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Nirav Tolia shared thisI sat down with Brett House and Rio Longacre on Signal & Noise to talk about why trust matters more, not less, as AI gets better at summarizing the internet for us, and why verified identity is going to matter even more as bots start outnumbering real people online. We also got into what it's been like stepping back in as CEO two years ago and bringing a Founder’s Mentality to this next phase of Nextdoor. Watch the full episode: https://lnkd.in/gVNwz_DP
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Nirav Tolia shared thisI had a conversation with Scott D. Clary on why AI can make us lonelier if we're not careful, and why we built Nextdoor on trust instead of speed. We also got into leaving the company I founded and what it took to come back. Full episode here: https://lnkd.in/gPq2yqqW
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Nirav Tolia shared thisYesterday I joined Erica Wenger on her wonderful podcast, Trailblazers. We had a great conversation about the founder journey: finding a mentor for coaching and a personal board of directors for support, facing fear instead of hiding it, and using failure as the ultimate teacher. We also discussed my return to Nextdoor: what it means to be a “boomerang” CEO, refounding a company I already built once, and why that's a different kind of hard than starting from zero, especially in this age of AI. Thank you, Erica, for having me on the show. Episode drops soon — stay tuned.
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Nirav Tolia shared thisHosted a breakfast Q&A with Anthony Di Muccio (Mooch), our Head of Sales, in our NYC office this morning. We talked about where Nextdoor goes from here after last week's earnings, the momentum building in NYC, and something I believe matters more than any metric: how fired up you are to walk into work every day. I want every Nextdoor employee to wake up genuinely excited to start their day. Because durable success isn't a strategy doc — it's the relationships you build and the hard problems you choose to tackle with the people beside you. Grateful for mornings like this one.
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Nirav Tolia shared thisThis morning I joined Luke Knight and Ronan Chambers from etn. to talk about Nextdoor's Q2 results — and I'll say what I said on air: it was the strongest financial performance in our company's history. None of that happened by chasing volume. It happened because we stayed disciplined about what makes Nextdoor different — a verified, trusted network of real neighbors. This is what it looks like when trust and momentum compound together. And we're just getting started. Check out the full episode: https://lnkd.in/gp_b_Dk6Anthropic IPO, NVIDIA $300B, AI Watermarks, $TEAM & $NXDR CEO’s JoinAnthropic IPO, NVIDIA $300B, AI Watermarks, $TEAM & $NXDR CEO’s Join
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Nirav Tolia shared thisIn my conversation with the New Economies podcast, I talked about a call we made at Nextdoor 15 years ago: requiring real names and verifying physical address. Trust was always going to be the foundation for Nextdoor's community, even when it slowed us down. We asked people to verify who they were, to stand behind what they said, and that friction was real when everyone else was optimizing for speed. We had no idea how much authenticity would end up mattering, especially in the AI-dominated world we find ourselves in today. We got the reasoning right early. The timing 15 years later has turned out to be luck. Full episode link: https://lnkd.in/g2HhVikQ
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Nirav Tolia shared thisQ2 was a landmark quarter for Nextdoor, with record Platform WAU and the strongest financial performance in our company's history. Platform WAU reached 22.9 million. Revenue grew 15% to $75 million, beating our guidance range. And adjusted EBITDA hit $10 million, up $12 million year-over-year. When I came back to Nextdoor, we said we'd win by improving the product in small ways and letting it compound. This is what that looks like when it's working: contributors hit a multi-year high, and self-serve revenue grew 32% year-over-year, all without increasing ad load. Better product, not more ads. This quarter gave us confidence to raise our full-year outlook accordingly. As AI changes how people find information, what matters more is trusted information: created by real people, in real places. More than 110 million verified neighbors give us that. Full investor update: investors.nextdoor.com $NXDR https://lnkd.in/gJ8ynpqV
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Nirav Tolia shared thisToday I had the privilege of spending time with our summer interns in Nextdoor's Dallas office - including Juanca Umana, Anthony Tang, Nick Lin, Avi Gobrin, Yuxin Gao, Adwoa Owusuaa Owusu, Sofia Martinez, Huaijin Sun, Leo Zheng, Bekah Hufnagel, Reet Oberoi, Avni Mohan, Cooper Winburn and Aamna Aamir. Coincidentally I was also told today is National Intern Day. I love spending time with people who are just starting their careers. It's honestly one of the most fun parts of my job, hearing their enthusiasm and optimism for what the future can hold. It reminds me of my early days at Yahoo, and how hungry I was to learn from the people around me. Here's something I told them that I believe more each year: pick the 'who' before the 'what.' Our time is not infinite, but ideas are. What you're working on matters less than who you're working with. As you're starting your career, be strategic about building your network and surrounding yourself with people you can learn from, who support you and lift you up. Building those lasting bonds and loyalty early is what has served me most in my career. That kind of advice feels almost old-fashioned. But community gets harder to find as you get older. You end up boxed into smaller and smaller versions of your own life. An internship does the opposite. It puts people from completely different places in the same room for one shared summer. My entire career, I've been obsessed with community, whether that's local, professional, family, or friends. That obsession with local community is what led us to start Nextdoor. Internships are where you start building your professional community, and they're just as important to jump-start your career. Whatever community you're building, whether at work or at home, foster it. It's what leads to more opportunities. Thanks again to all our interns across our office hubs in Dallas, SF, and NYC for a great summer.
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Nirav Tolia shared thisEarly in my career, Bill Campbell asked me what my title was. I said CEO. He told me I was wrong. My title was coach, because my responsibility was to make everyone around me better. His line was "your title makes you a manager, your people make you a leader." A title can say anything you want it to say. Whether people follow you and listen to you is what leadership actually is. Bill believed that if you saw yourself as the CEO first, you'd become arrogant and untouchable, someone no one could relate to. See yourself as a coach and the job changes. You start lifting people up. Twenty years later, I still answer to that title. From my full conversation with David Begnaud: https://lnkd.in/d-bJ9CzC
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Nirav Tolia reacted on thisNirav Tolia reacted on thisWhen your VC gifts you this hat, you’ve made it. Thanks Elaia & Pauline Roux ❤️
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Nirav Tolia liked thisNirav Tolia liked thisColleagues who become dear friends are a gift you don’t expect when you start a new job. My relationships with Steve Sordello, Jeff Weiner and Ryan Roslansky are some of the most treasured ones of my 32-year career. We were in the trenches together for a decade while building LinkedIn and experienced so many highs, a couple of lows, limitless growth, and a ton of fun. I am so grateful for all that I learned from all three of them and even more grateful we can meet for dinner all these years later - and pick up right where we left off. Work can be all-consuming and difficult at times, but it’s so much easier and a lot more fun when you get to do it with people you’d choose as friends.
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Nirav Tolia liked thisNirav Tolia liked thisThe fastest company to ship production AI chips from scratch. Kleiner Perkins is thrilled to back Gavin Uberti, Robert W., Chris Zhu and the entire Etched team. We couldn't be more excited! Low voltage inference FTW!
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Nirav Tolia liked thisNirav Tolia liked thisAfter nearly seven years, I’m leaving Nextdoor. People have asked why I stayed at one company for so long. Two reasons: 1. Local is the hardest problem on the internet. The graveyard is full of great ideas and teams that tried to crack it — including my own. Hoodline, the company I co-founded, got far enough for Nextdoor to acquire it in 2019, and not much further. Nextdoor is one of the few still standing because the underlying need is so fundamental: people want to know their neighbors and understand what’s happening around them. 2. I got to reinvent my career about five times without leaving the building. I sold ads. I worked on M&A. I briefly became a PM and helped build our first camera and video player. I built our developer platform and partnerships with Microsoft Start, The Weather Channel, GoFundMe, Samsung, WordPress and others. And most recently, I helped lead our push into local news and alerts. Today, more than 4,000 publishers are on the platform, and now a third of neighbors regularly get news on Nextdoor. So why leave now? I’m quitting while I’m ahead. Q2 was the strongest quarter in Nextdoor’s history: $75M in revenue, up 15%, and 22.9M weekly active users, an all-time high. More importantly, the partnerships and product teams are full of new ideas, energy, and people who are more than ready to take it from here. Richard Slatter, Isaac Teich, Savannah Allan, Mark Jaskolski, Glen Tona and the team Nick Lisher built already run much of this work — and, inconveniently for my ego, they’re better at it than I ever was. I’m incredibly grateful to them, to Nirav Tolia, and to the many people at Nextdoor who took bets on me over the years. Seven years is a lifetime in tech. I’m glad I spent mine here. More on what’s next soon 😜
Experience & Education
Patents
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Generating and Displaying Recommendation Counters based on Dialogue through a Social Network and Constrained by Geographic Regions of the Recommenders
Issued EU 16171795.4-1958
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