[Raised $735 million] Ep.98 - The First 100 with David Wiesen, the Co-founder of Nextdoor | PR Marketing | Mailed-Invitation tactic | Network Effects | Postcards

My guest today is David Wiesen, the co-founder of Nextdoor, which operates a hyperlocal social networking service for neighborhoods. The company was founded in 2010 and is based in San Francisco, California, by Nirav Tolia, Sarah Leary, Prakash Janakiraman, and David Wiesen. Nextdoor has built a platform that facilitates healthy neighborhood connections and conversations. Nextdoor has ~36 Million weekly active users or neighbors on the platform. With 63 Million users and over 280,000 neighborhoods, Nextdoor has become a niche social media platform with the purpose of cultivating a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on. Nextdoor has raised $736.5M in funding over 13 rounds. Their latest funding was raised from a post-IPO equity round on Jan 17, 2023. Nextdoor is registered under the ticker NYSE: KIND

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Transcript

This podcast is sponsored by Gemography. If you're struggling to find top developers in a competitive market, Gemography connects you with the top tier remote developers from untapped regions, all pre-vetted and interview ready. And the best part, they handle recruitment, payroll, admin service, equipment, office space, healthcare, and benefits in full local compliance. You'll know all costs upfront, no surprises. Don't let big players hoard the talent. start hiring world-class developers remotely at gemography.com slash hire. That's G E M O G R A P H Y dot com slash hire. Here's your host, Hadi Rodman. Good to have you on the show, David. How are you doing today? I'm doing very well, how are you? Thanks for having me. Thank you for being on the show. I'm really excited about this episode because I'm a big user of Nextdoor. Me and my wife, we use it always. We have a newborn and it tells us a little bit about things that are happening around us. But before we dive into your story, I'll introduce you very quickly. So David Wiesen, the co-founder of Nextdoor, which operates a hyper local. social networking service for neighborhoods. And the company was founded in 2010 out of San Francisco, California, four co-founders, Nirav, Sarah, Prakash, and yourself, David. Your platform essentially has a lot of active users, more than 63 million, 280,000 neighborhoods. And I think those numbers are even higher. Last time I researched it, you also have raised a huge sum of money 736 million and your company is public I think in January 17 2023 I guess and you have a very interesting ticker it's called kind we'll talk about it in a bit but I think you nextdoor has become a new social media platform with the purpose of cultivating a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood that they can rely on David it's been I think more than almost 15 years and you've grown this amazing network. But before we go into the story of Nextdoor, did young David exhibit any flashes of entrepreneurship early in your life? The funny thing is, I would say probably not. I'm not one of those people who knew from my teenage years, I wanna start a company, I didn't have a lemonade stand outside of our house or anything like that. So I would say in many ways, no. The one way that I think I did show signs of being an entrepreneur, maybe I didn't realize that these were signs of being an entrepreneur is I've always enjoyed building fast. I've always enjoyed being able to, whether it's, you know, anything I was building, but definitely once I started learning how to program, became a software engineer, I really valued this fast iteration of figuring out very quickly if what you had was going to work or not. And so I think that's something that when I. did become a founder of a company and as an engineer, I realized that actually is entrepreneurial spirit. So maybe I didn't quite recognize it until I actually started. Makes a lot of sense. You know, it's an intersection of opportunity and skill. And then you have that level of discipline and commitment to take that hard step, right? When you're an engineer, you're always coding, you're in your world, but that step is always the hardest. As I was telling you earlier, before we started recording. I like to interview co-founders who are technical because they have a different perspective on telling the story rather than the CEO or the visionary. But tell us about Nextdoor. So how did all the co-founders come together? You mentioned that it's not four, it's actually seven. So I'd be very interested to learn your story. Yeah. So we actually, as you mentioned, did have seven co-founders of Nextdoor, which is, I think, a slightly unusual number. And so it comes with an explanation. The seven of us who co-founded Nextdoor had already been working together. So we actually were all involved with the company that started back in 2008. That company was not related to neighborhoods or hyperlocal networks, anything like that. It was actually sports-based. So we were working on a product called Fanbase. And so sometimes you may see online that Nextdoor was started in 2008. In a sense, that's true. The company was started in 2008. But for two, two and a half years, we did something that was completely unrelated to what we're doing now. And in the spring of 2010, that's when we realized Fanbase was not going to succeed. It wasn't going to be the thing we hoped it would be. And so the company, we, our investors made a decision that this wasn't worth our time and their money anymore, but that we had put together a really strong team and they were very supportive of us as a team. actually all of their investment in the company and give the team or more realistically, a subset of the team a chance to come up with something better. And so this number seven, seven of us decided that's something we wanted to do, right? So some of the fan-based team said they would rather go do something else. Right after two and a half years of a failed startup, you may wanna go do something a little more stable and some of them did, but seven of us decided we would give it a few more months, see what we could come up with. And yeah, we spent the... spring and summer of 2010, brainstorming, brainstorming ideas. And one of the ideas that came up, turns out very likely the best idea was this idea of building what we've then thought of as just like a social network for neighborhoods. And so that was the very, very first version of Nextdoor before it was even called Nextdoor. That's how that came to be. Amazing. And if you go back to those days as four co-founders, How did you land up on the idea of Nextdoor? Like how did you validate that this is something that has legs? Were you solving a pain point that you guys have or you had approached it in a different way? Yeah, my recollection is that while we did have the pain point in our own communities, that probably wasn't the driving force. Like as I remember it, I don't remember anyone coming to the table saying, hey, I've got this thing in my neighborhood. I don't know my neighbors anymore. It was more of us, I think, kind of keeping our eyes and ears open. And specifically one strong signal I remember that kind of got us on this path was there was an article in the New York Times back in 2010 that was really all about neighborhoods, you know, from the New York Times, so Americans and their relationship with their neighborhoods. And it talked about how this strength of neighborhoods had really declined. And I remember there was a survey as part of this article, they asked people some questions. And one of them that really stuck in our minds was they asked people how many of their neighbors could they name? And almost one in three people said zero, right? So almost a third of people said they could not even name a single neighbor. And so I would say this got us thinking about neighborhoods, got us thinking about our neighborhoods growing up. And you know, sort of set us on this path of thinking, okay, well, is this a problem? Right? New York Times thinks maybe it is. We tend to agree. Is it something that we could potentially help with? That's really what got us on this path of a neighborhood based product. Amazing. So tell us a little bit more about your early strategy, right? When you're building a social network, essentially there is that network effect. So if I want to join it and my neighbors are not there, it defeats the whole purpose. especially when we want to get going with a network effect business, the hardest part is to start. Because it's great if you get someone to join a neighborhood, but if there's no one there, just crickets, you know, people won't come back. So tell us a little bit, how did you start to solve that problem at the beginning? You've definitely identified one of the challenges that, you know, we had in the early days of Nextdoor. And to be honest, a challenge we still have. Not like this problem is completely solved, even in the U.S. where we have the most neighborhoods and members, but certainly in other countries where we've launched, where we were a little earlier in our process. We actually made a number of decisions with the first version of the product that perhaps made that job even harder. Right. And so it was always going to be a challenge with a network product. Certainly with a a hyperlocal network product, it's especially difficult, right? Because you really, you have to have a certain number of users in there, right? You know, it's got to be people that live right in the same place. We took that problem and potentially made it harder, but for reasons that we thought were good reasons, and I still think we're good reasons. And there were, I would say two things that we did in the early versions of that product. One is we had very explicit neighborhood boundaries, right? So, you know, you think of many networks. Obviously, think of all the networks like Facebook. They're open, right? You can add anyone into your network. This was very different. Everything was siloed. Every neighborhood had a boundary on the map. You could see to the address level which addresses were in and out of your neighborhood. And you couldn't see any content from any neighborhood outside of that boundary. The other thing that we implemented was address verification, right? So we made from day one. we had a requirement that you had to verify your address to join. And the reasons we did this, right, like they certainly weren't growth related, right? They were not the decisions that were gonna get us the easiest or fastest growth. We just felt like what we were hearing from people as we interviewed anyone who would talk to us about their neighborhood and about what they would potentially want in a service like this, they said they wanted something private. 13 years ago, they said in some ways, they wanted the anti-Facebook, right? They wanted it to be very private. They wanted it to be really just people in their neighborhood verified. So that's what we built. And the growth was difficult. As you said, if you join your neighborhood and it's a ghost town, it's not useful. So I think a few things that we did in the early days. So one was we made this special role called the founding member, the first person in. And we evolved that a little bit to include more people and call them next door leads. And so in that, we took some of the most passionate members and kind of put them on our team, right? Said, okay, it's not our job to grow this neighborhood. It's yours with our help. So we had a special role that was encouraged to invite and to start conversation. We even put in a little bit of a gamification technique that said, back then the number was five. So if you couldn't get five verified members to join your neighborhood within a few weeks. we would actually kind of demote it, right? So it would go back to a uncreated neighborhood. And so that actually served a couple of purposes, but one of them was to give a little bit of a kick in the pants to people. Say, if you want to use this, you got to get people in there. And then the last thing we did, which is something that we continue to do for many, many years and still do, is we gave people ways of inviting their neighbors that worked in the scenario where they didn't know their neighbors, right? So again, you talk about... You know, most social networks or things that even look like social networks, generally the people you're going to invite are people you know, right? They're your friends, they're your colleagues. We knew from, from the New York Times and from our own experience that people do not know their neighbors, right? They don't even know their names, let alone their emails or phone numbers. So we actually gave our members the ability to create mailed invitations, right? So they could actually, we would use the fact that it was us only, the US postal service. to send invitations to their neighbors, right? Because it was really the only way. They didn't know the names or the addresses of, or rather the email addresses of their neighbors, but we knew the physical addresses. So yeah, we, for many, many years, and again, still now, we are good customers of the USPS. Amazing. If you go back to those early days, were there any non-scalable guerrilla tactics that you deployed early on just to bring brand awareness? And... that today probably you cannot use in your playbook. Yeah, well, it's funny because I think of this whole mailed invitation technique, and I almost want to say that was the guerrilla tactic. It's maybe not quite an answer because we still do it. It's very expensive. And so while we still do it, we're always looking for ways to do less of it and to rely more on other growth methods. It felt very guerrilla at the time because in the early days, We were so small that we didn't hire a printing service or anyone to mail these for us. We literally did it ourselves. I remember we had a printer, a nicer printer in the office, and someone would print out postcards every day, in the very early days. They would actually print out physical postcards every day and carry them in a big box down. Luckily there was a post office just two doors down. They would literally carry this box down the elevator, down the street, into the post office. So there were definitely things we did. like that were unscalable. And as I think about, this is a little bit of a fast forward, but what I think about to when we launched in additional countries outside the US, there was perhaps more of that, even more of this sort of unscalable. We would send people into market. We would hire people to actually go to neighborhood events and farmers markets, and these are places where you would have people gathered, and we would actually use methods like that to source leads and founding members. So... I would say that's something that we definitely, yeah, we definitely employ just to kind of get this thing kickstarted because it's so important. It just doesn't work without it. Amazing. I mean, listening to you, I do recall on your first tactic where you have the community or someone, the users are actually building the community. Waze has used that with their mapping system, which was also amazing. Very similar story. If you go back to the early days, where have you seen the virality kick in? What was like an event or series of events that happened that you just started to see more neighborhoods pop up, more people joining the community? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I would say when it comes to true virality, right? So we obviously try to encourage viral imitations on the platform. We do find that we see that in smaller neighborhoods, right? So as neighborhoods are... kind of getting membership, people start to see the benefits, the true benefit, right? So when your neighborhood, the number of people you have available to Nextdoor goes up from say like, you know, in very early 20 to 50 or 50 to 500, you really see a very big difference in how useful the platform is for you. One of the interesting things is in many cities around the US and in the UK and other places, we actually have so many members that desire starts to be a little... muted in people, right? They don't see the immediate benefit of getting more people in there, right? Because they have a question, they get an answer. They're curious about something they can learn about it. So we do see that in early stages of neighborhood development. The other thing that has actually been very successful for us. And I don't know if I can use the term of virality exactly to talk about this. Cause it's not virality as we think about it, but our communications team, our internal communications team, our, our PR, our press team. has always been one of the biggest factors of our growth and one of the biggest tools in our bag for how to grow. And that's been true for a decade now in the US that one of the best ways we can get people interested in joining Nextdoor is through PR. We have this playbook where we relied on it a lot in the past and we still do it where we see some of the incredible things that are happening on the platform. They happen all the time. And so... many of these things are really, they're newsworthy. They're especially newsworthy in a world where, I say this, but you know, there's not a lot of bad news. Like there's plenty of bad news to see on the local news or in newspaper. So when something really wonderful happens, news organizations are very happy to tell that story and it's local. So we say, hey, look, you're in, I don't know, name a city in the U.S. somewhere. Look at this amazing thing that happened in one of your communities on Nextdoor. Isn't this a story you'd like to tell? And they often do. And so, Maybe it's not pure virality, but it's very effective and it brings a positive light to the platform and gets people to want to join. Amazing. Follow-up question on this and it happens most of the time to the technical co-founder is when the virality happens, something breaks and it happens that the product breaks. Is there any anecdotes or stories that you could tell on when things broke and you were in charge, how did you handle that? I do have a good story. This was a two-part story, and I think the beginning of it was in the fall of 2013. Our communications team had won us the ability to be featured on this American TV show, 2020. Pretty well-known evening news show. It was going to be a six or seven-minute, essentially, feature on Nextdoor. And so the comms team worked on it, got some of our neighbors, our members of our platforms to give interviews. I remember we got a little sneak peek of the feature before it was going to go live and it was just great. I mean, it was, it felt like just an ad for Nextdoor. It was very positive, very happy about it. And when it aired, it was, I want to say it was like around five o'clock Pacific time, which is where most of us were located. The whole site went down just like crashed and wouldn't serve any traffic almost immediately. within a couple minutes. I mean, again, it's a large viewership. It's an evening show. And it was just, it mentioned nextdoor.com so many times, just, you know, it was just inviting people to go check it out. And so we had this frantic evening where the show is airing in various time zones in the US and we're just not capturing anything. So, and it was the worst time of day, right? It was like five o'clock. So people are, some people are on their way home or. just ending their day or they're going to dinner, right? So it was just, it was the worst time. We eventually get everyone in a room virtually because most people were home at that point to try to figure out what could we do. And we wound up after, I wanna say almost two hours, coming up with a way that we could serve something, some page on nextdoor.com. And all it had was just a form, right? Hey, you know, you wanna join, what's your new email address? What's your address? and then you just get a message, thank you, we'll get back to you. Because again, the application wasn't working. So this happened, lots of disappointment. It was likely the best opportunity in terms of press that we had ever had. And I'm gonna fast forward before I tell the rest of the story. So four months later, we were told by the production team at 2020 that they were gonna re-air it. The same episode, right? They were gonna re-air it a few months later. And I'm not gonna get too into the details. Obviously, we took it much more seriously this time. We did all this work to have all these switches in place and we were gonna have an operations room at our headquarters where everyone was gonna be there in the office. And so we made all these changes and it aired the second time and for about two minutes, things looked good. We saw the traffic spike and then we crashed again. We crashed in a way that we had not anticipated. We crashed in a way that it took us a while to figure out what was going on. And ultimately we served the same static HTML page a second time. To me, it's a story I'll never forget because it meant a lot of things. So if sure, first of all, it meant we had a story that was interesting. That people really did were interested in next door. And so when we put it in front of the right audience and a big enough audience, they reacted. So on the one hand, very positive. On the other hand, very disappointing to feel like we lost that opportunity or lost most of the opportunity twice. I mean, at this point, I was, I responsible. I was one of the people responsible for sure. I would say this was sort of shared between all of our engineering leaders at the time. Um, all the various systems, uh, in play. The thing that we told people, I think was, it was a combination of messages, which I think was very successful. And then I credit some of my other co-founders as well, you know, near of Tolia, who was our CEO at the time, Sarah Leary and Prakash Janakaraman for helping with this message. And the message was kind of twofold. On the one hand, we said, look. This is disappointing. It's disappointing, we're not gonna mince words. These opportunities, we don't know when they come up. They're big ones, we spend a lot of time internally, mostly our communications team making this beautiful and it's disappointing that we didn't get it. On the other hand, I think what we told ourselves was, if we're successful in the way we want to be, we will have more of these opportunities. There will come a time where we look back and say, yes, 2020 was a great opportunity and we've had 50 of them that were even bigger. So we think we'll get there and failure happens. It happens. It's disappointing when it happens twice, but it happens. And every time it happens, the best you can do is learn from what happens. Make sure you take it seriously. Make sure you, you know, you're do your best to understand what happened, make sure it doesn't happen again and move forward. Well, ultimately that was the message that yes, you can take some time to be disappointed, but ultimately just make it better. Even if it happens five times in a row, the fifth time it happens. try to make a better for the sixth time. The good news is that Nextdoor still became a global phenomenon as it reached millions of users worldwide, but as you said early on, was very insular and very singular. And I think the neighborhoods that you touched upon were like a thousand houses at the beginning. Now that you're expanding worldwide, you have a playbook. You go to a country, you know what you need to do to capture the market there. If someone is starting you know, from scratch and they want to expand. If you could give us a few pointers on your growth playbook, something that another company in another industry might adopt if they're a consumer based company, could you highlight a few of the things that you would advise if I'm expanding to another market? Yeah, I think for us and maybe for other companies and other verticals as well, I think it's really critical to understand. that early growth because it changes over time, right? So if I think about when we went international for the first time was in 2015. So the company had been around for five years already. And so if you looked at what we were doing in the U.S. at that time to grow, it was actually very different from what we were gonna do in our first country we expanded to, which was actually the Netherlands, the first country we expanded to. So I think what we did was we took extra effort to really understand what were the growth mechanisms that worked, given where the product was, right, five years ahead of where it was when we started in the U.S. and given a market where we had no people. So I would say we, for the first one, two, three countries, we really over-invested in having people, having processes, and having budget that we could spend to try a few things to understand that. And it's true, as you said, there are often... unscalable guerrilla techniques that do make sense. If you find yourself in a situation like we did where, you know, again, having five, 10 people in a neighborhood is just not very useful, you know, we learned that if we can go into major cities and kind of go to the centers and put in some manual effort to get them up to a certain point where it's then the growth starts to fuel itself, that was very, very valuable for us. So. You know, I think if you look at, okay, you know, we're in this new country, we're spending X number of dollars to get from zero members to call it 50,000 members. And if we take that and, and think about what it would cost to get us to real success in the country, it may sound terrible, but it made sense because it wasn't what we were going to have to do. Like once we got some momentum, it would have made sense. So. I think that's one. I think you're really understanding the nature of your product, right? And the nature of what is required to get growth. And again, for us, it's really, it's people, right? We just have to get people, and they have to be people that are all in the same area. So we knew that. And so it allowed us to take a very geographically targeted approach. The other thing that we have the opportunity to do, and it's not unique to us, but maybe not available to everyone, is in a couple of markets, we actually competitors pop up, some competitors that came up with products that looked similar to ours. And the thing that they often learned is that building a hyper local social network, it's pretty hard. And I don't mean to say that we're somehow special in some way, but I think what we learned is that it's to be successful takes years and potentially tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. And so I think what many of these companies found was that this is actually a very hard thing to build and to succeed with. And so in a couple of our markets, we actually had opportunities to have a bit of an acquisition of the member bases of these companies, where had found themselves in a situation where they probably didn't have the funding they needed to continue. And so we were able to use that as a way to jumpstart our growth as well. So again, it was something that was incredibly helpful for us most memorably in the UK and in Australia actually, were opportunities we had. Amazing. Excuse my ignorance on this question, but why do social networks require so much funding and where does that funding go? And especially when you're early on, is it the product? Is it the marketing? Is it acquisition of customers? How has that shaped next door at the beginning of your journey? Yeah, that's a good question. I think when I think about, you know, what does it require? I would say in the early days, not so much the product actually. I think a product like most social networks. Eventually you get to a point where the product is fairly expensive to run. If I think about how we operate now, the things we're building, the amount of infrastructure needed to support it, the amount of ML and AI used to make it great, now it actually is. Back in the earlier days, I would say in the first few years, the product wasn't that hard to build. Obviously, it's a product. You have to build it well. You have to build it with care. I would say it's more marketing and acquisition. And especially for us. Right? Because again, we didn't have this sort of inherent viral capability, but opportunity for people to invite their friends and their coworkers. So I would say acquisition of customers and marketing was a big part of our spend in the early days, combined with the fact that, you know, social platforms are notoriously slow to monetize as well. Right? So as part of it was, you know, amount of money spent, part of it was the fact that for us, for six years of our existence as Nextdoor, we didn't make any revenue. And so everything was just money going out the door, very little money coming in. Makes a lot of sense. In a recent research that Nextdoor does, I think you released what you call a global loneliness report. You're saying statistically, if there's six neighbors with you, you'll feel less lonely and less socially isolated. Do you think people come to Nextdoor for this reason or they come for another reason or multiple reasons? I think we want people to come for that reason. And I think sometimes they do. I think when we ask our members why they came to the platform or also when we ask non-members why they would consider coming to the platform, the answer they give us the most is that they want to be up to date as to what's happening in their neighborhood. They see Nextdoor as a place where they won't miss out on any news, any events, right? Sort of any issues with crime or anything like that. So that's the primary reason they come is a pretty utilitarian one. They come to get information about their neighborhood. Often we see people join because they just moved somewhere. It tends to be a really, really great use case for Nextdoor, right? You just move to a new place. You don't know much about the place. You know, you don't know where to go to do this. You don't know who to hire if you need someone to... clean your windows or fix your plumbing. So these are some of the reasons we see. I think what often what people find, and this has been true in my memory since the beginning of the company, that often people come to Nextdoor for a certain reason, but they find that they enjoy Nextdoor or it matters to them maybe for some different reasons. We saw this early, I remember, in the first year or two of the product, I would sometimes I think fairly get the question of why does Nextdoor need to exist? Right, you know, why do I need an app to connect me to people who live right across the street? And I think I had a few answers for why I think the next door did need to exist despite that. But one of them is, one of the things I learned was people didn't always realize the benefits of having this local community online until they joined it. And so I think with things like, you know, talking about the loneliness report, I think that's one of the things we aim to do is tell people that next door, yes, it is. Wonderful for learning about a parade or a road closure or construction or all these things It's great for that and it's great for finding a local service recommendation. I mean, it's really wonderful for that It's a use case. That's excellent for the product, but it's not just that There's also a feeling of being connected to the people around you That's you know, maybe not immediately evident from the fact that you asked a question and got an answer There's more to it than that. So I think that's why we try to share some of this information amazing Nextdoor's journey from a startup to a global phenomenon is inspiring. Can you share any memorable moments or stories from your experience as the founder of Nextdoor that have stayed with you like today, it flashes always in your head, could be the bell ringing, could be something else. Yeah, there's a few of them. I'll talk about a couple of them. Try not to go too deep into any one of them. So the very first year that Nextdoor existed. full year was 2011. And in the summer of 2011, before we even went and did our kind of national launch, we were still in beta, we gave ourselves this challenge of adding 100 new neighborhoods to the platform. We just thought before we open this up to the whole country, we wanted to make sure that we didn't have any blind spots, right? Were there any places where Nextdoor's not successful? We gave ourselves this challenge of adding 100 new neighborhoods during the summer of 2011. And it was really hard. It was hard. Nobody knew about next door. It was hard to get people to invite all the reasons that we talked about. It was hard to do. We did get it done and it took us the whole summer. I remember looking back probably 2014, 2015, and seeing that at that time we were adding a hundred new neighborhoods to the platform every day. To me, that was one of the first times where I looked back and really kind of saw in a very measurable way, how far we had come. So I remember that being like really satisfying. So. That was one for sure. Another one was we, this would have been 2017. So our first neighborhood ever on the platform is a neighborhood called Lorelei Manor. It's in Menlo Park, California, just south of San Francisco. They are absolute number one neighborhood. Like if you look in the database, they are ID1. They joined the platform in October of 2010. Summer of 2017, we decided to have a block party. I don't remember why, to be honest, why we picked that time, but we decided we would go have a block party in lower line manner. So the whole, most of the employees of the company, we were a few hundred people at that time went down to Menlo Park and we just had a neighborhood block party with the residents of lower line manner. You know, many of them were the same people, you know, they, the same people that lived there in 2010 and were our first members. And we had food trucks and made some speeches and it was really a fantastic experience. And it's one that will always stick with me. Just being able to look. Seven years back when we were just starting in this neighborhood, these group of people were the first people ever to take a chance on us and give us their time. That was incredibly memorable. And as you mentioned also, right, the bell ringing at the New York stock exchange, definitely something I will never forget. And when you start a company, I mean, often this can be your goal, right? This can be your goal, right? Depends on the company. Sometimes it's not, but you know, for us, It was something we thought about, but when you're in those first few years, think that it actually might happen. It just feels there's so much that needs to happen between when you're starting it and this. And so I do remember being in New York and it was actually November of 2021. So that's when our IPO was. And it was a fun weekend. It was a bit surreal at times thinking that this was actually happening. But I remember the night before the bell ringing, we were all staying kind of near the stock exchange and we walked by it and it was all. pretty much set up for the morning. And there was a big green banner that said kind and talked about next door and having a neighborhood you can rely on. And I just remember seeing that at night. And that was the moment where, for me, that was the moment of the weekend, just seeing that and being like, wow, this is really happening. I felt proud, but also I felt really lucky. I felt really lucky that I hadn't been in this situation with the co-founders. and the early employees and all the employees. Like I just felt really lucky that I had been put in a situation to have this experience. Thank you for sharing these two great stories. It's been a long journey. And as any entrepreneur who has been successful will tell you, and you could tell that as well as you start somewhere, you have friends, co-founders, and then at the end of the trip or ongoing throughout the trip, new people come in, investors, board members, people leave. valuations, the stress of going public and reporting every quarter. I'm pretty sure it's not going to be your only startup. So if you were to start a new startup in the future, what are two or three lessons that you've learned that you would take with you to your new venture? Yeah, I think certainly it probably will come as a surprise to nobody, but the co-founding team is really important. And Again, we were in a somewhat unusual situation where we already were working together as a team. So I think we really had a sense that the seven of us who were involved with the starting of the company, we worked really well together. And I do realize that's not something, often co-founding teams come together for the first time. They may know each other, but they perhaps have never worked together. But I think whatever you can do to sort of test that relationship and see if it's one where you actually do work together well, where everyone feels like their ideas are heard. I feel like you're productive that I don't think you can succeed without that. I just don't. When it comes to, you know, investors and board members, I think obviously every company is different in terms of their relationship with investors. And over time, right? Like you may, you know, you may at the very beginning, and maybe you really try to sell to investors, right? Say, Hey, you know, please fund us. Please fund us. If you're successful, that's sometimes we can see even out. If you're fortunate, you may have some choice on which investors you take into the team. I think for us, it was definitely the most successful partnerships we've had with our investors are one where, yes, they've really deeply felt the mission of the company like we do, and cases where they're able to actually help us in that mission. So obviously, giving money is helping for sure. That is definitely helping the mission. But I think some of our best investors have also come in with advice. with connections, with recruiting help. I think there was definitely a phase of our company where a lot of our boost in recruiting actually came from our investors. They actually, in some cases, got very hands-on to help us grow the team, both just in general growth of the team, but also in some specific roles. So I think we found that's very, very helpful with that as well. So that's really what comes to mind. The team has to work well together, and ideally you bring investors who can bolster you not just with money. but also with their time and expertise. And that's been very, very useful for us. Makes a lot of sense. What is a principle that you live by that has helped you in your journey? I think for me, one of the things that I actually have always focused on when it comes to my work, how I work with my teammates and how I help to grow an organization, it's gonna sound maybe cheesy, but honestly, kindness is one of the things that matters incredibly to me. You know, I'm an engineer, so I could talk a lot about my sort of engineering principles that I have as well. They matter to me. I think they're important. I think for this conversation, I think having a kind welcoming team is something that I try to be kind and welcoming myself. Actually, one of the things I do about once a month is I get up in front of all of our new employees and give them a history lesson of the company. And part of the reason I do that is because. I really want to connect with the people who are joining our team, right? I've been here for all these years over a decade. For them, it's like month one. So I really want to do my part to say, Hey, as, as part of the company, I'm here to welcome you and offer up myself to you. And I think that with our engineering team, like that's the team that I've been the most involved with helping to build over time, it's been crucial. I think that being able to join a company and have, feel like you can ask questions, feel like people will give you their time. especially the most senior, most tenured people. I think when you see a culture where those people are generous with their time, I think it means a lot. I think it really gives a really strong feeling to what it's like to work here and the community we're trying to build. And our company is about community. And so obviously that's the reason our product exists is all about community. That's the only reason we exist. And I think we have been successful because we actually care about community. And I think when you care about community, you care about your own community as well. So for me, I feel like that's been the most consistent thing with me, with my personal philosophy is like, make people happy to work with you, make people feel comfortable, they'll do their best work when they feel like they belong at this company and they feel like the company cares about their happiness and cares that they're there. Amazing principle, thank you for sharing this. If you were to write a book about your life, what would the title be and why? That's a good one. What would the title of my life be? I'm gonna have to think about that. Take your time. Yeah. I'll talk through it a little bit. Maybe that will help me come up with a good title. I think for me, a lot of my life, certainly my professional life, especially has been about patience and about being open. I think for me, my journey with Nextdoor, when it started, I had already been... working, uh, almost 15 years, right? So it was not the beginning of my career. And so I definitely took some time to explore a number of different jobs or different companies, right? So again, I've spent some time at smaller companies, you know, it's in like 50 to 200. I worked at Google when it was a lot smaller than it is now, but still pretty big. I even spent a year or two working just with a friend, just the two of us on some consulting work. And so I think like, you know, for me finding the situation. that put me as a part of the founding team with Nextdoor was perhaps not luck. It was perhaps the culmination of learning about what matters to me. So I feel like the title would be something like try all the other things. You'll eventually find the thing you like, or find the thing that's best. And there's probably a more clever way of phrasing that, but I think it's that, like, try all the others and with the one that's, you know, end with the best. I call it that. Pretty maybe not so eloquent, but it would be something like that. Who's the person who inspired you the most in your journey? I'm going to give two answers. I'm going to give the, okay. And then I'm going to cheat a little bit because the first one's actually three people. I mentioned how before Nextdoor was Nextdoor, it was this company, Fanbase. Fanbase was started by three people. It had three founders. I mentioned them already, you know, Nirav Tolia, Sarah Leary, Prakash Jatakaraman. They definitely inspired me. You know, they had all had really successful careers already. before the founding of Bandbase. And yet what I saw was them, despite that success, getting back down to starting a company, getting their hands dirty, building something that they thought was important and building it with care and really just having a lot of integrity on how things get built. So I'd say professionally, the three of them as a team really inspired me and they all inspired me in different ways in terms of the various skills they had. You know, I think... In particular, I think of something I really learned from one of them, Sarah Leary, which was she really taught me that, you know, you can have incredibly high standards and you can give people critical feedback, truly critical feedback, but in a way that is like respectful and really shows that you care. Like you're not telling them this because you want to chide them for doing something that they shouldn't have done, but really about like actually investing in people. That's just one that comes to mind. I would say separately. My wife, my wife, Melina, has inspired me in many ways. I think when we met, Nextdoor did exist. It was very, very young. It was in the first year or two. And I think when I think about where Nextdoor is now, what are some of the things that we can still do that we're not doing, she has really helped push me in lots of these ways. I think she cares very deeply about community. She tells me about the community where she grew up in San Jose, and so. I think she keeps me honest sometimes when I say, oh, look, we're doing this, we're doing so great, we're doing this. He says, yeah, but what about this? This thing that we talked about. So she doesn't work with the company, she never has, but she definitely inspires me even after all these years to still be passionate about some of the things that Nextdoor has not yet done that we still can do to serve communities better. These are exceptional answers because what you mentioned are people who make up to 24 hours. of your life. It's either your family or your co-founder. So that's truly inspiring. One last question, David, what's next for Nextdoor and David? Well, what's next for Nextdoor is, and one of the reasons I like, again, like I've been with Nextdoor now over 13 years, people often ask me like, why do you, what makes you excited? Like after all that time, what can make you still excited? I truly believe. that even though we've been around for 13 years, we are now a public company, that we have in many ways just scratched the surface of what Nextdoor can do. I really truly feel that. And I truly feel that in terms of what the product can do. And I feel that way in terms of the monetization that we have available to us. And just simply, I feel that way because if you look at Nextdoor and where the product operates, we're only in 11 countries in the world. And so I think there's, we still have more of most of the world open to us. And I think certain parts of the world will require product innovation to get it right. Certainly it will require operational excellence. So I still feel that way. I still feel like next door is just scratching the surface. And so I think we have a wonderful platform for our members and we can do more and we can serve more members in more delightful ways. And so, you know, for me, that's my future, as long as I feel like I play an important role here and I'm Contributing to our success. That's my future. I don't think a lot about what I may do after Nextdoor one day, just, you know, eventually maybe, yeah. I mean, maybe I won't be here my entire life. But right now, like, I'm still just excited to see Nextdoor take that next step in the countries where we exist and in, you know, other parts of the world. So that's what's next for me. I'm still here. I'm still enjoying it. David, thank you for stopping by. This was an amazing episode. Where can people reach you? They can reach me? Oh, I'm... David at nextdoor.com, send me an email or LinkedIn. I'm everywhere, I'm easy to find, just Google me. Amazing, we'll put that in the show notes. Thank you again, we wish you the best of luck. Have a great evening. Thanks so much, it was really nice having this conversation, I appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening to the first 100. We hope it inspired you in your journey. If you're enjoying the podcast, please subscribe to our podcast on Apple iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or Spotify and share it with a friend starting their entrepreneurship journey. Leave us a five star review. Your support will help spread our podcast to more viewers.