Nirav Tolia - Nextdoor Co-Founder & CEO | The Man Who Connected 100 Million Neighbors Says AI Is About to Make Us All Lonelier

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You said the age of information gave us the internet, the age of intelligence gave us AI.

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So what does that actually look like?

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We need to pair the age of intelligence with human connection.

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As the machines get more powerful, we cannot lose our humanness.

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That's connection with each other.

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How do we successfully use AI in our day-to-day?

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We don't keep losing our sense of humanness and our human connection.

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We cannot use AI as a substitute.

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We can only use AI as a tool.

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Today's guest is Nirav Tolia, CEO and co-founder of Nextdoor, a longtime technology entrepreneur and investor.

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He has spent decades building companies around online communities and human connection.

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In this conversation, he explores how AI can help us connect without replacing the human relationships that matter most.

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Use technology as a tool, but understand that it's no substitute for ultimately meeting people in the real world.

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Do you believe that we have a true loneliness epidemic?

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It will be an epidemic when there is a generation that prefers to spend time with their computer, with their mobile phone, their AI versus spending time with a human being.

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So Nirav, you said the age of information gave us the internet, the age of intelligence gave us AI, and what comes next is the age of human connection.

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So what does that actually look like?

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Well, we live in an amazing time with incredible transformations in this lifetime.

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And I feel so fortunate to have been around at the beginning of the dot-com boom, which I consider the age of information.

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We suddenly had access to information in a way that we've never had before.

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Now we're in the middle of something which I believe is even bigger and even more transformational for society and even better.

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I'm an unabashed lover of AI.

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And AI is bringing us the age of intelligence.

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We're moving from just access to information to intelligence with that information.

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So the question is, what's going to happen next?

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And the truth is, I don't know.

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But what I do know is we need to pair the age of intelligence with...

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with human connection.

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Because as we get closer to machines and as the machines get more powerful, we cannot lose our humanness.

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We cannot lose what makes us unique as a species, and that's connection with each other.

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So I'm not sure that human connection comes next.

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I don't really know what comes next.

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But what I do know is in this age of intelligence, which I think will be unprecedented for the world...

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We need to pair it with human connection.

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It can't just be our reliance on AI.

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It needs to be our reliance on AI paired with our continued reliance on each other.

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And that's what I mean by the age of human connection.

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I also think that the more we depend on AI, the more human connection becomes an exceptionally valuable commodity.

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I think that what you're doing with Nextdoor, where you're building community connection, what a lot of CEOs that I speak to are doing with in-person events, there's this premium on human connection.

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We all kind of felt the first inflection point in this connection epidemic, if you want to call it that, was COVID, where we were all stuck at home and everybody was lonely.

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And then I don't think social media helped that much.

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I think that it isolated us even more.

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And then now in the age of AI and Zoom meetings, I feel like we're getting information from AI.

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We feel like...

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Even half the content we're consuming is AI generated.

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There's all these different things that are compounding into us wanting to connect with humans more and more and more because we feel like it's getting more scarce and more scarce and even more scarce.

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So I guess the question is, you see this sort of firsthand, like you work with people who are constantly trying to figure out how to balance AI and humanness.

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So how do we do that properly?

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How do we successfully use AI in our day-to-day, but we don't keep losing our sense of humanness and our human connection while still making sure we use a technology that's incredibly powerful and helpful?

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We cannot use AI as a substitute.

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We can only use AI as a tool.

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And so let me go back to build on that argument.

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So the first thing is, AI and its emergence is not the first time that technology has left us isolated.

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And you talked about COVID, but this happened much, much, much prior to even the internet.

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The television, which was a piece of technology,

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started to keep us inside the home.

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And when we were inside the home, we weren't outside meeting with people.

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So that was the first thing that really started this epidemic of isolation and loneliness.

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After the television, the computer comes along, and after the computer, you have the mobile computer, which now you've got the computer in your pocket wherever you go, and you can interact with it in a way that is much easier and higher leverage than going out and meeting people in person.

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That leverage is great.

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And we've seen it continue with Zoom and everything that we can do virtually, right?

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We can now inhabit these virtual spaces much easier and much faster and much more economically in a viable way than going to someone physically.

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But it does create a lack of connection because you just don't connect the same way when you're in a virtual space as you do in a physical one.

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So now AI comes along.

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And not only do we have access to information, we almost have access to a personality.

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When you're talking to an agent, it's no longer a computer that's spitting back lists of links.

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It's almost a dialogue that you're having with another person.

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And so will that make us stop talking as much with each other?

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Almost certainly it will.

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So the thing we have to remember is that we have to pair that use of AI with,

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with continued human connection.

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Another way to think about it is, so COVID comes along and we're forced to stay inside.

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After COVID passes, what industry skyrocket?

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Well, for the most part, we saw travel and tourism go through the roof because all of a sudden people said, gosh, I remember what it was like to be able to travel and to be with people in physical space that I don't live around, right?

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And so I'm gonna do more of it.

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I think you use that word scarcity.

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I think scarcity does drive value.

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So the scarcity of these human interactions is going to make them more valuable.

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But it's a false dichotomy to say either I'm going to use AI or I'm going to talk to people in person.

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This is where I think most people are mistaken.

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They're trying to set this up as AI or humanness.

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And I think that's very much a false dichotomy.

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I think the idea is use AI as a tool.

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Allow it to give you leverage in all the ways that it can.

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But don't lose sight of the fact that real connection happens when you're with another person or with a group of people.

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And that's what we call community.

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And so even something like Nextdoor,

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which is built on the principle of community.

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Nextdoor is all about using technology to drive people together in the real world, in their neighborhoods, into community, which is something that's been steadily declining in America.

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You know, we were inspired by the book Bowling Alone, written by Robert Putnam, that was written 20 plus years ago about the decline of community in America.

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So this has been happening for a long time.

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But we're not saying...

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Abandon technology and go out into your neighborhoods.

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We're saying use technology as an icebreaker.

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Use technology as a tool, but understand that it's no substitute for ultimately meeting people in the real world and being with them.

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Because when we're with other people, that's when we feel truly alive.

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And when you're with an AI, you can feel empowered.

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You can feel like you're high leverage.

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You can feel like you're getting a lot of things done.

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But it never feels like you're part of something bigger than yourself.

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The only way to feel like you're part of something bigger than yourself is to be part of a community.

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And that's what's so powerful about being in the real world.

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Why do you think that so many social platforms, even though there was parts that encouraged some slight real life interaction and some more than others?

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maybe like LinkedIn would promote a meetup or Facebook would help you or meta would help you promote an event.

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But majority of social platforms basically said we are recreating your in life.

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community online.

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And that's really what all these platforms optimized for.

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I'm curious why, because when I look at Nextdoor, I see it as an outlier, as a platform that really focuses on in-person.

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Why did, for example, nine out of 10 social platforms focus on online community building when there's so much value in a human to human?

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Is it frictions?

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Is it too difficult to build for the, you know, when when Zuck was starting, he was taking people.

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that had communities at various schools across the U.S. And he moved those people online.

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He didn't use Facebook to augment the in-person experience.

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But that would have been the perfect opportunity.

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So I'm trying to figure out why, again, 9 out of 10 social platforms don't optimize for in-person.

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What is the toll that's taking on the average social media user?

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Well, we know that there's a heavy toll because the more time that we spend online, the less time we spend developing ourselves with real people.

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So that part of it, no argument.

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But as someone who's lived and worked in Silicon Valley for my entire adult life,

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I'm a huge believer in technology, and I'm a huge supporter of the people who've created these platforms.

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So you said, why did nine out of 10 social platforms focus on online interactions, right?

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The reality is almost 100 out of 100 internet companies.

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focused on what was happening virtually.

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I don't think it was intentional that the social platforms came along and said, we're gonna bring people from the real world into the virtual world.

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In most cases, and I think this is true of Zuckerberg, and I think this is true of all the social platforms,

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You start somewhere believing that if you remove friction and if you provide these virtual spaces, there's more leverage that's provided to the real world interactions.

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Remember, the Facebook was about people at Harvard in the physical world.

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It wasn't about people you don't know.

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It was actually a less friction way to learn and get more information about the people that you were going to school with.

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So it started not as a virtual platform necessarily.

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Right.

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but as a virtual mechanism to get more leverage from the real world platform.

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But then all of a sudden the revolution happens.

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More people use the internet, mobile phones come along.

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The leverage becomes so powerful that before we know it,

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The algorithms know us better than other people do.

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And so we spend more time on them.

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So I don't think this is a story of intentionality where the creators of these social platforms said, I'm going to find a way to create a loneliness epidemic, or I'm going to find a way to bring people away from the physical world into the virtual world.

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I think this is largely about unintended consequences.

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And then all of a sudden you wake up one day and you realize that the building blocks of your platform...

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have done what you didn't necessarily intend to do, which is they have pulled people away from their real world communities.

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And they have created loneliness because they make it easier to spend time online.

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With Nextdoor, what's so interesting is my entire career up to Nextdoor,

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I was creating virtual communities as well.

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That was my whole intention.

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That was my dream, my aspiration.

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And it came because when I discovered the internet when I was in college at Stanford, the way I first experienced the internet was as a virtual space.

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I grew up in Texas, so I'm a fan of the Dallas Cowboys.

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I went to Stanford, which is in San Francisco 49ers territory.

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So in the 90s, when the Cowboys were last pretty good, when they won their last set of Super Bowls,

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I wanted to find a place where I could talk to other Dallas Cowboys fans.

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And I wasn't living in Texas at the time.

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I was in Palo Alto at Stanford.

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So I went online and I found other Dallas Cowboys fans in a virtual space, no matter where they lived.

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Some of them were in Texas.

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Some of them were in other places.

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And I realized the power of being able to rely on a virtual space to meet people like me.

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That was real community.

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And then I ended up starting a company, Opinions, that was about online community.

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Now, when it came to Nextdoor, which is the summer of 2010, the first wave of Internet companies had already passed.

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Remember, the Internet boom started around 1995.

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Then there was the dot-com bust in the early 2000s.

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Then the cloud and mobile brought things back.

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And now we're sitting in 2010.

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Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter are just emerging.

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And my co-founders and I of Nextdoor, we said to ourselves, okay, these social platforms are amazing.

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And you have one that makes it super easy to connect with friends.

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That's Facebook.

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And you have one that makes it super easy to connect with business colleagues, and that's LinkedIn.

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And you have one that makes it super easy to follow your interests, and that's Twitter.

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But how come there isn't a social platform that makes where you live possible?

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more powerful, more leveraged, more impactful.

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And so from the beginning, when we built Nextdoor and we things like using neighborhood boundaries, having verified neighbors, ensuring that you use your real name,

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We knew that the building blocks of our social platform needed to be grounded in the real world.

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And so I can't say even for a second that we were so smart as to know that AI would show up one day and we would have a social platform built on verified identity and trust.

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But we do today because from the beginning at Nextdoor, we really did want to strengthen offline communities.

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Our goal was not to build a better virtual neighborhood.

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Our goal was to build a better physical neighborhood and to use virtual tools to do that.

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And so the tools that you start with are the ones that ultimately create, you know, it's the inputs, outputs thing that a lot of entrepreneurs talk about.

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Your inputs ultimately drive your outputs and you don't always know how successful you're going to be.

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The other social platforms, their inputs are.

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were sound, but they've become so successful that they have created some of these unintentional consequences.

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For Nextdoor, I would argue that we've been more lucky than good, but by leaning heavily on the real world community of the neighborhood back in 2010, we're better positioned than ever today because that real world set of things, verified identity and trust and knowing that it's your real neighbors, not a bot, those are things that will increasingly be valued in this AI emergent world.

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Do you believe that we have a true loneliness epidemic?

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Well, epidemic is a strong word, but I do believe that in the past, it has been much easier to rely on other people versus rely on machines to feel closeness and to feel connection.

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And so it will be an epidemic when there is a generation that prefers to spend time on

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with their computer, with their mobile phone, with their AI, versus spending time with a human being.

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And we're starting to see some of that.

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There are the stories that in South Korea, women would rather date virtual AIs than have real boyfriends.

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You think about the people who on a Friday night would rather stay at home and endlessly scroll through Instagram.

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versus go out into the real world, right?

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It's starting to happen.

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When it reaches a point where people start to use machines as a substitute versus as a tool, that will be epidemic.

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And I think the reason it's important to wake up now, we don't want to have to fix it once we get there.

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We have an opportunity right now to not shy away from technology, but to pair it with human connection, right?

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When COVID happened,

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and we were forced to stay inside, that was an extreme.

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But when COVID ended, we didn't say, we're only gonna spend time outside.

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We figured out a way to enjoy where we live and also travel and be in other places.

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We found some harmony.

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What I think we're really looking for here is a harmony between the power of technology

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and the humanness of connection.

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And that's something that for us at Nextdoor, we feel like we have a unique opportunity to build that and to model it ourselves because Nextdoor is a virtual tool.

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It is something you experience on your mobile phone.

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But ultimately, we would like the interactions that you have on Nextdoor with your neighbors to lead to interactions that you have outside of our app, outside of your phone, in your neighborhood.

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And so that harmonization

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is the thing that ultimately, I think, gives us the best of both worlds.

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It gives us access to that technology that we know is super powerful, that we know is going to be here whether we want it to be or not.

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But it also keeps us grounded in what makes us unique and special, and that is our connections to each other.

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Plot is a success story partner.

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Now, I spoke about Plot a few episodes back.

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This is the AI-powered device that captures your conversations, turns them into transcripts, summaries, action items,

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And I wanted to come back to it because I keep finding new ways that this thing is incredibly useful.

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Last week, I sat down with a potential sponsor at a coffee shop and we were going back and forth on deliverables, timelines, pricing, a lot of details and a lot of numbers.

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And normally after a conversation like that, I'd open my notes app on my phone.

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I try to write everything down.

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I remembered and I'd probably get about 70% of it, but the other 30% would be gone.

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Usually the small details that end up mattering a lot later.

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But this time, with their permission, I had the note pin S on my shirt and I honestly forgot it was even there.

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So after the meeting, I opened up my Plod app and everything was already laid out.

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The full transcript, a clear summary, the key numbers we discussed and the follow ups I'd agreed to.

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And I could even ask Plod, what pricing did we discuss or what were my next steps?

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And it pulls up the answer right away.

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I didn't have to reconstruct the conversation from memory.

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And that's the part that I keep coming back to.

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I'm not splitting my attention in meetings between being present in the conversation and trying to document and remember everything.

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I can just focus on the person in front of me, knowing that the important details will be there afterwards.

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And remember, they do have two products.

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So the Note Pro magnetically attaches to the back of your phone.

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It's great for calls.

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And the Note Pin has clips or magnetically attaches to your shirt, making it ideal for in-person conversations.

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And you can choose between them depending on the situation.

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So if you spend a lot of your day in conversations and you're tired of losing important details, go check it out.

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Go to plod.ai slash success and use code success for 15% off.

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That's plod.ai slash success and use code success for 15% off.

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Odoo is a success story partner.

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And remember, that is pronounced O-do.

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Now, I want to tell you something that happened to me recently that I think a lot of you will relate to.

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I was trying to send a quote to a client, and this should be simple, right?

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Except the pricing was in one tool, and the contact info was in another tool, and the last conversation that we had was in a third tool.

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And then I spent something like 20 minutes pulling it all together for one quote.

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And that's the thing.

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Each tool works fine on its own.

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The problem is that they don't talk to each other.

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So you become the person connecting everything.

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You become the integration.

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You're the one copying numbers between tabs and making sure everything matches.

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But that's what Odoo fixes.

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It puts everything on one platform.

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So I'm talking accounting, invoicing, CRM, inventory, HR, project management, your website, e-commerce, e-signatures, over 45 apps, all connected.

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When something happens in one place, every other place already knows about it.

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So you're not updating three systems every time you close a deal.

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And the pricing is the part that surprised me.

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The first app is free for life, unlimited users, hosting included.

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One subscription after that unlocks everything else.

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So if you're spending your time connecting tools instead of actually doing the work you have to do, go check it out.

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Links in the show notes.

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My fitness pal is a success story partner.

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On this show, I speak to tons of high performers and the people that sustain that high performance, not just sprint and crash and burn, but they actually sustain, they all treat nutrition like a system, not an afterthought.

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The same way they treat revenue or hiring or product, it is key to their business.

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They pay attention, they look at the data.

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And that really stuck with me and it's how I started thinking about my own health and wellness and what I put into my own body.

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Not in like a restrictive diet way, but in a data way.

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See, most people take a look at daily calorie total and they think they have the full picture.

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That's just one number.

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The MyFitnessPal app premium, it shows me macros.

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That means proteins, carbs, fats, broken down by meal.

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So I can see, am I getting enough protein at breakfast versus dinner?

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And it also shows me how my food is distributed across the day, because of course I can take a look at my total calorie number, but to see everything broken down by meal, those are two completely different things.

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Even if your daily total looks fine and you're going to feel the difference.

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If you eat proper nutrition across your entire day and you track it, your energy is going to allow you to sustain that high performance.

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Also, the food analysis picks up trends over the week that I'd miss just going by feel.

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See, this information makes good food choices automatic.

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See, food is a foundation, right?

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Energy, focus, performance, recovery, it all starts with food.

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So do yourself a favor.

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Go visit podcast.myfitnesspal.com and use code Scott, all uppercase letters, for 15% off MyFitnessPal premium.

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That's podcast.myfitnesspal.com, code Scott.

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Why is that?

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Why are we so bad at making in-person connections when it seemed like it was so easy for our parents?

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Is it just because we've been born in this digital world where most of the people that we meet and the connections that we make, it's all online?

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And then I guess the follow-up question is, you know, I grew up in a...

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not analog, but more analog world than what my kids will grow up in.

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So if it's worse for us because we were online for the majority of our life, what does that mean for our kids?

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And then what are the actual steps that we can take as adults and as parents to make sure that we sort of move in the right direction?

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Because I don't feel like we are now.

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That's a long-ass question.

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That's bad form for a podcast, but there's a lot of thoughts and a lot of stress around this.

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Right.

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Well, I think that this trend started well before our generation.

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That's the first thing I'll say.

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When we started Nextdoor, the simple statistic that we would quote to people is that almost 30% of Americans could not name a single neighbor by name.

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And that was in the summer of 2010.

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And like you, when I grew up in West Texas, in Odessa, that had a very strong sense of community,

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That would make no sense whatsoever.

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I knew many neighbors.

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In fact, not only did I know them, I was friends with them, as was my parents.

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And we would rely on each other, whether it was rides to school or borrowing the proverbial cup of sugar or babysitting for their children.

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Right.

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We were integrated with them.

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And then over many years because of television, because we commuted to work, because things kept us inside our homes.

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Right.

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We started to lose touch with people.

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And as we lost touch with them, it became harder to exercise that muscle that had atrophied, which was the muscle of meeting new people.

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And all of a sudden, it became weird if you saw someone outside in your neighborhood knocking on doors, introducing themselves, trying to get to know each other.

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That turned into the nosy neighbor versus the nice neighbor.

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So you fast forward to today, and I think you actually had the right point, which is

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It's bad enough for us, even though we grew up in a different period of time.

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What about our children?

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I have three sons, ages 14, 12, and 10.

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They are not at all familiar.

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with going and introducing themselves to people they don't know.

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It's just not the way they've grown up.

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In fact, if anything, people tell them, don't talk to strangers, keep to yourself, only interact with the people you already know.

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So there have been many societal trends, not just technology, but many societal trends that have gone in the wrong direction.

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Then you add technology, right?

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And we see what's happening again to the children.

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Now social media being outlawed until the age of 16 in Australia.

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Same thing is going to happen, I think, in the UK and Europe, and eventually it's going to get to the US as well, because we don't want these addictive platforms to take over our kids' brains before our kids had the capability to know that they shouldn't spend as much time on these.

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We don't believe, my wife and I.

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that our kids are never going to use technology.

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It's not like we say, we don't like screens at all.

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You can never pick up a phone.

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You can never use Instagram, et cetera, right?

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But we want to balance these things.

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So for example, we've taken our kids.

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I moved to a foreign country because we thought to ourselves, hey, if you're living in a new place, by definition, you don't know anyone and you're going to be lonely.

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So let's figure out how to put all of us, not just our kids, but my wife and I as well, in a new situation where we need to build community from scratch.

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It's the end of the summer.

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We sent our kids just a couple of weeks ago to a camp in Switzerland for almost three weeks.

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They didn't know a single person.

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And it wasn't just Americans.

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It was people from 39 different countries.

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So we try to do the things that we can within reason.

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that get them to exercise those muscles that are largely active because of the way society is set up today.

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I think we need more block parties.

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I think we need more events where we meet people that maybe we've seen, or maybe we know they live close by, but we don't know their names.

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And we need to exercise that muscle of getting to know them.

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We need to go outside and smile at people and shake their hands and introduce ourselves.

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And that's something that I think for whatever reason –

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We've stopped doing and we haven't stopped doing it out of some real intentional focus away from community.

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But things like looking at our phone when we walk across the street, that influences our ability to meet people.

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We were in Italy this summer and I gave a keynote speech at Stanford has a small campus in Florence, Italy.

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And I gave a small keynote speech there and I said to get to this palazzo.

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where you're currently sitting, you sat and walked across a piazza that was probably 500 to 800 years old.

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And what did you likely do?

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You looked at your phone the entire way over.

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Instead of looking around at what is essentially an open-air museum, instead of looking around at all the other people who've traveled to Florence to be in that same environment.

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And I appeal to them that when they left the speech, put the phone in the pocket.

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And when you walk back across that piazza...

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Look at the art.

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Look at the people.

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Go and meet someone.

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So you just need a reminder.

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Even the way that we planned America, for example, versus Europe.

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Europe is built around piazzas where people come and congregate, right?

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America, particularly with the prosperity that we have, it's a suburb and a strip mall, one after another, where you can get in your car and drive to anything you want.

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You know, when we started Next Door...

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My co-founder Sarah Leary and I were really struck by the fact that when we went to Italy, say Rome or Florence, and we asked someone, hey, what's the best place to get coffee and espresso?

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What's the best place to get pizza or pasta around here?

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Almost always the person in Italy would say, well, it's the place that's right close by to where I live.

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Whereas in America, if you ask someone, where's the best coffee?

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Where's the best pizza?

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Where's the best fill in the blank?

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They'll largely say, well, get in your car, drive 18 miles or drive across town and you'll be at the best place.

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And that may be the best place, but it's outside your neighborhood.

388
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So that connection you have with it is totally different.

389
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So I think a lot of this is larger than technology and larger than AI.

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But technology and AI is amplifying technology.

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that epidemic, as you call it.

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And it will be an epidemic if we don't do something about it.

393
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One last thought on this.

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For parents, what's your advice to them if they can't move overseas, for example?

395
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Like, what's the way that they should raise their kids so that they don't succumb to this loneliness?

396
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I think you got to find the balance.

397
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Our kids go to a great school in Dallas, Texas, and I'm always wondering if in that school they're going to find the right balance of allowing the students to use AI but not overuse it.

398
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Because I think the schools that say, oh, no, you can't use AI at all.

399
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they're actually putting their students at a disadvantage.

400
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But obviously, we don't want the students to only use AI, right?

401
00:31:08.588 --> 00:31:25.417
So this is going to be one of the really thorny, difficult, but yet valuable challenges that we have over the next 5, 10, 15 years, which is how do we ensure that the young generation becomes facile with these tools?

402
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Because you have to know how to use these things.

403
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but doesn't become over-reliant on them.

404
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And that requires harmony and that requires nuance and that requires true parenting.

405
00:31:40.225 --> 00:31:42.186
And unfortunately we're so busy these days.

406
00:31:42.226 --> 00:31:45.988
Sometimes we either say, well, just take your iPad and do whatever you want.

407
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Or we lock up the iPad and say, you can't touch it.

408
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Right.

409
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And even my wife and I are guilty of that.

410
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It's much better to sit down with your children and say, okay, I want you to learn how to use AI, but I don't want you to just go there and ask the AI whatever you want.

411
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Let's come up with some projects.

412
00:32:04.729 --> 00:32:06.790
Would you like to know something about world history?

413
00:32:07.110 --> 00:32:09.672
Would you like to know something about the world of arts?

414
00:32:09.732 --> 00:32:11.313
Would you like to know something about business?

415
00:32:11.393 --> 00:32:13.054
Would you like to learn something?

416
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Because, gosh, think about the power of AI for our children in teaching them things.

417
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It's like having the world's most advanced tutor.

418
00:32:23.060 --> 00:32:23.840
in your pocket.

419
00:32:24.181 --> 00:32:27.602
So I don't think we should ignore that at all, but you have to find the balance.

420
00:32:27.622 --> 00:32:36.467
I mean, the best we've done, my wife and I, is we've said, okay, there's a quota on the number of minutes of screen time that our children can have.

421
00:32:36.947 --> 00:32:41.990
And that's not very big during the weekdays and it's a little bigger during the weekends.

422
00:32:42.410 --> 00:32:45.292
So maybe 30 minutes of screen time during the week per day.

423
00:32:46.295 --> 00:32:48.076
and then maybe a couple hours on the weekend.

424
00:32:48.416 --> 00:32:54.499
The challenge is these pieces of technology have become messaging devices primarily.

425
00:32:55.059 --> 00:33:01.042
And so if you're a young teenager, all of your friends are on this device and that's how they all communicate with each other.

426
00:33:01.382 --> 00:33:03.163
And so if you stand outside of that,

427
00:33:04.230 --> 00:33:05.751
You're out of the flow of information.

428
00:33:06.331 --> 00:33:07.951
And you know what it's like to be a teenager.

429
00:33:08.412 --> 00:33:10.112
You don't want to be out of the flow of information.

430
00:33:10.232 --> 00:33:13.694
So these are serious, serious, serious challenges.

431
00:33:14.034 --> 00:33:15.214
I don't think they're unsolvable.

432
00:33:15.754 --> 00:33:17.355
But I think it will require nuance.

433
00:33:17.415 --> 00:33:18.555
It will require hard work.

434
00:33:18.636 --> 00:33:22.017
And it will require, I'll bring up that word again, harmony.

435
00:33:22.597 --> 00:33:30.479
between understanding that there is tremendous power and leverage, and we want our children to be facile with technology.

436
00:33:31.099 --> 00:33:34.099
But we don't want them to treat it as a substitute.

437
00:33:34.619 --> 00:33:37.760
Learn to treat it as a tool, but not as a substitute.

438
00:33:38.240 --> 00:33:46.242
One thing that I'm very impressed with is how you built Nextdoor almost against the wisdom of technology,

439
00:33:47.302 --> 00:34:01.433
Any sort of entrepreneurship lesson strategy, because when you talk to anybody about how to build a company, they'll always say reduce friction, grow as quick as possible, achieve virality.

440
00:34:01.713 --> 00:34:03.474
This is the way to grow a company, right?

441
00:34:03.494 --> 00:34:07.177
This is how most people assume this is how they're going to be successful.

442
00:34:08.338 --> 00:34:09.478
You added friction.

443
00:34:10.379 --> 00:34:11.500
to your growth playbook.

444
00:34:11.640 --> 00:34:25.291
So when people sign up, and let me know if this is correct, but from what I researched, so first name, last name, street address, do you also require a postcard in the mail for them to sign up as well?

445
00:34:25.611 --> 00:34:32.596
In the early days, the way we verified that you were telling us the truth about where you lived is we would send you a postcard.

446
00:34:32.616 --> 00:34:36.279
That wasn't a particularly economical way to verify identity.

447
00:34:36.299 --> 00:34:37.320
But you know, it's, it's,

448
00:34:39.043 --> 00:34:46.244
It is the case that as an entrepreneur, you need to balance between what we might think of as best practices –

449
00:34:47.393 --> 00:34:56.021
And then a contrarian point of view, because you use the best practices to learn from everything that's come before you.

450
00:34:56.602 --> 00:35:01.366
But if you don't have the contrarian point of view, you're not going to create something that's different.

451
00:35:01.787 --> 00:35:04.149
You're largely just going to create something that's already there.

452
00:35:04.729 --> 00:35:09.494
And so you need to have a point of view that says, look, what currently exists is

453
00:35:10.465 --> 00:35:16.711
is not good enough, or there can be something that we can build that's better than what currently exists.

454
00:35:16.751 --> 00:35:21.776
But you don't build that better thing by doing the same thing that other people have done.

455
00:35:22.216 --> 00:35:27.281
And so you got to learn from the best practices, but you have to understand what is the high order bit.

456
00:35:27.321 --> 00:35:30.824
So for us, it wasn't, we never said to ourselves, let's increase friction.

457
00:35:31.585 --> 00:35:36.530
I mean, as an entrepreneur, that would be a crazy thing to say because you don't have a lot of leverage as an entrepreneur.

458
00:35:36.590 --> 00:35:42.115
If you add more friction, there's already enough friction that's actually right there in everything you're doing.

459
00:35:42.175 --> 00:35:42.395
Right.

460
00:35:42.715 --> 00:35:44.937
And so it's not that we said, let's add friction.

461
00:35:45.258 --> 00:35:47.500
We said, let's increase trust.

462
00:35:48.427 --> 00:35:55.250
We said, let's more accurately simulate the real world set of connections that people have.

463
00:35:55.550 --> 00:36:05.053
And then the solutions that we came up with based on those principles that we were trying to optimize, some of those solutions did create more friction.

464
00:36:05.173 --> 00:36:05.734
And gosh.

465
00:36:06.674 --> 00:36:11.095
we would have chosen solutions that didn't add more friction.

466
00:36:11.215 --> 00:36:14.296
In retrospect, it's easy to say, oh yeah, we added friction and it was a good thing.

467
00:36:14.756 --> 00:36:21.697
At the time, we were just ripping our hair out, saying, are we really going to send postcards to a billion people?

468
00:36:21.757 --> 00:36:24.338
Because we want to have a billion people using Nextdoor.

469
00:36:24.358 --> 00:36:27.979
Now there are over 110 million people who've registered to use the service.

470
00:36:28.239 --> 00:36:31.419
You multiply that times the postage of that many postcards.

471
00:36:31.479 --> 00:36:32.420
That's a lot of money.

472
00:36:32.460 --> 00:36:34.340
We never would have wanted to spend that.

473
00:36:34.880 --> 00:36:35.421
starting out.

474
00:36:35.501 --> 00:36:45.629
So I think a lot of times when we hear these stories about entrepreneurial journeys, we forget that it all looks very clear in hindsight.

475
00:36:46.490 --> 00:36:50.894
But when we were building, the thing that was driving us was not adding friction.

476
00:36:51.414 --> 00:36:54.437
The thing that was driving us is, how do we increase trust?

477
00:36:54.797 --> 00:36:58.381
And in some cases, the way to increase trust is to add friction.

478
00:36:58.401 --> 00:37:02.264
In fact, what's so interesting now as we think about 15 years after that,

479
00:37:03.345 --> 00:37:05.927
AI reduces even more friction.

480
00:37:05.947 --> 00:37:08.770
If you think about AI search versus Google search, right?

481
00:37:09.230 --> 00:37:22.141
Google search, you put in the query, you get the 10 blue links, you have to click on each one of them, you go back, you go forward, you synthesize everything you find in those 10 links in your own head, and then you come up with some kind of amalgamated view.

482
00:37:23.309 --> 00:37:27.192
There's some friction there, a lot less friction than there used to be, but there's some friction there.

483
00:37:27.713 --> 00:37:32.397
You go to AI and you type in a natural language query that's conversational.

484
00:37:32.777 --> 00:37:36.981
And it takes not just 10 links, but every link it's ever found.

485
00:37:37.581 --> 00:37:41.024
And it amalgamates all of them into this bite-sized summary.

486
00:37:41.524 --> 00:37:43.967
You think about that incredible leverage you just got.

487
00:37:44.247 --> 00:37:45.148
The friction just went...

488
00:37:46.032 --> 00:37:48.393
I mean, it went bye-bye immediately, right?

489
00:37:48.714 --> 00:37:52.696
But sometimes the friction is where you learn to ask better questions.

490
00:37:53.316 --> 00:37:58.460
Sometimes the friction is the thing that uncovers the nuance that everyone else is missing.

491
00:37:58.540 --> 00:38:01.782
And so I think the friction, in an odd way...

492
00:38:02.602 --> 00:38:03.842
is actually what makes us human.

493
00:38:04.042 --> 00:38:09.204
We hear a lot about imperfection of humans versus the perfection of a machine, right?

494
00:38:09.704 --> 00:38:18.146
Let's use the perfection of a machine to get us to a place really fast, but let's do the very end with the beautiful imperfection of humans.

495
00:38:18.246 --> 00:38:21.527
There's a meme that's going around in Silicon Valley

496
00:38:22.407 --> 00:38:24.147
Maybe you've heard it, 20, 60, 20.

497
00:38:24.868 --> 00:38:26.568
It's a way to use AI.

498
00:38:26.608 --> 00:38:27.508
Have you heard this before?

499
00:38:27.568 --> 00:38:28.328
No, I haven't yet.

500
00:38:28.348 --> 00:38:29.248
What is this?

501
00:38:29.829 --> 00:38:34.069
The idea is you as a human do the first 20% of the work.

502
00:38:34.509 --> 00:38:35.550
So you have something to do.

503
00:38:35.610 --> 00:38:38.190
You have a podcast guest to research.

504
00:38:38.670 --> 00:38:41.571
Okay, the first 20% of that research, you do.

505
00:38:41.771 --> 00:38:45.292
You're getting to know it, you're understanding, why would I have this guest on the show?

506
00:38:45.572 --> 00:38:46.692
What would I want to ask them?

507
00:38:46.932 --> 00:38:48.592
What can they add to the community, right?

508
00:38:49.192 --> 00:38:51.233
Once you've done 20%, though, you turn it over to AI.

509
00:38:52.033 --> 00:38:59.599
And that's when you put the prompts into ChatGPT or you go to Claude and you say, I'm going to interview so-and-so and here's some things that I want you to push on.

510
00:38:59.639 --> 00:39:03.082
And what are some great questions and what are some great themes that we should get into?

511
00:39:03.102 --> 00:39:06.564
And how is this very topically relevant to what's going on in the world today?

512
00:39:06.865 --> 00:39:09.527
And then the AI will give you a lot of information, but you don't stop there.

513
00:39:10.087 --> 00:39:13.410
You take that and then you do the last 20% yourself.

514
00:39:13.890 --> 00:39:18.374
You look at the list of questions the chatbot has created for you and you decide which ones are the best ones.

515
00:39:18.394 --> 00:39:22.137
You prioritize them in the order that you believe they should be prioritized.

516
00:39:22.537 --> 00:39:24.358
I think that's an interesting heuristic.

517
00:39:24.719 --> 00:39:26.240
20, 60, 20.

518
00:39:26.480 --> 00:39:28.642
We're not relying on the machine.

519
00:39:29.553 --> 00:39:32.176
Nor are we saying that we shouldn't use the machine.

520
00:39:32.616 --> 00:39:39.082
But we built a framework where we're starting, and then it's doing a lot of the work in the middle, and then we're ending.

521
00:39:39.563 --> 00:39:44.447
And I think at the beginning, there's some friction because you've got to get started, and it's hard to get started.

522
00:39:44.848 --> 00:39:50.193
In the middle, the machine's just taking all that stuff, that activation energy that you've created, and it's doing the work.

523
00:39:50.433 --> 00:39:52.035
But at the end, the refinement is...

524
00:39:52.909 --> 00:40:00.153
You want a human to look at that and bring nuance and elegance and beauty and those things that machines typically don't have.

525
00:40:00.433 --> 00:40:06.135
So I think there are ways that we can use the AI without losing what makes us special.

526
00:40:06.436 --> 00:40:09.317
And sometimes friction is the thing that makes us special.

527
00:40:09.337 --> 00:40:15.600
I mean, friction is the thing that helps us understand that we're not talking to a machine, right?

528
00:40:15.700 --> 00:40:19.462
And this is gonna be an issue, particularly with online content.

529
00:40:19.762 --> 00:40:21.083
If something's written perfectly,

530
00:40:22.048 --> 00:40:26.591
increasingly people believe you use an AI to write that.

531
00:40:27.491 --> 00:40:33.614
If it's got em dashes and it's perfect from a grammar standpoint, you probably used chat GPT, right?

532
00:40:33.874 --> 00:40:41.499
But if you see something and there's a word that's misspelled or there's a construction that's not great from a grammar point of view, you're not gonna think that came from an AI.

533
00:40:42.079 --> 00:40:43.580
You're gonna know that that came from a human.

534
00:40:44.120 --> 00:40:48.944
And the human can make it better, but that friction, that imperfection, right?

535
00:40:49.304 --> 00:40:54.267
That's ultimately the thing that we put into something that gives it soul.

536
00:40:54.608 --> 00:40:56.249
I like that 20, 60, 20.

537
00:40:56.869 --> 00:41:07.257
Just to sort of echo what you've just said, I found that even something as simple as prepping for a podcast, when I just ask AI to prep and gives me a list of questions, it's...

538
00:41:07.377 --> 00:41:08.377
it always falls flat.

539
00:41:08.517 --> 00:41:11.038
It never captures the topics the guest actually cares about.

540
00:41:11.078 --> 00:41:25.161
Yes, it can pull the things that maybe you're a domain expert at, but it won't know the topics that you're emotionally invested in, that you're going to, you know, you're going to pull ideas that you've never said before and tell stories that have never been heard.

541
00:41:25.181 --> 00:41:28.902
Like you really have to, at least for me, when I prep for these,

542
00:41:29.562 --> 00:41:31.943
I have to listen to other podcasts you've been on.

543
00:41:32.043 --> 00:41:36.825
I have to read the book, at least a bit of it myself, and then I can understand what matters to you.

544
00:41:36.925 --> 00:41:41.106
And I found that when I figure out what matters to you, then that's the questions you ask.

545
00:41:41.146 --> 00:41:44.347
Those are the things that you triple down on and that creates the best content.

546
00:41:44.727 --> 00:41:51.510
But to your point, when you just rely on AI, when it's not 20, 60, 20, but it's a hundred percent AI.

547
00:41:52.725 --> 00:41:54.966
It'll try and do a good job, but it always misses the mark.

548
00:41:55.186 --> 00:42:04.969
And the interview feels inhuman because you're just pulling up points that the guest has mentioned on previous podcasts, but it may not be what they care about.

549
00:42:05.529 --> 00:42:08.270
It may not be things that are relevant to them now.

550
00:42:10.393 --> 00:42:25.080
I've actually gone in the other direction where I used to do all my podcast prep manually, and then I used AI, and then I went back to manual podcast prep because I hated the result of the completely AI-generated prep.

551
00:42:25.380 --> 00:42:30.442
But I think that's a really good framework for people to use AI in a 20, 60, 20 format.

552
00:42:32.010 --> 00:42:34.852
I don't think we want AI to be the first word or the final word.

553
00:42:35.092 --> 00:42:38.234
Because then if it's a first word, it's like garbage in, garbage out.

554
00:42:38.574 --> 00:42:46.198
If it's the last word, then there's no human audit of the content before it gets posted or before it gets used.

555
00:42:46.598 --> 00:42:55.123
It can help us transform the first set of words that are largely imperfect into the final set of words that are much more evolved.

556
00:42:55.384 --> 00:42:55.964
But think about it.

557
00:42:55.984 --> 00:42:59.206
You wouldn't go to an AI and say, tell me how to make a million dollars.

558
00:43:00.179 --> 00:43:01.860
it's not going to tell you anything, right?

559
00:43:02.160 --> 00:43:05.282
You wouldn't even go to an AI and say, tell me which stocks to invest in.

560
00:43:05.582 --> 00:43:10.304
You might actually ask the AI, you might say, I have this much money that I've just inherited.

561
00:43:10.404 --> 00:43:12.825
I'm thinking about creating a balanced stock portfolio.

562
00:43:13.086 --> 00:43:15.747
Can you give me some suggestions for names that I should consider?

563
00:43:16.027 --> 00:43:20.289
And it'll give you great names, which you can then spend some time thinking about.

564
00:43:20.309 --> 00:43:22.850
And then ultimately you decide what the portfolio looks like.

565
00:43:22.870 --> 00:43:26.112
So again, I want to be really careful about,

566
00:43:26.567 --> 00:43:37.134
Because I believe too many people today want to either say use AI for everything because it's magic or don't use it at all because it's imperfect.

567
00:43:37.694 --> 00:43:39.175
Neither of those statements are true.

568
00:43:39.555 --> 00:43:45.259
I mean, in fact, if I had to choose one of them, I would actually go more towards AI is magic than it's imperfect.

569
00:43:45.519 --> 00:43:49.662
But I would say it's magic at doing a particular set of things.

570
00:43:50.622 --> 00:43:53.684
And it's not magical at doing the very end.

571
00:43:54.064 --> 00:43:58.626
It's not magical at coming up with the right question to ask at the beginning.

572
00:43:58.907 --> 00:44:02.268
So let's use it as a tool the same way that we use all the other tools in our lives.

573
00:44:02.629 --> 00:44:10.933
When you were building Nextdoor, and I think it's still, you always have to balance trust versus friction.

574
00:44:10.953 --> 00:44:12.874
I'll just call it friction so people understand what we're talking about.

575
00:44:12.894 --> 00:44:13.555
Yeah.

576
00:44:14.488 --> 00:44:22.960
But you've done things that signal high trust, but it makes it very difficult for a company to grow if they followed the playbook that you followed.

577
00:44:23.400 --> 00:44:27.546
I think you also blocked Google from indexing your content on Nextdoor.

578
00:44:28.848 --> 00:44:29.729
These decisions...

579
00:44:31.370 --> 00:44:36.551
For example, sending out the postcards, blocking Google from indexing content, killing the SEO.

580
00:44:37.352 --> 00:44:40.732
How do you think about trust versus friction?

581
00:44:40.752 --> 00:44:47.834
Like, how do you know when an idea is something that's going to increase the trust, but just enough that it's going to benefit the company and not hurt the growth?

582
00:44:48.094 --> 00:44:53.856
Like, this is this fine equilibrium, this balance that you're trying to figure out.

583
00:44:54.236 --> 00:44:58.057
And it's a smart play to increase trust, but it's a difficult idea.

584
00:44:58.157 --> 00:45:07.723
It's a difficult thing to decide on what kills a company versus that perfect amount of trust that secures the client or the customer or the subscriber.

585
00:45:08.370 --> 00:45:19.013
Well, I'll start by saying that, again, in hindsight, things like not having any of our content inside Google or requiring verification of identity, those look really smart.

586
00:45:19.353 --> 00:45:28.295
There were probably 100 things that we did that were actually genuinely bad ideas that we don't talk about today because they're already gone and they didn't work at it.

587
00:45:28.335 --> 00:45:33.257
But for those two in particular, because they're related, it's less that we talked about

588
00:45:34.157 --> 00:45:37.381
the challenge of choosing those solutions.

589
00:45:37.802 --> 00:45:47.113
And it's more that we went back to this truism that we felt was even more important than getting distribution through SEO or through removing friction.

590
00:45:47.433 --> 00:45:50.937
And that truism for us was, how do we build a virtual space

591
00:45:51.698 --> 00:45:55.760
that is as analogous to the real world space as possible.

592
00:45:56.120 --> 00:46:05.606
And so to give you an answer or to give you an example, when you talk to someone in your neighborhood, you don't have to wonder whether or not that person lives in the neighborhood.

593
00:46:05.906 --> 00:46:09.168
You've probably seen them or they've just walked out of their front door, right?

594
00:46:09.408 --> 00:46:11.829
And so we knew we needed verification of identity.

595
00:46:12.329 --> 00:46:13.470
And that's what drove it.

596
00:46:13.490 --> 00:46:17.012
It wasn't that we want to just pick the thing that's most high friction, right?

597
00:46:17.032 --> 00:46:20.534
It just so happened that that was more friction than what people...

598
00:46:21.074 --> 00:46:22.036
had done in the past.

599
00:46:22.738 --> 00:46:24.682
With the no SEO, there are a couple things there.

600
00:46:24.702 --> 00:46:27.487
The first is when you're having a conversation with a neighbor,

601
00:46:28.577 --> 00:46:34.140
You don't think that the contents of that conversation is going to be accessible to anyone in the world.

602
00:46:34.600 --> 00:46:36.321
You're just having a private conversation, right?

603
00:46:36.581 --> 00:46:39.422
You and I are having a conversation that we both know is going to be accessible.

604
00:46:39.922 --> 00:46:44.705
And so we're going into it with the right amount of transparency into what the end result is going to be.

605
00:46:44.725 --> 00:46:53.349
But if you and I were having a conversation on your couch tonight about something completely different that wasn't part of the podcast, we wouldn't expect that to show up on YouTube.

606
00:46:53.769 --> 00:46:53.989
Right?

607
00:46:54.290 --> 00:47:04.840
And so the same way, those conversations that happen between neighbors that have happened for 15 years on Nextdoor, they can't show up in Google because that wasn't the construct behind the conversation to begin with.

608
00:47:05.521 --> 00:47:17.153
Additionally, my first company that I started, Epinions, that ultimately became a company called shopping.com, the public, and then was bought by eBay, that company really took advantage of SEO.

609
00:47:17.968 --> 00:47:25.831
And after we went public, we dropped out of the Google index for a month because of a clerical error that an engineer made.

610
00:47:25.851 --> 00:47:30.473
He put a robots.txt file saying, do not crawl me on the main site accidentally.

611
00:47:30.793 --> 00:47:32.833
And so for a month, we fell out of the Google index.

612
00:47:33.194 --> 00:47:34.654
As a result, we missed our numbers.

613
00:47:34.834 --> 00:47:35.694
The stock tanked.

614
00:47:35.734 --> 00:47:36.895
The company had to be sold.

615
00:47:37.355 --> 00:47:42.297
And so there was a part of me as a repeat entrepreneur that said,

616
00:47:42.877 --> 00:47:47.001
I know whatever company I start, there are going to be big intractable challenges.

617
00:47:47.021 --> 00:47:50.265
That's kind of the definition of being an entrepreneur and starting a new company.

618
00:47:50.725 --> 00:47:56.371
But at least as a multi-time founder, I want to pick the challenges that I'm comfortable taking.

619
00:47:56.672 --> 00:48:02.378
And I don't want to pick the challenge of SEO because I don't know if I can sleep at night

620
00:48:02.938 --> 00:48:06.159
knowing that most of my traffic is not in my control.

621
00:48:06.779 --> 00:48:20.804
And so today, when you look at actually what's happening, not just with SEO, but specifically what's happening to publishers, because Google is now answering queries with its own AI, without letting users get to the links, right?

622
00:48:21.044 --> 00:48:24.346
Can you imagine what it's like to get most of your traffic from Google today?

623
00:48:24.706 --> 00:48:27.967
You know that's not gonna continue, but you haven't built the muscle.

624
00:48:28.407 --> 00:48:30.208
on how people will come to you directly.

625
00:48:30.268 --> 00:48:38.831
So with Nextdoor, it's different because we've never relied on SEO, but I would be way too arrogant to say that we planned that in advance, right?

626
00:48:38.971 --> 00:48:47.414
We were very, very, very fortunate that we chose a path because we wanted to protect our users' conversations from a privacy standpoint.

627
00:48:47.994 --> 00:48:53.556
We're very lucky that that's led us to a place now where all of our distribution is our own distribution.

628
00:48:54.036 --> 00:48:54.836
It's completely earned.

629
00:48:54.876 --> 00:48:56.957
And that's why, you know, when I came back to the company,

630
00:48:57.873 --> 00:48:58.774
Two and a half years ago.

631
00:48:59.555 --> 00:49:09.065
And Bill Gurley and I said to ourselves after the stock had gone down 90 percent from its IPO price, we asked ourselves, is there an opportunity here?

632
00:49:09.445 --> 00:49:10.767
Because we're in the age of AI.

633
00:49:11.087 --> 00:49:13.049
Nextdoor is not an AI native company.

634
00:49:13.369 --> 00:49:15.311
We've already spent a lot of time on this.

635
00:49:15.512 --> 00:49:15.752
Right.

636
00:49:16.152 --> 00:49:18.355
Is this a company worth spending time on?

637
00:49:18.875 --> 00:49:22.576
And we looked at the core assets and we looked at the verified identity.

638
00:49:22.636 --> 00:49:24.397
We looked at the fully owned distribution.

639
00:49:24.697 --> 00:49:25.938
We looked at the unique content.

640
00:49:25.958 --> 00:49:27.578
We looked at the conversational interface.

641
00:49:28.258 --> 00:49:38.802
And we said to ourselves, there are some assets here that are just as valuable today in the age of intelligence and AI as they were valuable in 2010, 11, 12, 13 when the company was flying high.

642
00:49:41.350 --> 00:49:46.874
So let's come back and try to turn those assets into something that has real material value.

643
00:49:47.294 --> 00:49:52.518
And so, again, I wish I could say that we predicted where the world would be today.

644
00:49:52.678 --> 00:49:54.719
There's no way that that's the case.

645
00:49:55.119 --> 00:50:06.167
We just have been lucky and we'll take the luck, like most great entrepreneurs, we'll take the luck and apply as much hard work as possible against that luck and hope it turns into something special.

646
00:50:06.187 --> 00:50:06.407
Thank you.

647
00:50:06.527 --> 00:50:07.988
HubSpot is a success story partner.

648
00:50:08.108 --> 00:50:13.490
Now, customers are using traditional search less and less to find the businesses they want to buy from.

649
00:50:13.790 --> 00:50:18.912
Now, when a buyer or a customer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up?

650
00:50:19.012 --> 00:50:25.094
They're looking for a product, they're looking for a service, and they're going into some AI chat tool and they're saying, hey, help me find the best one.

651
00:50:25.255 --> 00:50:27.596
If your company isn't showing up, you're missing out.

652
00:50:27.716 --> 00:50:32.017
And most companies have no idea if their business is showing up or even how to show up.

653
00:50:32.177 --> 00:50:36.139
And by the time they figure it out, they've already lost a deal to somebody to figure it out

654
00:50:36.379 --> 00:50:36.699
AI.

655
00:50:36.779 --> 00:50:38.079
This is what AEO is.

656
00:50:38.399 --> 00:50:40.260
Answer Engine Optimization.

657
00:50:40.420 --> 00:50:46.721
HubSpot AEO helps you show up in those moments with the right answers that your buyers and your customers are looking for.

658
00:50:46.841 --> 00:50:50.202
It could be before the first click, before the first form fill.

659
00:50:50.502 --> 00:50:53.083
That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for.

660
00:50:53.183 --> 00:50:55.663
So check out HubSpot.com to learn more about AEO.

661
00:50:55.823 --> 00:50:59.204
HubSpot is the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

662
00:50:59.444 --> 00:51:01.485
NetSuite Next is a success story partner.

663
00:51:01.865 --> 00:51:09.607
So they say that every day your business is late to using AI, you fall two days behind and the competition is only moving faster.

664
00:51:09.907 --> 00:51:10.667
So how do you keep up?

665
00:51:11.027 --> 00:51:13.048
Well, fortunately there is NetSuite Next.

666
00:51:13.428 --> 00:51:14.868
Now you probably already know NetSuite.

667
00:51:15.149 --> 00:51:17.429
NetSuite is the AI powered business management suite.

668
00:51:17.449 --> 00:51:20.070
It's trusted by over 43,000 customers.

669
00:51:20.130 --> 00:51:26.752
It securely connects all of your data, financials, inventory, commerce, HR, CRM, into one single source of truth.

670
00:51:27.412 --> 00:51:35.098
But NetSuite Next is the next huge leap in how businesses get done because AI is built into everything you do.

671
00:51:35.198 --> 00:51:40.742
So NetSuite Next automatically shows you all these custom insights for your business throughout your day.

672
00:51:41.103 --> 00:51:45.446
You'll have AI agents work alongside you to solve problems and handle routine work.

673
00:51:45.766 --> 00:51:52.872
And anytime you have a question about anything in your business, you just ask like you're having a conversation with a colleague and NetSuite Next will give you an answer.

674
00:51:53.332 --> 00:51:59.338
NetSuite is customized for a wide range of industries, so it supports the way that your business truly works.

675
00:51:59.398 --> 00:52:06.424
Whether your company earns millions or hundreds of millions, it's time for NetSuite Next, where your business meets AI.

676
00:52:06.464 --> 00:52:08.466
If I needed a solution like this, it's what I'd use.

677
00:52:08.826 --> 00:52:12.389
For the first time ever, you can try NetSuite Next for free.

678
00:52:12.710 --> 00:52:18.295
If your revenues are at least in these seven figures, go to netsuite.ai.scottclary.

679
00:52:18.695 --> 00:52:19.936
It's built for every industry.

680
00:52:20.376 --> 00:52:21.697
It's ready for every boardroom.

681
00:52:22.158 --> 00:52:24.520
NetSuite.ai slash Scott Clary.

682
00:52:24.780 --> 00:52:26.101
Monarch is a success story partner.

683
00:52:26.201 --> 00:52:26.922
Now, quick question.

684
00:52:27.062 --> 00:52:29.023
Do you know where your money went last month?

685
00:52:29.123 --> 00:52:30.865
Not roughly, but exactly.

686
00:52:30.965 --> 00:52:31.685
And most people don't.

687
00:52:31.886 --> 00:52:32.826
And I didn't for years.

688
00:52:32.866 --> 00:52:34.968
And that is most of our money stories, right?

689
00:52:35.088 --> 00:52:38.811
When we first start our career, we have one income and one account, and you can kind of wing it.

690
00:52:39.052 --> 00:52:46.939
But once you're running businesses, once you're investing, once you're carrying 50 different subscriptions that you stop paying attention to, winging it gets super expensive.

691
00:52:47.139 --> 00:52:48.160
Monarch fixed that for me.

692
00:52:48.240 --> 00:52:50.422
It is the personal finance app that tracks everything.

693
00:52:50.562 --> 00:52:50.982
everything.

694
00:52:51.042 --> 00:52:55.105
So that means accounts, investments, savings goals, spending all on one screen.

695
00:52:55.225 --> 00:52:58.928
The first week I had it, it fired recurring charges I've been paying for months without realizing.

696
00:52:59.028 --> 00:53:04.772
And every single week, the AI recap tells me if spending spiked, if my net worth moved, and what bills are coming.

697
00:53:04.792 --> 00:53:08.014
And I can just ask it, hey, can I afford this trip without touching my savings?

698
00:53:08.074 --> 00:53:11.196
And I can get a real answer based on my actual numbers.

699
00:53:11.296 --> 00:53:13.457
It is a financial advisor in your pocket.

700
00:53:13.717 --> 00:53:15.579
It costs less than an hour with a real one.

701
00:53:15.719 --> 00:53:17.500
So write your own money story with Monarch.

702
00:53:17.700 --> 00:53:22.283
Use code success at monarch.com and get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50.

703
00:53:22.563 --> 00:53:26.085
That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code success.

704
00:53:26.345 --> 00:53:27.006
A couple thoughts.

705
00:53:27.206 --> 00:53:34.270
First of all, when you apply a whole bunch of hard work against luck, there's a point where you are architecting a little bit of your own luck.

706
00:53:35.271 --> 00:53:38.113
So I don't think that it's fair to just say it's pure luck.

707
00:53:38.133 --> 00:53:44.957
There's a lot of people that could have the same circumstances, same company, same situation, and fumble to a degree.

708
00:53:44.997 --> 00:53:48.400
So you still have to understand when you are getting lucky and ride that wave.

709
00:53:48.500 --> 00:53:50.661
So you did a great job.

710
00:53:51.122 --> 00:53:53.684
One thought about the decline in organic search.

711
00:53:54.964 --> 00:53:57.545
this is something that is hitting companies very hard.

712
00:53:57.605 --> 00:54:00.007
I mean, I'll speak from personal experience.

713
00:54:00.027 --> 00:54:02.027
This podcast is sponsored by HubSpot.

714
00:54:02.107 --> 00:54:05.529
It has been for several years now, and every year I speak at Inbound.

715
00:54:06.089 --> 00:54:16.354
And I think last year they published a paper, which is basically like the state of organic search, because HubSpot as a company was built on organic search.

716
00:54:16.394 --> 00:54:21.036
They were the company where if you Googled almost any business term, you could find a blog article on it.

717
00:54:21.596 --> 00:54:29.765
And it just showed they were way ahead of the curve on this, but it just showed year over year, like massive, massive, massive decline in organic search.

718
00:54:29.845 --> 00:54:34.770
And this is a company that understands organic search better than almost any company on earth.

719
00:54:36.015 --> 00:54:40.016
And then they started figuring out, okay, how do we have earned distribution?

720
00:54:40.036 --> 00:54:44.638
How do we go through influencers, different media and content formats?

721
00:54:45.058 --> 00:54:54.321
And now they're figuring out, and they have figured out to a degree, like the AI or the agentic search optimization or whatever you want to call it, play.

722
00:54:55.242 --> 00:54:55.682
But this is...

723
00:54:56.481 --> 00:55:01.785
This is, actually, I'll ask you, what's the lesson for entrepreneurs?

724
00:55:01.905 --> 00:55:11.513
So for example, you build a company that's based on organic search, HubSpot navigated it, you've actually built it so you never had to even deal with it.

725
00:55:11.653 --> 00:55:21.461
But for the entrepreneur that's starting something, they're thinking, okay, I have to find a way to build a company that can survive if where my traffic comes from

726
00:55:23.442 --> 00:55:38.635
radically shifts or should I even start from scratch in a different way where every customer I acquire is earned and I don't have to worry about growing by competing on someone else's platform?

727
00:55:39.316 --> 00:55:43.899
Like, what is the lesson in all of this for somebody who's starting out on how to navigate this?

728
00:55:43.939 --> 00:55:46.081
Because for somebody starting, this is just scary.

729
00:55:46.141 --> 00:55:48.282
Like we're having this conversation about how you lucked out.

730
00:55:48.662 --> 00:55:53.646
I'm talking about how HubSpot navigated, you know, their main, their decline of their main traffic source.

731
00:55:53.666 --> 00:55:56.108
And somebody's like, oh, my God, I just want to get one customer.

732
00:55:56.468 --> 00:55:57.589
And that's my main goal right now.

733
00:55:57.629 --> 00:55:59.550
And I don't have any of these things figured out yet.

734
00:55:59.570 --> 00:56:00.551
This is overwhelming.

735
00:56:01.251 --> 00:56:03.933
So to that entrepreneur, what is your advice to them?

736
00:56:04.285 --> 00:56:10.310
Well, we mentioned Bill Gurley and has this great expression, and it is be a learn it all, not a know it all.

737
00:56:11.071 --> 00:56:24.223
So typically entrepreneurs, they start off and I would say you want to be intentional about both the advantages and the obstacles that you're choosing, because almost every advantage exists.

738
00:56:24.538 --> 00:56:25.839
There's an obstacle side too.

739
00:56:25.859 --> 00:56:27.079
Almost everything is a two-sided coin.

740
00:56:27.099 --> 00:56:38.546
So if you say to yourself, I figured out a way to get great SEO, you need to understand that the other side of the coin is if SEO changes, you're going to have to completely re-architect your service.

741
00:56:38.986 --> 00:56:41.888
If on the other hand, you say, I don't want to have SEO.

742
00:56:42.824 --> 00:56:52.012
Well, then the other side, that may be an advantage, but the other side of that coin is, okay, how are you going to build organic distribution, which is one of the most difficult things to do on the consumer internet, right?

743
00:56:52.413 --> 00:56:59.078
So the first thing I would say is you can never stop as an entrepreneur, particularly in the tech industry.

744
00:56:59.839 --> 00:57:03.280
trying to understand where the industry is going.

745
00:57:03.760 --> 00:57:12.943
Because in almost all cases, the great companies are the beneficiaries of megatrends that are bigger than any one company.

746
00:57:13.443 --> 00:57:17.304
And if you time one of those trends well, well, you see what happens.

747
00:57:17.665 --> 00:57:21.906
And if you're not prepared for one of those trends, you can be flattened instantly.

748
00:57:22.878 --> 00:57:30.947
If you're a company today that is timed AI the right way, you almost certainly are valued way higher than you were five years ago.

749
00:57:31.287 --> 00:57:38.415
If you're a company today that hasn't prepared for AI, you're almost certainly one fifth of the value that you were five years ago, right?

750
00:57:38.455 --> 00:57:42.019
So you have to be a learn it on, you have to be hungry

751
00:57:42.838 --> 00:57:45.941
Think about where is this industry going?

752
00:57:46.362 --> 00:57:51.367
And at the same time, you can't be too early because pioneers get arrows in their backs, right?

753
00:57:51.407 --> 00:57:58.234
So if you were too early with agentic AI and you gave up all of your SEO, maybe you never would have gotten there.

754
00:57:58.834 --> 00:58:01.355
If you're too late, you know you obviously will die.

755
00:58:01.775 --> 00:58:08.298
So as an entrepreneur, you constantly have to be living in the past, the present, and the future.

756
00:58:08.338 --> 00:58:10.038
The past is, okay, what has worked?

757
00:58:10.439 --> 00:58:12.339
The present is what's working right now.

758
00:58:12.720 --> 00:58:16.341
And the future is what do we think is going to work in the future?

759
00:58:16.841 --> 00:58:18.502
I know, for example, that AI...

760
00:58:19.182 --> 00:58:22.066
is going to be a boom that we're in the early innings up.

761
00:58:22.567 --> 00:58:31.198
So from my standpoint, I could be wrong, but from my standpoint, every hour that we invest in AI today is going to pay off big time.

762
00:58:31.999 --> 00:58:34.882
Next year, the year after, and I think for a decade,

763
00:58:35.403 --> 00:58:35.823
for now.

764
00:58:36.223 --> 00:58:39.705
And so I would tell any entrepreneur, make sure you're deep in AI.

765
00:58:39.845 --> 00:58:41.206
I don't know exactly where it's going to go.

766
00:58:41.226 --> 00:58:45.368
I don't know if it's going to be mostly software or if they're going to be robots and other pieces of hardware.

767
00:58:45.689 --> 00:58:56.535
But I know that understanding AI and being able to harness it and use it and understand how it affects businesses, that is probably the most important skill for any entrepreneur in any industry right now.

768
00:58:56.895 --> 00:59:00.477
And so I can say that as an entrepreneur who's lived through dot-com boom,

769
00:59:01.077 --> 00:59:05.922
and then transition from desktop to mobile, mobile to cloud, now cloud to AI, right?

770
00:59:06.262 --> 00:59:11.327
I've seen the way these transitions work, but you cannot get stuck where you are.

771
00:59:11.347 --> 00:59:16.072
I mean, the great companies in our industry, they either don't last very long,

772
00:59:16.692 --> 00:59:17.913
or they reinvent themselves.

773
00:59:18.293 --> 00:59:19.694
Look at Apple and Microsoft.

774
00:59:20.154 --> 00:59:21.855
They were both left for dead.

775
00:59:22.355 --> 00:59:25.497
It's amazing to think this, but left for dead.

776
00:59:26.017 --> 00:59:28.719
And then they transformed themselves for a new generation.

777
00:59:28.999 --> 00:59:32.861
And today, you may ask yourself, where's Apple on AI?

778
00:59:33.341 --> 00:59:34.402
What has Microsoft done at?

779
00:59:34.422 --> 00:59:40.706
They're going to have to do it again, because today they're not the leaders when it comes to AI, right?

780
00:59:40.786 --> 00:59:42.627
So as an entrepreneur in this industry,

781
00:59:43.567 --> 00:59:50.009
If you make it a priority to be a learn-it-all, you're putting yourself at a competitive advantage, right?

782
00:59:50.289 --> 00:59:56.030
Because you are more likely to be able to adjust to the changes that are made, right?

783
00:59:56.331 --> 01:00:00.852
I mean, it's that old Clayton Christensen book, you know, The Innovator's Dilemma, right?

784
01:00:01.172 --> 01:00:04.693
I mean, the other thing I'd say is almost always success is...

785
01:00:05.599 --> 01:00:09.202
is the wrong kind of lesson to continue succeeding.

786
01:00:09.883 --> 01:00:15.288
Whereas failure, if you learn from it, can equip you to succeed in the future.

787
01:00:15.348 --> 01:00:21.233
I mean, if you're successful, you kind of sit back and you're pinching yourself, saying, wow, this is amazing.

788
01:00:21.253 --> 01:00:22.854
Can you believe what's going on right now?

789
01:00:23.134 --> 01:00:25.777
And you won't see the tidal wave that comes behind you.

790
01:00:26.596 --> 01:00:28.077
and takes your company away with it.

791
01:00:28.497 --> 01:00:33.021
If you fail and you're at the bottom of the ocean because you've already been hit by the tidal wave, you do one of two things.

792
01:00:33.561 --> 01:00:34.982
You say, gosh, this isn't for me.

793
01:00:35.623 --> 01:00:36.403
I'm hanging it up.

794
01:00:36.943 --> 01:00:39.866
Or you say, I never want to be at the bottom of this ocean again.

795
01:00:40.326 --> 01:00:45.410
What am I going to learn from this experience to make sure that the next time this tidal wave comes...

796
01:00:46.255 --> 01:00:49.217
I'm writing it versus being buried by it.

797
01:00:49.637 --> 01:00:50.938
And that's all about learning.

798
01:00:51.018 --> 01:00:55.920
I think the ultimate competitive advantage for an entrepreneur is to learn.

799
01:00:56.461 --> 01:00:59.542
If you can learn, and this is why AI to me is so powerful.

800
01:00:59.962 --> 01:01:02.144
Because before, where could you learn?

801
01:01:02.444 --> 01:01:06.586
You learn from other people, you learn from books, you learn from what you read and what you saw, right?

802
01:01:07.046 --> 01:01:10.648
Now, all of that is coming to you in the form of one agent.

803
01:01:11.048 --> 01:01:13.290
And you can talk to it for hours and hours and hours.

804
01:01:14.450 --> 01:01:21.914
So I think there's an incredible opportunity for entrepreneurs today to have a level playing field in terms of that access to information and intelligence.

805
01:01:22.234 --> 01:01:24.715
But that doesn't mean that the AI is going to do the work for us.

806
01:01:24.795 --> 01:01:26.075
We still have to do the work.

807
01:01:26.456 --> 01:01:29.717
But if we do the work, we'll be able to anticipate what's ahead.

808
01:01:30.164 --> 01:01:34.326
You've said that leaving next door was the hardest thing you've ever done professionally.

809
01:01:35.306 --> 01:01:36.927
I want to know what was going on in 2018.

810
01:01:37.387 --> 01:01:44.050
But also, I want to piggyback off of your idea after you tell the audience that story, because there's some lessons there as well.

811
01:01:45.264 --> 01:01:50.147
When you came back, you were just speaking about these companies that almost died and came back.

812
01:01:50.247 --> 01:01:57.212
And I don't want to say that's what happened with Nextdoor, but when you came back, you called it a refounding, which is a really interesting word.

813
01:01:57.312 --> 01:01:59.034
Refounding, not a turnaround.

814
01:01:59.714 --> 01:02:05.078
So please tell everybody the story about why you stepped away, why it was so hard, what was going on.

815
01:02:05.398 --> 01:02:06.459
But then let's talk about...

816
01:02:07.039 --> 01:02:09.040
You coming back, we could talk about Bill Gurley's.

817
01:02:09.300 --> 01:02:10.240
He's been on the podcast.

818
01:02:10.260 --> 01:02:10.921
He's a great guy.

819
01:02:12.121 --> 01:02:13.242
Incredible, incredible investor.

820
01:02:13.262 --> 01:02:14.842
If you don't know who we're talking about.

821
01:02:14.862 --> 01:02:22.685
So please go look up that episode, but talk about this, you know, this hiatus, this refounding, and then also why, why refounding?

822
01:02:22.705 --> 01:02:34.050
What's the lesson from, you know, coming back and disrupting something or refounding it that an entrepreneur can learn from, but tell your story first.

823
01:02:34.421 --> 01:02:36.247
Yeah, no, you said a lot of powerful things in there.

824
01:02:36.267 --> 01:02:38.996
So I'll start with leaving next door and why it was hard.

825
01:02:39.056 --> 01:02:40.761
And it kind of...

826
01:02:42.243 --> 01:02:46.925
It echoes what I said before about success not being a great teacher.

827
01:02:47.325 --> 01:02:48.846
I started Nextdoor in the summer of 2010.

828
01:02:48.906 --> 01:03:02.432
And even though we were never a hyper-growth company, I don't remember a month or a quarter or a year where something we did in the past was better than what we were doing in the present and what we were going to do in the future.

829
01:03:02.472 --> 01:03:05.513
So we were very steady in terms of our growth.

830
01:03:05.673 --> 01:03:09.335
And our growth was getting bigger and bigger and bigger as we compounded.

831
01:03:10.331 --> 01:03:14.314
But my performance as a CEO was kind of doing the opposite.

832
01:03:14.514 --> 01:03:19.758
I had plateaued and then I was actually, I think, starting to become less effective all the time.

833
01:03:19.958 --> 01:03:25.542
And maybe a part of that was the company was larger and it required a different set of skills.

834
01:03:25.562 --> 01:03:30.866
A lot of times founders are really good in the early days and then they get worse and worse as the company gets larger.

835
01:03:31.347 --> 01:03:33.228
Maybe it was because I was really tired.

836
01:03:33.508 --> 01:03:37.211
I'd been a CEO for, gosh, I don't know, almost 20 years at that point.

837
01:03:37.471 --> 01:03:39.453
Nextdoor was the third company that I started.

838
01:03:40.193 --> 01:03:43.356
And then I think the third thing is I wasn't that self-aware.

839
01:03:44.076 --> 01:03:51.983
And early in my career, I was really lucky because I had the CEO coach, Bill Campbell, probably the best CEO coach in the history of Silicon Valley.

840
01:03:52.663 --> 01:03:58.108
And he was like a mirror for me as I developed as a young CEO.

841
01:03:58.128 --> 01:04:00.810
I was a CEO for the first time at 27 or 28 years of age.

842
01:04:00.830 --> 01:04:01.511
I knew nothing.

843
01:04:01.851 --> 01:04:03.492
I didn't deserve to be a CEO.

844
01:04:03.933 --> 01:04:05.114
I was lucky to be there.

845
01:04:05.234 --> 01:04:08.597
And Bill helped me take that luck and make the most of it.

846
01:04:09.197 --> 01:04:19.043
Bill sadly passed away and I didn't really have a CEO coach, nor was I open to seeing what my weaknesses were.

847
01:04:19.083 --> 01:04:30.790
And so in 2018, the board of Nextdoor felt that we were building a company that could be a company for the ages, tens of billions of dollars of market cap or even larger.

848
01:04:31.391 --> 01:04:32.972
And I don't think they felt that

849
01:04:34.068 --> 01:04:37.611
If I ran it as CEO or continue to run it as CEO, we would get there.

850
01:04:38.111 --> 01:04:41.634
So it was hard to lead because it wasn't my choice, for one.

851
01:04:42.214 --> 01:04:54.543
But the other reason is when you're a founder and the CEO of your own company, your identity is just indistinct from that company, particularly if you're in Silicon Valley.

852
01:04:54.563 --> 01:04:56.585
So I went to Stanford and I worked in Silicon Valley.

853
01:04:56.685 --> 01:05:03.070
And when I thought of myself and my identity, it was as the founder and CEO of Nextdoor.

854
01:05:04.004 --> 01:05:08.507
And so if I'm no longer the CEO of Nextdoor, who am I?

855
01:05:08.687 --> 01:05:19.553
And it sounds silly, but it's kind of profound because you wake up every morning thinking that you have this purpose professionally, and the purpose is to fulfill the identity that you have.

856
01:05:19.593 --> 01:05:21.894
And that identity for me was as CEO of Nextdoor.

857
01:05:22.354 --> 01:05:28.938
And so when you can't continue that, and it's not really your choice, I mean, it's a double whammy because the first thing is...

858
01:05:30.005 --> 01:05:32.687
You're not able to do it even if you want to continue.

859
01:05:32.727 --> 01:05:37.812
And the second thing is you're going to have to pick up the pieces and figure out what you do next.

860
01:05:37.872 --> 01:05:40.234
And so I left at the end of 2018.

861
01:05:40.354 --> 01:05:46.720
It turned out to be one of the greatest blessings ever because it allowed me to take a step back.

862
01:05:47.505 --> 01:05:59.695
to relax for a moment, to take a deep breath, to spend more time with my wife and three kids, and to finally have a moment to look in the mirror and say, okay, what do I want to be?

863
01:06:00.275 --> 01:06:02.317
What do I want to learn from this experience?

864
01:06:02.357 --> 01:06:03.738
How do I want to change?

865
01:06:03.778 --> 01:06:04.699
How do I want to grow?

866
01:06:05.019 --> 01:06:07.101
I talk a lot about being a learn-it-all, right?

867
01:06:07.541 --> 01:06:09.582
I needed to be a learn-it-all, right?

868
01:06:10.023 --> 01:06:13.946
And so it provided the breath of fresh air, right?

869
01:06:14.359 --> 01:06:20.801
For me to say, I'm not worried when I wake up every morning about the company because I'm not running it anymore.

870
01:06:21.641 --> 01:06:31.224
Let me be worried about myself and being the best person I can be, not just the best CEO, but the best human being, the best father, the best husband, right?

871
01:06:31.324 --> 01:06:32.745
And then maybe a CEO.

872
01:06:33.005 --> 01:06:35.225
The truth is I was so burned out at that point.

873
01:06:35.385 --> 01:06:36.886
I never thought I'd be a CEO again.

874
01:06:37.326 --> 01:06:37.967
I didn't want to be.

875
01:06:38.467 --> 01:06:39.748
It's a lot of pressure.

876
01:06:40.309 --> 01:06:44.093
It takes a lot of life force to run a company.

877
01:06:44.473 --> 01:06:45.254
I was really lucky.

878
01:06:45.314 --> 01:06:55.103
One of the early Nextdoor investors, Hedda Sophia, a London-based VC firm, the founder and CEO Ian Osborne had been an investor in Nextdoor.

879
01:06:55.263 --> 01:06:57.866
He said, why don't you join Hedda Sophia as executive chairman?

880
01:06:57.886 --> 01:06:57.926
He

881
01:06:58.446 --> 01:07:04.292
You can learn to be an investor and you can sit on boards and you can be part of the other side of the table.

882
01:07:04.432 --> 01:07:06.193
You know, one side of the table is the entrepreneurs.

883
01:07:06.213 --> 01:07:07.515
The other side is investors.

884
01:07:08.035 --> 01:07:11.038
And I loved the time that I spent at Hedo Sophia.

885
01:07:11.158 --> 01:07:13.300
I loved helping entrepreneurs.

886
01:07:13.440 --> 01:07:15.963
I joke and say I love giving them advice.

887
01:07:16.563 --> 01:07:27.592
And then going home and going to sleep with a clear conscience where they would go to sleep worrying about the advice I had just given them and whether it was the right advice or the wrong advice, you know, the way I had for 20 years.

888
01:07:27.972 --> 01:07:29.814
And so I never thought I would come back to next door.

889
01:07:30.654 --> 01:07:31.515
Why did I come back?

890
01:07:31.595 --> 01:07:33.136
I mean, the company was failing.

891
01:07:33.156 --> 01:07:33.777
Yeah.

892
01:07:33.937 --> 01:07:34.898
It honestly was.

893
01:07:35.098 --> 01:07:36.899
And I was on the board and Bill was on the board.

894
01:07:36.939 --> 01:07:40.282
And so you can't blame that on anyone, right?

895
01:07:40.402 --> 01:07:43.844
I mean, it's collective responsibility, but it wasn't working.

896
01:07:44.104 --> 01:07:52.470
And even though it would require a tremendous sacrifice to leave a great job at Hedda Sofia and go back to next door,

897
01:07:53.537 --> 01:08:04.910
My wife said to me, I think if you're on your deathbed and this thing called next door had gone poof and had failed and someone asked you, why did you let that happen?

898
01:08:05.691 --> 01:08:12.358
You would have a regret if you thought to yourself you had a chance to go in there and try to make the outcome different and you didn't do it.

899
01:08:12.919 --> 01:08:14.500
And so I went back and...

900
01:08:15.181 --> 01:08:16.544
You talk about a refounding.

901
01:08:16.564 --> 01:08:19.672
I mean, there were so many reasons that we needed a refounding.

902
01:08:19.712 --> 01:08:23.481
You mentioned one of them, which is we needed to massively disrupt

903
01:08:24.479 --> 01:08:26.680
the trajectory that the company was on.

904
01:08:26.700 --> 01:08:28.781
The company had lost 90% of its value.

905
01:08:28.801 --> 01:08:30.001
The company was shrinking.

906
01:08:30.401 --> 01:08:34.763
The company's product was not performing the way that it was intended to perform.

907
01:08:35.143 --> 01:08:41.385
And so turning that around, I mean, can you think of that many consumer internet properties who've gone from shrinking to growing?

908
01:08:42.145 --> 01:08:46.167
It's very, very, very hard, and it rarely happens, if ever.

909
01:08:46.287 --> 01:08:48.187
So we needed something radical.

910
01:08:48.487 --> 01:08:52.409
The other thing is, I needed to be a much more effective CEO.

911
01:08:53.450 --> 01:08:54.934
to be part of that turnaround.

912
01:08:55.014 --> 01:08:55.476
I knew that.

913
01:08:55.917 --> 01:08:59.908
I knew that if I came back and operated the company the way I had in the past,

914
01:09:00.800 --> 01:09:01.681
Nothing would change.

915
01:09:02.041 --> 01:09:04.482
In fact, maybe the company would fail even more quickly.

916
01:09:04.902 --> 01:09:19.511
And so I had to ask myself, I mean, this is a refounding for me as a CEO as well, but ultimately when you talk about a refounding, you're going back to your DNA, you're going back to your first principles, you're going back to why did I start this company in the first place?

917
01:09:20.111 --> 01:09:23.173
And we start thinking about things like the power of community.

918
01:09:23.653 --> 01:09:26.634
And we start thinking about things like the age of human connection.

919
01:09:26.674 --> 01:09:32.417
We start thinking about things like making people love where they live even more than they do.

920
01:09:32.837 --> 01:09:35.218
And those are really powerful building blocks.

921
01:09:35.518 --> 01:09:44.002
But you have to get back to them because when you've been around for 13 years and you're a public company and you're on that quarterly rhythm, the metrics start to take over.

922
01:09:45.125 --> 01:09:46.566
They exceed the mission.

923
01:09:47.026 --> 01:09:49.227
But when you're a founder, you don't have any metrics.

924
01:09:49.488 --> 01:09:50.428
It's all about mission.

925
01:09:50.848 --> 01:09:52.649
And so we needed to get back to the mission.

926
01:09:52.749 --> 01:09:56.591
And I needed to get back to my own personal mission as a CEO too.

927
01:09:56.651 --> 01:10:02.254
Because when I left, I think like many CEOs, I was beating people down to get things done.

928
01:10:02.975 --> 01:10:05.756
You know, I was persecuting people to get results.

929
01:10:06.136 --> 01:10:07.417
It's an easy way to do it.

930
01:10:07.757 --> 01:10:10.259
You intimidate, you threaten, right?

931
01:10:11.193 --> 01:10:18.198
When I came back, I said to myself, gosh, I know this is going to be very difficult, but I'd like to reinvent the way that I lead.

932
01:10:18.738 --> 01:10:19.999
I want to lift people up.

933
01:10:20.059 --> 01:10:21.180
I want to inspire them.

934
01:10:21.240 --> 01:10:24.923
I want them to feel empowered to do the best that they can do.

935
01:10:25.283 --> 01:10:28.065
And I knew that that was going to take a refounding myself.

936
01:10:28.125 --> 01:10:29.526
It was going to require more patience.

937
01:10:30.127 --> 01:10:31.448
It was going to require more clarity.

938
01:10:32.128 --> 01:10:34.970
It was going to require more poise, more calmness.

939
01:10:35.370 --> 01:10:39.012
Those aren't things that you typically associate with a founder, right?

940
01:10:39.032 --> 01:10:44.275
I mean, founders are impatient and we're stressed out and we're anxious and we're pulling our hair out, right?

941
01:10:44.315 --> 01:10:48.057
And so it was a tremendous challenge for me and a tremendous challenge for the company.

942
01:10:48.097 --> 01:10:51.258
And we're still in the middle of that, but I think we're making progress.

943
01:10:51.558 --> 01:11:00.163
When you think about your decision to come back and to participate in this refounding and this disrupting of Nextdoor, what?

944
01:11:00.580 --> 01:11:05.561
Have you thought about who the most influential person was in that decision?

945
01:11:05.581 --> 01:11:10.343
And when I say that, I mean, were you the most influential person convincing yourself?

946
01:11:10.463 --> 01:11:12.423
Was it somebody like a Bill Gurley?

947
01:11:12.463 --> 01:11:13.644
Was it somebody on the board?

948
01:11:13.684 --> 01:11:14.504
Was it your wife?

949
01:11:14.584 --> 01:11:15.924
Was it your kids?

950
01:11:15.944 --> 01:11:25.187
Like, who is the person, and it can still be you, who decided or influenced you to say, yes, I'm going to take this on again?

951
01:11:25.494 --> 01:11:26.434
You know, I'm really lucky.

952
01:11:26.474 --> 01:11:30.957
I have this old friend, Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn.

953
01:11:31.017 --> 01:11:32.777
And I met him in 1996.

954
01:11:32.837 --> 01:11:35.919
And so I knew him before he started LinkedIn.

955
01:11:36.199 --> 01:11:40.181
I knew him when he was Reid Hoffman alone, not Reid Hoffman, the billionaire founder of LinkedIn.

956
01:11:40.681 --> 01:11:43.883
And he has this really interesting experience.

957
01:11:44.583 --> 01:11:49.247
theory, which is founders tend to work on the same problem their entire careers.

958
01:11:49.307 --> 01:11:53.971
It may be through various different companies, various different efforts, investments, et cetera.

959
01:11:54.371 --> 01:11:58.254
The through line for me is not just professional that way.

960
01:11:58.294 --> 01:12:03.559
It's personal, which is I crave community, both in my professional life and my personal life.

961
01:12:03.599 --> 01:12:09.143
And what that means is a decision like coming back to next door, it could never just be me.

962
01:12:10.104 --> 01:12:11.884
Who's the reason behind that decision?

963
01:12:12.525 --> 01:12:13.805
It was a community.

964
01:12:14.025 --> 01:12:16.405
It was all of the people that you mentioned.

965
01:12:16.425 --> 01:12:17.686
It was my wife.

966
01:12:18.286 --> 01:12:19.286
It was my parents.

967
01:12:19.666 --> 01:12:20.706
It was my kids.

968
01:12:20.866 --> 01:12:24.107
You know, my kids are now 14, 12, and 10.

969
01:12:24.707 --> 01:12:28.168
When I left next door in 2018, I mean, you can do the math.

970
01:12:28.188 --> 01:12:29.408
That was eight years ago, right?

971
01:12:29.428 --> 01:12:30.268
They were much younger.

972
01:12:30.408 --> 01:12:33.089
I don't think they really knew what it was like.

973
01:12:33.885 --> 01:12:35.627
for their father to be the CEO of a company.

974
01:12:35.667 --> 01:12:37.909
Now they know, they understand the sacrifices.

975
01:12:37.929 --> 01:12:48.600
They don't always like them, but hopefully they're learning that when one is passionate about something, it does require sacrifice and it does require commitment and work ethic and all those things that we have to put in.

976
01:12:49.280 --> 01:12:55.807
Bill Gurley was a big part of it because if he felt given his ability to really understand sacrifice,

977
01:12:56.190 --> 01:13:00.294
value and how to unlock that value in a very radical way.

978
01:13:00.334 --> 01:13:11.085
If he felt that there was no opportunity in next door, it wouldn't make a lot of sense for me to leave investing in great companies that are on the bleeding edge and come back to a company that had no future.

979
01:13:11.425 --> 01:13:15.589
My co-founder, Sarah Leary, I was lucky that she came back to the company.

980
01:13:15.629 --> 01:13:17.911
She was pivotal in the decision.

981
01:13:18.252 --> 01:13:19.994
But look, at the end of the day,

982
01:13:21.215 --> 01:13:22.077
I love community.

983
01:13:22.998 --> 01:13:34.997
And the idea that I would have an opportunity with my own hands to be part of building a product, a tool, that has the potential to make community stronger, safer, and happier...

984
01:13:36.194 --> 01:13:39.795
That really is my purpose, certainly professionally.

985
01:13:39.915 --> 01:13:41.916
That is my happy place.

986
01:13:42.136 --> 01:13:46.957
That is what I want to do when I wake up in the morning, regardless of the sacrifice.

987
01:13:47.497 --> 01:13:49.498
And so it required all of those things.

988
01:13:49.738 --> 01:13:55.679
And even with all of that, there were a lot of scary moments and there still are.

989
01:13:55.899 --> 01:13:57.960
And that is the entrepreneurial journey.

990
01:13:58.550 --> 01:14:01.471
For people who are listening, who are, a lot of them are entrepreneurs.

991
01:14:01.491 --> 01:14:02.991
A lot of them are building their first company.

992
01:14:04.091 --> 01:14:14.174
Some may be serial, but I want you to just take the most important lesson that you've learned over your career, founding multiple companies, multiple successes, multiple failures along the way too.

993
01:14:14.634 --> 01:14:16.574
What's that one lesson that you want to leave everybody with?

994
01:14:16.774 --> 01:14:24.516
The most important thing that I have learned over and over again is the most important question is not what, it's who.

995
01:14:25.857 --> 01:14:28.539
And who could be, who am I starting this venture with?

996
01:14:29.019 --> 01:14:31.000
Who am I going to seek for investment funds?

997
01:14:31.260 --> 01:14:32.501
Who am I building this for?

998
01:14:32.541 --> 01:14:33.582
Who is my customer?

999
01:14:33.942 --> 01:14:37.524
But so many entrepreneurs start by asking what?

1000
01:14:37.744 --> 01:14:38.725
What should I build?

1001
01:14:38.765 --> 01:14:40.085
What's the competitive advantage?

1002
01:14:40.105 --> 01:14:41.546
What's my distribution strategy?

1003
01:14:41.987 --> 01:14:47.430
All of those things are important, but to me, way more important by an order of magnitude

1004
01:14:47.970 --> 01:14:48.830
is the question of who.

1005
01:14:49.110 --> 01:14:50.911
First of all, thank you for everything.

1006
01:14:51.291 --> 01:14:52.991
I just want to give people the opportunity to connect with you.

1007
01:14:53.011 --> 01:14:54.091
So where do you want to send people?

1008
01:14:54.111 --> 01:14:59.332
So we'll put everything in the show notes, all the links, everything, but social, where do you want them to go?

1009
01:14:59.632 --> 01:15:01.812
Easy to find me on X and LinkedIn.

1010
01:15:02.112 --> 01:15:05.773
And increasingly, I'm going to start on Instagram as well.

1011
01:15:05.813 --> 01:15:06.813
So any of those three.

1012
01:15:07.273 --> 01:15:14.634
If you could go back and you could tell your 20-year-old self one piece of advice, it doesn't have to be business advice, it could be life advice, whatever you want, the most important lesson.

1013
01:15:14.674 --> 01:15:16.615
You can only pass on one lesson.

1014
01:15:16.635 --> 01:15:17.555
What would it be and why?

1015
01:15:17.815 --> 01:15:25.022
The lesson would be to enjoy the journey because the only asset that we cannot make more of is time.

1016
01:15:25.783 --> 01:15:39.216
And so whether it's those times when I was up all night, just bellyaching because I couldn't solve a problem, or whether it was those brief moments when it felt like we'd finally scaled the mountain and we were at the top –

1017
01:15:39.877 --> 01:15:42.460
I wish I could just hold on to those moments forever.

1018
01:15:42.500 --> 01:15:50.488
And so enjoying the journey and taking advantage of the roses along the way, it's so important because it all goes too fast.