows how to speak the language?

Number one, and number two,

is he gonna deliver chocolate milk to people, right?

So I definitely put my parents through the ringer,

but it was like winning a lottery ticket

that I was able to join a company like Yahoo at that stage.

And that's really the thing that launched everything

that came afterwards.

Well, first of all, what an incredible inner compass

to know, hey, this is not clicking in the way

that I wanted to and I actually have these other strengths.

Let me go, petition my parents to actually get out there

and try this.

Of course, you couldn't have picked a better

first internet company to join at the time.

I guess maybe there was like one better one

that you could have joined, but other than not.

No, there weren't any better ones.

And you know, the funny thing is,

when your listeners know this, in retrospect,

it looks clean and it looks really strategic

and it looks like I had some inner compass, right?

At the time, it was all about anxiety

and it was all about struggle

and it was all about being incredibly insecure

and it was all about surviving, frankly.

And so I could say, oh yeah, I had this master plan

and it was exactly the opposite.

It was failure, leading to learning,

which led to serendipity, which led to opportunity.

And then once that opportunity existed, boy,

I think that I took that little scene that I had

and I ripped it open into a giant gash

that I could walk through, right?

But no, it was not planned and when I think back on it,

I'm such a planned person today.

I'm really surprised that this happened.

I mean, I feel like it's an incredible blessing.

You know, I said, it was like I won the lottery, right?

I wouldn't chalk this up to skill or hard work,

which I think a lot of success

does come from skill and hard work.

I would chalk this one up to luck.

And I'm not above saying that I think luck

is more powerful than skill and hard work.

Okay, I think we can debate that,

but I want to get into the,

because that sounds like you have a lot of skills

under the hood here and you're being modest,

but as it relates to that experience at Yahoo

and then of course, you're self being inspired

to join this thing, entrepreneurship,

call it being a founder with opinions,

your first company, with an E.

We can talk about what happened there

and how it merged into shopping.com and acquired.

But you may like all of that is good,

but I'm worried we're not even getting into next order

so much to talk about.

I just, I think I want to orient our listeners

to like the entrepreneurial ecosystem

in the Bay area of that time.

Kind of how is your journey and what was then,

and okay, yesterday I known as the early.com era

kind of coming about and what drew you into that founder moment.

I think I'd probably go back to community,

but just to give the listeners a sense

of what it was like back then,

the internet was just emerging.

There was no mainstream trillion dollar internet companies

that had gone public, right?

Even Yahoo, I mean, think about the fact

that Yahoo had the name Yahoo.

There was a company called Yahoo.

Today that's completely mainstream.

The wackiest name is completely fine, right?

But back then it was hard for people to be taken seriously.

Once these companies began to go public,

then there was a lot of attention on them

and then everyone was watching CNBC

and they were day trading and this and that.

And so people started to move to the Bay Area in droves

and instead of going and joining banks

and joining consulting firms,

the brightest people, not just engineers,

but business people were coming to the Bay Area

because at that time as well,

there was mass centralization of these companies

in the Bay Area.

There was Amazon and Microsoft in the Pacific Northwest

and there was maybe a few in New York

and a few dotted across the landscape in other places

but it was largely happening in Palo Alto,

not even San Francisco, frankly.

And so being at Yahoo was incredible

and it was definitely like winning a lottery.

There was only one issue, which is,

every day I worked at Yahoo and I was there for three years

and I was one of the first hundred

by the time I left there were 10,000 people.

When I joined the market cap was less than a billion

when I left it was over a hundred billion.

I think there were probably 10 million users

of the product when I joined and by the time I left

there were dozens of products

and probably a billion users, right?

So imagine living through that,

which was just an unbelievable privilege

to go to work every single day and the numbers go up.

I've never been able to replicate that

and I don't know many people who have

but there was this truth that dawned on me the longer I stayed

and this is what kind of opened my mind to being a founder

which is being a Yahoo as an unbelievable privilege

but I knew that if I happened to not look

both sides of the street before I crossed

and I was run over by truck,

I don't know that anyone would even notice that I was gone.

None of the success that Yahoo experienced,

you know, all those metrics that I talked about

none of them were being driven by me

and I felt that I really wanted to be one of the people

that was creating the value and that is definitionally

what a founder is.

And so on the side really nights and weekends

I got together with four other aspiring entrepreneurs

and you know this time again to set the landscape

no one would leave Yahoo.

I mean the stock was doubling every three months, right?

I mean it was crazy that someone would consider leaving

my co-founder of next door,

someone that is like a sister to me Sarah Leary,

she has this great expression,

don't leave a good time looking for a good time.

I left a good time looking for a good time

because I wanted to be a founder so me and four other folks

started this nonprofit called Round Zero.

Round zero was a name kind of a geeky name

that refers to prior to seeking round one financing.

There's Round Zero and that's when you're thinking about

do I have the right idea, do I have the right co-founders,

do I even need a co-founder,

how am I going to make a market entry,

how am I going to raise money,

how am I going to talk about this idea,

who are the competitors, what are they up to?

And you realize pretty quickly

that you can't answer those questions by yourself.

You need community around you

and it's so much better when you're talking to people

who are trying to do similar things.

And so we put together this group

that would meet once a month

and that was really my first start up.

I was the president of this thing, Round Zero

and we would bring people together

and that was also where from a networking standpoint,

Reed Hoffman and Elon Musk and Larry Page

and many of the giants of today would attend Round Zero

and that gave me the courage to then go and start opinions

the company that you're referring to in 1999.

So I joined Yahoo 96.

I started opinions in 1999.

That company was one of the hottest at the beginning

and then was one of the near busts.

I think a couple of weeks from going out of business,

ultimately we merged with another private company.

There were lawsuits.

I had to leave the company and ended up going public.

It was successful.

It was sold to eBay, lots of learnings, lots of highs and lows.

And then I took a little bit of time off

and lived in my favorite city in the world, New York,

which I know Claudia, you're originally from.

And then I came back to the Bay Area,

became an entrepreneur and residence at Benchmark Capital.

They had funded opinions the first company

and that ultimately led to next door.

Well, I'm excited to dig deep into the next story.

So let's orient ourselves.

You are in the Bay Area.

It's almost nine years later, your previous start up

and your co-founding next door with your co-founders,

Sarah, Prakash and David, aiming to build

a hyper-local social network grounded in real identities.

Tell us, what was Yalha moment?

What sparked the idea?

Well, the first funny thing to tell you is

next door is even a kind of phoenix rising

from the ashes story, right?

And so when I went back to be an EIR at Benchmark,

it was me and Sarah Larry, the person

who I've worked with most closely for the last 25 years.

And again, someone that I consider a sister,

one of the most important people in my life.

And we started a company first out of Benchmark as EIRs,

entrepreneurs and residents, called Fanbase,

which was about community, but about sports community.

And that company after two years didn't work.

And so we were gonna give the money back.

It was a failure.

It actually was not gonna be one of those startups that succeeded.

And we knew how hard it is to build a successful company.

It's equally hard to build an unsuccessful company.

And so that's something you don't want to do.

That's the corollary to don't leave a good time.

Looking for a good time is if you're having a bad time,

get the heck out, right?

And so we were getting the heck out.

We were gonna give the money back and Bill Gurley,

another really influential person in my career,

one of the most influential, said, hey, look,

we believe in the team.

And at that point, the team was also Prakasha.

You mentioned David Weason and a number of others

Adam Ginsburg, Madison Bell,

Eric Gonzales, seven of us as a matter of fact.

And we spent the summer of 2010 coming up with new ideas

and one of those was next door.

Now to answer your question,

how did we come up with the idea, right?

Well, first of all, there was a fair amount of desperation

because we were coming off of a failed thing.

And we had told the employees of fan base,

hey, look, we know fan base isn't working.

So we're sun setting this thing that you've joined.

Like you're here because you've joined

because you want to build this thing fan base

that's not working.

And we admit that.

And so we're gonna take a summer and try to come up

with a new idea.

And if we do, we're gonna pursue that idea

with the funds that we've raised.

If we don't, we're gonna return all the money

to our investors and we're not gonna take any

severance or anything.

If you don't want to do that,

which is you didn't join this company to be a founder,

but you're about to be a founder or something.

If you don't want to do that, we'll give you severance now

so that you can feel like you got something.

And I think we had maybe a dozen people

and five of the people took the severance packages.

And then we were left with seven.

And I joke with people,

it's not like you can put on your Google calendar 10 AM

come up with billion dollar idea.

Like it's just not the way it works, right?

I mean, founders tend to either have spent years thinking

of ideas they want to pursue

and then they finally have the courage to do so, right?

Or they do something that's a little bit more rigorous.

They worked in a particular company

and they saw an opportunity at that company

that the company wasn't pursuing.

So they went off to do it themselves, right?

Rarely is a company founded

because the original idea that you're passionate

about is not working, right?

That's a tough pivot.

I mean, that's a true pivot and it's a tough pivot.

And yet we had the desperation.

We knew we wanted to work on community

because that was something that we were passionate about

that we felt like we were good at.

And we ran across this article in the New York Times

about the decline of community in America

and how almost a third of Americans

could not name a single neighbor by name.

And that was not the way that we grew up.

I mean, going back to Odessa, Texas,

I talked about how may not have the influential rooms,

but what it does have is a really strong sense of community.

People really care about each other.

They look out for each other.

The neighborhoods are wonderful places to grow up.

And I really took that for granted

because if I fast forward to the summer of 2010,

I'm living in Pacific Heights in San Francisco,

the center of the tech universe.

And there's no sense of community in my neighborhood.

I don't know any of my neighbors, right?

And so we felt that viscerally

what the article was talking about.

And then we found a book called Bowling Alone

by Robert Putnam who'd been the chair

of the sociology department at Harvard.

And the subtitle of Bowling Alone

is the decline of community in America.

And that's when we started to do a little bit of research

around what's happened in neighborhoods.

And by the way, technology, not just internet technologies,

but televisions have played a pretty big role in this decline.

And we started to think, can we use the benefits

and beauty of technology to recreate

a sense of community online and help bolster

the real sense of community offline?

And that led to things like verification of identity

and neighborhood boundaries.

And all of the things that have become true innovations

relative to what next door is and what I think it can become.

Thank you so much for telling the story of how

the first idea wasn't the one that worked out.

And you made the hard decision to switch gears pivot.

I think a lot of the founders that we talk to,

and I'm sure a lot of folks in our audience often

have a hard time balancing the tension

between being tenacious and continuing

to try to figure out how to make things work

versus knowing when something's structurally not going to work.

And their opportunity cost is too high

and they should be doing something else.

So it's just incredibly helpful to hear that narrative.

Well, look, I think it's worth spending a minute on that

because today I am lucky enough to work

with lots of different entrepreneurs and founders.

And that dilemma you're talking about,

which is you're working really hard on something.

There's a little bit of daylight,

but not as much as you know you need.

And either you can't recruit a co-founder,

you can't go raise the money.

And you always think as a founder, it's right around the corner.

If I just do this one other thing,

if I just sign this one customer,

if I just release this one feature,

if I just hire this one person,

if I just make this one part of the app better, right?

And I don't know the magical answer of when you say enough,

let's move on to something else.

Or when you say it really is around the corner,

I don't know the answer.

What I can tell you is the reason that we ultimately

put fan base to rest is because we didn't have the energy

every day when we woke up to work on that problem.

And so I don't think we ever really know

when's the right time to keep going

versus when's the right time to quit,

you know, unless we run out of money, right?

But even that, you can work without money, right?

But what we do know, and it's almost like a metaphysical thing,

we do know when we wake up in the morning,

are we getting more energy out of working on that problem

or are we giving more energy out of working on that problem?

And we had felt after two years,

we can't spend more time on fan base.

That's such a helpful framework, you know,

as you're saying, definitely part art, part science,

but oftentimes your gut instinct is pretty accurate.

And I'd love to parlay that and just sort of the energy

you were getting out of building the platform

officially launched in the US in October of 2011,

tell us what were the early reactions from users?

What did you learn during that launch phase?

And how did you know you had signs of product market?

Those are all great questions.

You know, I'll start with the first,

which is how did we know we were on to something?

And you know, I'll contextualize it the way that I have,

which is we had it even higher bar

for whether we were on to something or not

because it's not like we did fan base thinking

that we weren't on to something.

In the early days of fan base,

we thought we were on to something as well

and clearly we weren't, right?

So the last thing the world we wanted to do

was waste two more years before we found out

that the thing we were working on was not going to happen, right?

And so the first thing I'll say is,

whenever we described the concept of next door

and this includes literally hand drawing wire frames

and showing them to people in neighborhoods, right?

Before writing a single line of code,

whenever we described the idea,

the idea is very simple,

which is technology has done a lot of great things,

but it's also in some ways isolated us.

It's also made us more likely to sit at home

and scroll through feeds than to go outside

and meet people in the real world, right?

We know more about Taylor Swift

than we know about the person who lives across the street.

You know, that kind of thing, right?

And that's well known.

However, we spend the majority of our time in our money

in a call it five mile radius around where we live.

That's just a fact.

And so why isn't technology doing a better job

of strengthening the connections in that very small radius?

And if it could through a social media interface,

is that something you would enjoy using people like,

oh yeah, I do want to know my neighbors.

I do want to know the best thing to do this weekend.

I do want to know the best place to get fish tacos

and the best place to go to get a teeth cleaning done.

And you know, the person who can actually put

my Christmas lights up in the right way.

I mean, I do want to know all those things

and it doesn't exist, you know, at the time

there wasn't even Google, there was Yahoo,

but it doesn't exist on Yahoo,

it doesn't exist on Google.

Today it doesn't exist on chat GPT.

So I do want that.

I do want the collective intelligence of my neighborhood.

Very accessible.

And I want to get to know those people

who have the collective intelligence.

So the first signal was there was a movement bigger than us

that wanted to bring back a sense of community

to the neighborhood.

We didn't meet that many Baham bug people

who said, oh, I hate my neighbors.

I never want to talk to them, right?

There are people like that, obviously,

but the vast majority of people said,

you know, I do actually want to contribute

and be part of my local community.

There are so many ways our neighbors can help us.

I just don't know how to interact.

Like I can't break the ice, I don't know these people.

And so that was the first sign.

We would then take the discussions to wire frames

and we'd show them wire frames.

And it was very clear that that was something

they would use.

It was a utility centric thing from the beginning,

meaning it wasn't so much about entertainment

and enjoyment, it was about solving problems.

My dog is lost, I need a recommendation for a dentist

to anyone here that loud noise.

And then when we started building a very crude product

that wasn't called next door, it was called

Loreline neighbors, it was in the Menlo Park neighborhood

of Loreline, it was just called Loreline neighbors.

We were doing site maintenance one day.

And so the site was down and we started getting

all these emails from people who lived in the neighborhood.

What happened to my neighbor's website?

Well, what's going on here?

Did you all take it away?

And you know at that point, the power of a pain killer

versus a vitamin.

So a vitamin something that's nice,

did you take your vitamins this morning?

Yes, I did, oh no, I forgot too,

that's okay, I'll take them tomorrow.

But what are people gonna do for painkillers?

I mean, they're gonna slither on their belly

to get to the painkiller with their last ounce of energy

because they need the painkiller, right?

And so if you can build a painkiller

like something that people, if it were turned off,

they would scream, right?

You kind of know you're onto something

and that's what we were getting in the early days.

And honestly, I would say from the summer of 2010

until gosh, even when I left the company at the end of 2018

that was a pretty consistent arc.

By the time I came back in 2024,

I'm sorry to say that even though we had over 100 million

verified users, many of those users were telling me,

oh, I used to use next door, it just wasn't that great.

So I don't use it anymore, right?

But in those early days, the signal was,

it was very, very clear.

And the product market fit piece was clear as well.

What I don't think we did in those early days is

the potential of the idea was always here

and the product was always trailing it

by a pretty significant margin.

And the best companies are built

because you have massive potential

and then you have these incredible products

that match that potential

and then that creates magic.

Well, I'd love to dig a little bit into one of those

sort of like pain killer features slash personas

that jumped off the page in the early days.

From the start, next door's crime and safety features

took off even sparking public safety collaborations.

Certainly resident here in San Francisco,

but the platform also had to grapple

with the challenge of being a product

that had many different types of users

and different types of communities.

How did your team navigate those complications

while remaining true to your mission?

That's such a great question.

And the idea of using technology

and neighborhood-centric communication

to create a safer place for everyone,

that's not something next door invented.

The idea of neighborhood watch

is something that existed long before next door, right?

We just created a digitization of the neighborhood watch.

And so when you're from the very beginning

that it's a lot more efficient,

if you see something that you think other neighbors should

know about because it doesn't look safe,

it's way more efficient to just put it out on an online platform

versus go neighbor by neighbor or call a phone tree

or all the ways that we did it in the past, right?

But I think what you're referring to is

I remember I was actually taping a segment on,

I think Dr. Phil, if you remember that TV show,

about this amazing story that had happened on next door

when neighbors were helping each other.

And an article came out that said that next door

was a place where racial profiling was happening.

And I remember seeing the article and thinking,

wait a second, I'm brown.

Like I am not white, I am a person of color

in what universe would I have created a product

that would racially profile people, right?

And that was a real wake up call

and I think many, many, many entrepreneurs

need to think about this and have had the wake up call

particularly in the modern era of technology,

which is you can build amazingly powerful things

that have unintended consequences.

And if you don't try to anticipate

some of those consequences upfront,

it's very difficult to then refactor the product

after it's already been built,

particularly if the product is about user generated content

and online community because you're essentially just

building a container and then your users

build a container up, right?

And so in lots of cases, I would say less than 1%

of total content, but we would say internally,

even one case is too many, even if it's less than 1%.

But in those cases, someone would see someone

who looked unfamiliar in a neighborhood,

either because of their skin color

or the way they dressed, right?

Or some of their style choices.

And in cases, it wasn't a criminal.

It wasn't someone that was trying to do bad things.

It was just someone who looked different.

And we all know, I mean, diversity is the spice of life.

I mean, it's totally okay if people look different

and they do look different.

That doesn't mean that they're bad people, right?

And it was particularly, I would say powerful for me

because I grew up in a place where I looked different

than everyone.

And it would have been easy for people

to racially profile me growing up in my neighborhood

in Odessa, Texas, right?

And so that led to this realization

that we are responsible even for unintended consequences.

And the idea of racial profiling,

it's actually about unconscious bias,

which is a very difficult thing.

Unconscious bias means I don't even know

that I'm stereotyping, yet I am.

And so if people don't even know they're doing something,

how do you teach them to do the right thing, right?

But I think we have to be challenged

to come up with ways that we can help people

be the best versions of themselves online and offline.

And so this led to a lot of sleepless nights, honestly.

I mean, no company wants to wake up in the morning

and say, I'm gonna go work on something

that's gonna racially profile people, right?

Even if it's less than 1% of the content, right?

And you're attacked and that becomes the story

because as you know, in the press,

if it bleeds, it leads, right?

So like it's the controversial stuff that gets amplified,

but it inspired us or really created a desperation for us

around ensuring that we were doing everything we could

to ensure that neighbors using our platform were responsible

and they weren't racially profiling.

And there was a lot of great learnings in that phase.

Thank you for bringing us into the room around,

you know, creating a digital third space

that has unintended, messy, complicated side effects,

which is just probably true about building community

in general, right?

Because at the end of the day,

when you're putting a group of people here,

who might not all come from the same background,

there are gonna be these emotions that come up

and fears that ultimately create challenges.

And of course, for you, challenges that are at scale,

given the way that next door has exploded

in being the platform of choice

for these local community-led moments and movements.

And, you know, thinking about how you got to that,

it was really a classic tale of Silicon Valley sort.

You mentioned Benchmark being one of your earliest supporters

through being both an EIR there,

but next door has gone on to raise over 450 million

in private capital from places like Benchmark, Greylock,

Tiger Global, Coastal Adventures.

I mean, these are tier one incredible investors.

And ultimately, this led to your IPO via SPAC in 2021.

So could you draw us in a little bit more

to those early conversations

and ultimately scale the exit for your company?

I certainly would not call an IPO an exit.

I think the notion of exit, like most entrepreneurs,

I think their hope and dream is that they're working

on that problem forever

because there's an infinite horizon

for the opportunity to get bigger and bigger.

I haven't seen that many,

there are obviously lots of successes

in terms of acquisitions like true exits, right?

But I would urge entrepreneurs to be thinking

about a limitless horizon and to pick ideas that the better,

the better they produce a product,

the more opportunity there will be,

and the more passion they will have to work towards that.

But yes, I mean, in many ways, you know, I joke and say,

if you looked up Silicon Valley entrepreneur in the dictionary,

I'm pretty stereotypical and Indian guy

who went to Stanford who started, you know,

companies funded by those people that you mentioned,

you know, where two of the companies went public.

And so we have been very, very, very fortunate,

but what people don't ever see

and all the founders who are listening know this

and this goes for the most successful founders.

I'm sure Elon Musk feels this way.

Success as an entrepreneur tends to be 999 failures

leading to one massive success.

So when I think about that IPO,

yeah, I think about some of the great moments,

but you also think about the fact that next door

was founded out of the failed company

and that we had to deal with the racial profiling.

And that, you know, there were many times

where we were trying to hire a person

or we were trying to raise money,

we were trying to do a business deal,

and the answer was no, because that is the daily life

of building one of these things.

But ultimately, our conviction in the potential

of the idea compelled us to keep going.

And the world's desire to have something like this

gave us the opportunity to generate

that amount of business success.

The other side of it is speaking very candidly,

post IPO, we lost a lot of the mojo

that had enabled the IPO to begin with.

We didn't improve the product the way that we should have.

We didn't address the shortcomings

that had already existed even prior to the IPO.

And this isn't just what I wasn't CEO.

I mean, I made thousands of mistakes as CEO, right?

And you ultimately have to address those,

you know, or they're gonna come home to roost.

And when you become a larger platform,

whether it's because you're public

or because in next door's case,

you have over 100 million verified neighbors,

99% of neighborhoods in America,

10 other countries, right?

That's a big scale.

And so when there's a leak in the dam somewhere, right?

The size of the dam at that point is pretty massive.

And so the leak can actually blow things up, right?

Which is unfortunately what began happening post COVID

because during COVID, obviously people leaned

on next door more than they ever had

because there was no way to interact with people

in real physical space.

And so coming out of COVID like many internet companies,

we realized that we were at an artificially high point.

And then the question is, okay, when you fall,

do you do the short term things

that help you kind of maintain that artificially high point?

Or do you acknowledge the fact

that you have some plumbing that you need to fix?

And you're gonna fix the plumbing

and in the midst of fixing that plumbing,

your results may not look that great.

As a private company, that's hard.

As a public company, it's near impossible.

It is near impossible.

And that happened us.

That happened us.

And you've stepped back in to leave this company

in the public arena.

You're calling out the fact that COVID really was

a moment of opportunity and a moment of challenge

for your platform.

Speaking as a next door user,

my favorite next door experience during COVID

was that I got a free table.

And I spent a entire Sunday sanding it and restaining it

to become my own dining table.

Shout out my friends who helped me with that project.

But it really was a community moment, right?

We were all stuck at home and therefore had time

to do different of how is your experience

stepping into that moment from the transition

of Sarah having been CEO, you know,

things hitting the fan for the world.

And then ultimately for you,

returning back into this role

as leading the home for next door.

Yeah, well, first of all, you have Sarah a lot of credit

because not only did she navigate the company through an IPO,

she had to navigate the company through COVID

and then on the other side of COVID,

the whole idea of hybrid work.

Those were things operating as a public company,

operating during COVID and operating in a hybrid environment

I'd never done.

So stepping back into the company,

I immediately had three pretty steep learning curves

that I had to get under control, right?

Not to say that I had them under control even today, right?

But the company was very different.

When I came back,

not only was the stock down 80%,

but the way to operate the company had changed

because public companies are different to private companies.

And COVID did change a lot of the ways

that we think about community

and the way that we seek community, right?

And finally, because a lot of people moved out

of the urban centers during COVID,

we had a bunch of employees who weren't in San Francisco,

which had been the headquarters of the company, right?

And so there were just a lot of challenges

outside of the main challenge,

which is the product wasn't delivering enough value.

And that ultimately for a technology company,

you can't really thrive if your product

isn't creating enough value

because it either means that users don't want it

or it means that someone out there

is providing more value than you.

Users are getting it somewhere else, right?

And so there were a lot of challenges

facing the company even kind of post COVID

and all the changes that COVID brought.

If anything, I believe that the COVID moment

made us crave community even more.

I feel like the opportunity for next door post COVID

is honestly even bigger.

But we have to do our part and we just haven't

and we still have it.

We still need to make the product better.

Well, just jumping in on the community point,

I think you're in a incredibly amazing position

given you have the user base that you do

and how much adoption you mentioned,

99% penetration of neighborhoods across America,

which is just frankly unheard of.

And then in the same time, we're hearing today

about these platforms that are be to see

that are getting to millions or hundreds of millions

of users overnight.

Those growth curves compared to when you first got started.

How are you thinking about continued sustained growth

and retention in next door in this time

admits this rapid ability to obtain new users

given where the internet penetration is today?

Yeah, it's really a true statement

that we should have more than 100 million.

I mean, when the other platforms have billions

like why don't we, right?

And I think it speaks to the opportunity

for the product to improve.

I don't think so much about those rapidly growing networks

as something that we should emulate

because next door while it may seem like one big platform

and if it's one big platform network effects

and increasing returns to scale

and all of the things that these companies do

to grow really rapidly, those can be taken advantage of.

Next door is over 300,000 unique neighborhoods.

And if your neighborhood in the Marina

is doing a great job, that doesn't actually benefit

my neighborhood in Highland Park in Texas.

So there's no network effect, right?

Which is the thing that really enables that rapid growth.

Now I think we should ask ourselves the question.

We should hold ourselves accountable.

Why don't we have every person in the Marina using next door?

Why don't we have every person in Highland Park?

Why isn't there a many network effect?

So we need to create 300,000 individual network effects, right?

But one of the reasons why Facebook tried something

called Facebook neighborhoods and then put it to rest

and many other big companies have tried efforts like this

but they haven't worked is because they tend to think

of them as how quickly can we get to 100 million users plus?

And that's solving through quantity.

I believe we have to solve through quality.

And that's something that won't change

for nearly days and it won't change now.

You've spoken about the unique positioning of next door

and our local communities coming out of the pandemic.

But you know, five years later we're in another equally

interesting, you've put more interesting time

with the AI boom, especially in the Bay Area.

We're seeing AI transform search, social and discovery.

And I think it's really important to keep in mind

kind of that quality piece as well in the lens of AI.

How do you see AI reshaping the way people interact

with local communities and information

over the next five to 10 years?

And how are you thinking about embedding AI

into next doors?

Boy, five to 10 years is a really long time horizon.

I mean, you'll get a lot of arguments about, you know,

whether AGI, which is like real sentient beings

using AI will even exist, right?

I'll try to move it more towards the, you know,

three to five year time frame, right?

So I'm hugely bullish on AI.

I think of all the technology revolutions

that I've seen AI is without a doubt the biggest.

And that's internet or sort of nothing to internet,

internet to worldwide web, worldwide web to cloud,

mobile, whatever you want to call it.

Now AI, I think is the biggest of all of that.

I really do.

I think we'll get unprecedented leverage

as human beings from AI tools.

That said, I always think about AI as an advisor,

not as a principal.

And what I mean by that is humans are still the drivers.

AI is whispering in your ear.

It's kind of like that little advisor you have

on your shoulder that's helping you go faster

or drive safer or get to your destination

in a faster, more economical way.

I do not think AI is actually the driver, right?

Now even with Waymo, right?

Waymo starts with real humans in the car driving around.

And then at some point, the humans will pass off

to the Waymo that's actually doing the work, right?

So I don't believe that AI will replace humans

in any way, shape or fashion.

I think it will make us way more efficient

and in much the same way that internet spaces

democratized access,

I feel the same way about AI.

Think about having a tutor,

you know, I think about my children,

I have a 13 year old, a 12 year old, and a 10 year old.

And they come home now from school

and responsible use of AI gives them an unlimited resource

to help them learn more quickly,

more comprehensively in a personalized way,

almost as if they're going to school

with someone who knows everything about them

and is teaching directly to them.

And it's $200 a month or whatever

at GPT cost, right?

I mean, that's kind of unprecedented.

So that's just one example.

So I'm hugely bullish on AI.

I do believe that when it comes to social media,

we will need to be very careful with content

that's created by AI because it's not humans

and how do you actually know the difference?

You've probably seen those amazing companies

that can take videos that are created

about real people.

It could make a video of the three of us

having this discussion when we never had the discussion,

right?

I mean, it's amazing technology,

but it's a little scary because you don't want to be

in a position where you say what's real and what's not.

So I believe some of the kind of founding principles

of next door around verification of identity

and authenticity,

and the fact that you're talking to your real neighbors,

I believe that's a great set of ingredients

for creating really valuable AI

because there should be a good neighbor AI

in every single neighborhood on next door

that you can ask questions to.

Some people don't want to post publicly.

Some people think the question's already been asked

a hundred times.

Some people just want to know what's happened in the past, right?

They can feel like it might be annoying

to ask their neighbors those questions.

So there should be a good neighbor AI,

but that good neighbor AI in our case

is going to be completely built

off of what real neighbors have said.

Not crawling the web and looking at different things

and then munging them together, right?

So I would say responsible AI

is I think one of the greatest forces for good

that will occur in my lifetime.

I believe that not just for next door,

although I believe it deeply for next door,

I believe it generally,

but irresponsible use of AI

is like any other really powerful technology.

It can lead to a lot of unintended consequences

that will make it more difficult for us

to constrain some of these problems

because technology is an amplifier.

Yeah, if you think about that great advisor,

what does that advisor do?

It helps you be the best version of yourself.

It amplifies you so that you can actually be more effective,

more powerful, right?

But if it takes the parts of you that are not great,

they can amplify those as well, right?

I mean, think about anonymity online.

Do people treat each other well

if they can be anonymous, not nearly as well

as if they have to actually be tied to their identities?

And so we have to think about these things

before we unleash the AI on the world,

but I'm certainly not of the camp

that we should wait, regulate any of those things.

I think we just need to be thinking

as much about responsible AI

as we think about powerful AI,

and I think we'll get to the right outcomes.

I love that intersection of the core principles of next door,

really tackling an existential challenge

that is arriving for any end user

that is interacting daily in the AI ecosystem.

Claudia, when you have to drop, please feel free to.

I'll close this out here.

But just maybe a final question

and kind of thinking about scope and scale for next door

in this next, I love that you bring up

both like the word social media and community.

And there hasn't really been like a breakout social media platform

yet in AI native.

I don't think chat really qualifies

even though it's a breakout consumer product.

How are you thinking about this next decade of,

and I say decades, I feel like as you saw firsthand,

there was the social media is of the 20, 2000s.

Then there was the mobile social media is

and video for social media is.

And now I'm kind of like sitting here wondering

how the integrates next and where community trust is coming.

For the next door roadmap,

how are you thinking about like leaning in

or leaning out on like traditional social media

and potentially how AI integrates to that experience?

It's a great question.

We call next door a social network

because the architecture of next door

is the whole thing is built on a social graph,

which is actually a neighborhood graph,

which is we know you, we know where you live,

we know where your neighbors live and we connect to you.

And so that's why we call ourselves social media.

In reality, what we're trying to build

on what we have built is a lot more like Reddit

than it is like Instagram.

And Reddit, if you think about each subreddit

as a kind of neighborhood, right?

Reddit is about community.

And so I think maybe a better lens

that we can view next door through is

what happens to Reddit in a world of rampant AI, right?

Well, I think we know that we're gonna trust more

the content on Reddit that's coming from real people, right?

And so that's gonna be the case with next door.

But at the same time, we know that reading

an entire subreddit takes a lot of time and effort.

And so if AI can summarize and get you more quickly

to the right answer, you embrace that.

And so I believe that ultimately for next door,

AI can be a very powerful force

in taking authentic neighbor conversation

and making it more powerful

because it can package it, it can summarize it,

it can leverage it in a way that is way better

than just the question answer format.

When we talk about agentic AI interfaces,

what we're really talking about is conversations.

And most social media is not a conversation.

It's a post and then you react to the post, right?

Reddit is a conversation.

People come up to a subreddit, they post something,

say, what do you think or they ask a question, right?

And the responses are almost more important

than the original question next door is the same way.

It's neighbors asking their neighbor's questions

or neighbors posting information

that they want their neighbors to respond to.

So we call ourselves social media

because we do have a social graph, we have a graph system.

But in fact, the building of community

is a lot more like subreddits.

And within the subreddits,

whether they're on Reddit itself

or on the way we think about our neighborhoods on next door,

authenticity is really important

but you don't want authenticity without leverage.

And so the authenticity comes from the real verified identity,

the leverage comes from AI.

And so that intersection, as you've talked about,

it's almost like intersecting community

and social media, social media

or a social graph is a powerful piece of technology

because it tells us what can be relevant for you.

And that's what AI can do as well.

But community is human.

And frankly, even at next door,

we would rather you get off the app

and go into the real world and meet your neighbors in real life.

We think if we introduce you to one new neighbor

who you become really good friends with,

you'll be passionate about next door

for the rest of your life, right?

We don't want you to doom scroll forever.

That's not actually our intention.

This relationship between URL and IRL

is definitely one that's constantly evolving

is only getting harder to manage personally

but made powerful when there are platforms

that allow us to get offline

at alongside our local communities.

So I'm really excited about the ways in which you

in this role as CEO are leading next door

into this next generation of user experiences and connection.

And we're curious to hear it.

You've been 18 months in the seat of public companies,

CEO after having founded the company.

What's next for you and what's next for the company?

Again, speaking as a founder,

we live in the moment so much

that I find when you start thinking too much about what's next,

you can't keep your eye on what's right in front of you.

We're trying really hard to make 20, 26 the year

when the next door product feels

and operates and performs in a transformative way.

And that is my kind of unyielding priority and focus.

It's a privilege to be back in next door.

You know one of the reasons it's a privilege is

I've been able to reunite with my great friend

and almost sister and partner of 25 years Sarah Leary,

who I think the world of.

And so to be able to work on this problem with her,

she's one of the original founders as well.

What a blessing, what an incredible privilege

to be back with many of the employees I worked with before

and a whole new set of employees that I'm delighted to be with.

So I'm very much enjoying myself.

I mean, my dad used to tell me all the time

that journeys the reward.

I think that's true.

I mean, you have to remember that you got to smell

the roses along the way.

But if you've gone through what I went through,

which is you're the CEO and then you're not the CEO

and then you come back, you realize how fragile

these situations are and you want to make the most of them.

So I'm not really thinking about what's next.

I'm thinking about earning the right to think about what's next

by making right now great.

Incredible way to reframe what is oftentimes too tempting

to think about what's coming down with undervaluing

what you can do today.

So thank you for reframing our own question

and giving us a bit of inspiration as we're recording this

just into the new and we'll be releasing it in 2026

to really look for within an exciting momentum from today.

We have a hero question that touches on some of the many

amazing themes you've already mentioned in terms of people

who've had an influence on Europe.

But that question is, who is a woman in your life

that has had a profound impact on you and your career?

I mean, there are so many and the truth is,

I mean, women have had the most profound impact

starting with my mom who I talked about,

moving to my wife, who is my best friend

and the inspiration of all the good things

that exist in my life today, including my children, right?

But professionally, I would say Sarah Larry,

who I've mentioned several times.

I mean, she is someone who has made it possible

for so many of my dreams to come true professionally

and she's a person who makes all the highs so much higher

and makes the lows not as low.

And ultimately, when you're seeking partnership,

friendship, mentorship, anything

and she does all of those things.

She makes me a better person, right?

You want someone who amplifies the good stuff

and can put the not so good stuff into perspective, right?

And Sarah used to say to me,

I think you're a good egg even though I know you're cracked, right?

And so that idea that someone knows you well enough

to acknowledge your flaws, but loves you in spite of them,

that gives you incredible power

because you can be authentic.

You don't have to put up a kind of mask

or a shield where you're a perfect version of yourself, right?

You can just be authentically who you are

and you know that person's gonna support you

through success and failure.

Sarah's done that, in addition,

she's probably the most successful person

that I've worked with, not just as we've worked together,

but in every part of her professional life,

she's someone who I really look up to and I learn from

and she's just fun, you know?

So I often say you want trust, respect, and like.

You want trust, the person's high integrity,

the person has your back.

Respect, the person can teach you things

and make you a better version.

And finally, like, you want a person who's fun.

Sarah is all three of those things

in a way that no one I've ever worked with professionally

has been and it's a privilege to work with her.

What a trifecta for partnership.

And as you're saying,

that I'm reminded of my own partnership with Claire

and the ways that after half a decade,

we have some of those abilities

to have the hard conversations

alongside writing the wave together

and exciting momentum.

So thank you for providing that model

of leadership and partner.

That is building community both inside of next door

and of course outside of next door

broader ecosystem in which you live.

But there are, this was absolutely a delightful conversation.

Thank you so much for making time with us

and sharing your story today on the...

I'm so delighted to have been here with you

and I'm so inspired by what you and Claudia have done

and I wish you all the best into all your listeners.

Keep tuning in.

This is a good one.

This is a good one.

Thank you so much for joining us at the Room Podcast.

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