21:20
(upbeat music) [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Hi, I'm Professor Brian Lowry, and this is Leadership for Society: The Daring Dialogues course at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. And this quarter, we're tackling the challenges of leading in divisive times. And today we have Nirav Tolia, Stanford graduate, co-founder, and boomerang CEO of the social media company Nextdoor. Thanks for being here, Nirav. [NIRAV TOLIA] Brian, it's great to be here. And that is definitely the first time I've ever been introduced as a boomerang CEO. So I'm sure we'll get into that, but I like it.
[PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] So to start, can you describe Nextdoor for those who might not be familiar with the platform? [NIRAV TOLIA] Sure. Nextdoor is a social media platform. It's like a Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp or TikTok, but it's dedicated to making you better equipped to live the best version of your local life. So Nextdoor, as the name implies, is about you and your neighbors, your nextdoor neighbors. And so we like to think of ourselves as the essential network for you living your local life. And it started really as something that was inspired by seeing Facebook and Twitter, at the time it was called Twitter, and LinkedIn start to emerge.
The company was started in the summer of 2010, and the founders Looked at these other social media properties and thought, "Okay, these are great. Facebook is amazing for communicating with friends. LinkedIn is absolutely indispensable for building professional networks. And Twitter is great for following people with whom you may have shared interest or whom you may want to hear from. But how come there isn't a social media property for what we believe is one of the most important communities or sets of people of them all? And that's the people right outside your front door." And so that's Nextdoor.
Today we are operating in 11 countries, primarily the US where we have 350,000 active neighborhoods. I think that's about 99% of the neighborhoods in the United States, and one of three households. Uses Nextdoor today. It's a public company, and so it's been a great journey. Now, this summer it'll be 16 years, and I'm sure we'll get into that. [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] That's great, thank you. So how is it? You mentioned these other platforms. How is it different than, say, Instagram, in the way it functions other than, excuse me, the focus on local neighborhoods?
Like, if I go on it, how is it different in terms of my experience other than I know it's kind of confined by neighborhoods? [NIRAV TOLIA] So I would say that there are three differences, and you mentioned the first and most obvious, where Instagram is not really a geo-located type of experience. Nextdoor is about local. It's about your neighborhood. But the other two differences are Instagram, for many people, is about self-expression if you're posting, and it's about entertainment or being entertained if you're consuming.
Nextdoor is much more about utility. So I would say Nextdoor is more like LinkedIn than it is like Instagram because you visit Nextdoor not necessarily to be entertained or to entertain other people, but Rather to get things done. And that's what we mean by utility. And then the third and final difference, and I think this is probably the most important one on Instagram, we can spend our entire experience, whether it's a day on Instagram or our entire time that we've been members of Instagram, interacting with people that we've never met in the real world, people who are virtually related to us.
Whereas on Nextdoor- We're really all about the physical world. We're about the people that you have seen in all likelihood as you've driven around your neighborhood or walked around your neighborhood or gone outside your front door, but you've needed an easier and higher leverage way to communicate with them. So Nextdoor is not about the virtual world and being able to access people virtually that you might never see in your physical environment. It really is about making that phygital, that physical world more accessible Easier to use, almost an icebreaker to ensure that you are connecting with the people who live right outside your front doors.
[PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Mm-hmm. And what are the boundaries of neighborhoods? When you say neighborhoods, what constitutes a neighborhood exactly? [NIRAV TOLIA] It's a great question. And one of the things that we struggled with a lot in the early days, because the reality is everyone has a different definition of the actual neighborhood boundary that they live in. Some people may say it's two streets over. Someone else might say, "No, no, no," it ends at this street," right? And so how did we solve that ultimately?
We believed that rather than giving everyone the opportunity to define their own boundary, we did want to have specific boundaries. And so we first looked at the really obvious ones. If you think about New York City, where I am today, there is actually a finite definition, a well-known definition of Soho, for example, or of Tribeca. These are two well-known neighborhoods, right? And so first we took all of those well-known neighborhoods that had defined explicit boundaries, and we loaded them in the system. But that was probably, I'd guess, 10% of the 350,000 in the US that are using Nextdoor. For the other 90%, we relied on people who live in those neighborhoods to first come up with a draft of the neighborhood boundaries.
And then the first nine members of each of those neighborhoods could work together to fine-tune those boundaries. And then it was largely set. So the neighborhood boundaries are finite, and they fit together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. But Nextdoor has evolved so much that today you not only can communicate with your exact neighborhood because you're within the boundaries of that neighborhood, you can communicate with a set of neighborhoods outside that boundary as well. [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Mm-hmm. So, you know, when you think about neighborhoods, I can imagine kind of competing things going on.
One is that they could be really homogenous because people tend to move into proximity of people like them, right? So, if I'm someone who likes to hang out in bars and go to cafes, I'm gonna go to a neighborhood where people are hanging out in bars and going to cafes, and that stuff is around. And on the other hand, you can imagine things being homogenous. Really intensely polarized because the personal relevance of your day-to-day life is there. How do you balance that? The kind of making sure there's some diversity while mitigating the potential for conflict?
How do you deal with that on Nextdoor? [NIRAV TOLIA] Yeah, it's a great question. And I think in terms of the homogeneity or the heterogeneity of people in a neighborhood, I'd maybe think about two vectors. One vector is, typically speaking, suburban neighborhoods tend to be more homogenous than urban neighborhoods. Homogenous neighborhoods tend to be in places that have similar characteristics, whether it's proximity to running trails, or proximity to great public schools, or proximity to Something that feels a little bit more remote. People tend to choose those neighborhoods because they want that set of things that defines that suburban area. In an urban area, going back to our
New York City example, for example, right? In Tribeca, you have A bunch of people who care about living in Manhattan, and then you have some people who've chosen Tribeca because it is the furthest from all of the really active New York neighborhoods as well. So you may get that collision of people who want to be left alone, maybe with those people who really want to be out and about, right? So that's kind of one vector. The urban is where we see more diversity on a neighbor-by-neighbor basis, right? But the other vector is you also have the circle of life going on in all these neighborhoods. So in every single neighborhood, you have people who've been
there for 20 or 30 years and are getting older, and then you have people who've moved in, and then you have the people who've moved in or have been in the neighborhood that have children And so you have this constant set of, I would say, diversity of life stage, even if the neighborhood itself is one that feels very homogeneous. And for us, you ask the question: how do we deal with that? Well, you know, we described Nextdoor in the early days more as almost a voting precinct versus a country club. And what I mean by that is a country club.
Chooses its members and looks at some criteria and says, "Okay, you're a member and you're not a member, right?" But not everyone can join a country club. A voting precinct, as long as you live in the voting precinct, you can vote, assuming that you're of the right age, et cetera, right? And so with Nextdoor, it's not that we choose the people who can come in And then we restrict some people and they have to stay out. If one lives in the neighborhood, and one of the big tenets of Nextdoor is you have to verify your physical address, if you live in the neighborhood and you can verify your physical
address, you can join Nextdoor and be part of that community. and it has nothing to do with whether you are the same as the other people in your neighborhood or different. So that kind of brings us to, I think, the real question you were asking, which is, what do you do when people disagree, right? Which happens all the time. Whether they feel like they're similar or whether they're different, they do disagree, right? So the biggest thing that we've tried to do is by focusing Nextdoor on utility. Versus self-expression. There's not a lot of disagreements about the best plumber or a great place to get tacos on Friday night, right?
[PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Well, how about tacos? There could be a lot of disagreement about [NIRAV TOLIA] the best tacos. Friendly disagreement and good disagreement, and we like that. You know, we call that dialogue, right? And we call that people expressing the love that they have for something. But when it comes to self-expression, I mean, let's take something that we see today. We're in the middle of a war right now. Right? And people have different attitudes about whether we should be in the war, whether we shouldn't be in the war, right? And those people may live right next door to each other.
And if they use Nextdoor as a forum to have those discussions, it can get, at times, very discursive. And so the constant challenge for Nextdoor is, yes, our true north is everyone in the neighborhood should be able to get on this platform and work together to make the neighborhood great for Everyone included. So Nextdoor is about community. It's not, it's not a system like Instagram that you can interact with just as an individual. On Instagram, I can go to Instagram, I can choose who I wanna follow, and I can curate that in a way that it's my individual experience, and
nothing else gets put in that. I don't really consider it, in that way, a community platform. It's one to many. One is me as the user, and then many are the people that I choose to follow. Community platforms tend to be many to many. There are lots of people talking to lots of people, and they're all actually in the same conversations. And so on Nextdoor, if there's a conversation about the best tacos, that's not relegated to the person who posted and the people that he or she chooses to listen to that post. That's everyone in the neighborhood who can chime in, right? And so there is this constant question of, okay, when you have this conversation that's going on with everyone
in the neighborhood, how do you ensure that conversation brings people together? Versus forces them apart. And I think that's in large part why we're having this conversation and one of the biggest challenges for Nextdoor. Because it's not that Nextdoor is a place where people disagree. In the real world, people disagree. And Nextdoor is simply a mirror or a technology tool where people can take those agreements or disagreements and amplify them in some cases. And so I think the real challenge for us is what are we gonna do about it? Right. [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] And that sounds really interesting.
[NIRAV TOLIA] How are we going to try to amplify? The conversations that bring people together and maybe turn down the volume on the conversations that we feel are pulling people apart. [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Yeah, I mean, I'm happy you pointed out that there's like an increasing polarization or at least certainly the sense of that in this country. And at the neighborhood level, I think that creates different challenges, and this is, I think, what you're talking about. It's not the same as Instagram for a variety of reasons that you've articulated. But I wonder about a situation, for example, when neighborhoods are changing
Right. So we were talking about neighborhoods in this way that it's not completely static, but there's a certain type of neighborhood. It has a certain character. The neighborhoods shift and change. So that's an interesting situation for a platform like yours. Like, how do you deal with what happens as neighborhoods start to shift and change? And you do have the possibility of Different, let's, for lack of a better term, factions within that neighborhood?
How does Nextdoor manage that? [NIRAV TOLIA] Yeah, and that's not even a hypothetical. I mean, in reality, most incumbents don't want things to change, and most new entrants to a situation are coming to that new situation because they wanna drive change. And so the simplest advantage is, you know, you hear this term NIMBY, not in my backyard, right? There's this very, very common term. And the idea behind it is I live here And I don't want anything to change. And then someone new comes in and says, "Hey, it turns out that area that people use to walk their dogs would be an amazing place for a shopping center." What do you think?
We need more shopping centers around here. And then you get opposing views, and you get factions. And I think we start by saying we do believe in a democratic society that having the space for people to express themselves and even disagree is incredibly important for a well-functioning democracy. And one of the problems with the increasingly divided world that we live in is, in many ways, There is no upside in disagreeing with people because you think to yourself, "Well, they're not going to change their mind, and if I'm seen as someone who's counter to the way that they feel about something, I'm going to be attacked or I'm going to be canceled." And I read this essay once about how online people are lot meaner.
Than they might be in person. And so if you are expressing yourself online and someone disagrees, some really nasty things can happen because behind the keyboard or behind the anonymity of not sharing your real name, you might actually be a lot nastier. And as a result, people were increasingly retreating from expressing themselves online. And the essay was called The Cost of Silence, and it was this very provocative thesis around how many conversations have we completely lost? Because the cost of having that conversation and potentially disagreeing with someone is so high that people decide ultimately they're not gonna have the conversation at all. And in fact, they retreat to an echo chamber where they are
just speaking with people that believe the same thing they do, which gets them even more convinced that they're completely right. When in fact, we all know that the way that we learn and grow is we expose ourselves to differing points of view that make us think about our own assumptions and that expand our sense of what. Might we want to believe? And so to come back to the question, it's not that we don't want people to have these conversations where they disagree on Nextdoor, particularly around the civic issues that are happening every single day in communities.
Now, when we talk about something like the war in Iran, I'm not sure that's a local issue. So we would argue on Nextdoor, first of all, that's not relevant. For you and your neighbors to talk about. Whereas if there happened to be some discussion about whether the height limit on buildings should be amended, either you can build things that are higher or you can no longer build things of a certain height, that's actually a local issue, a civic issue that you could see a lot of people disagreeing about, right? We want those discussions to be on Nextdoor because increasingly they're not being had at all, and so we're just driving even
more of a wedge into the disassociation that people have. We do start by saying, though, you can disagree without being disagreeable. [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Mm-hmm. [NIRAV TOLIA] Right? So the first thing is there's a code of conduct. There's a way. It's not about what, it's about how. And one of the things that I'm really excited about on the AI front, for a long time, we've had this technology feature on Nextdoor called the Kindness Reminder, and if you're posting on Nextdoor and you write something that's maybe a little bit antagonistic or is a little heated because you're emotional.
Before it gets posted, we run it through a filter, and we can flag it as something that's probably going to be inflammatory, either because it's name-calling or because in some way the tone is too aggressive or antagonistic. At that point, we return the post to you before it actually goes online, and we say, "Hey, you may want to revise this. You may actually want to think twice about expressing yourself in this way because your point may not come across as effectively." That was something that was done with machine learning that largely predated this new AI revolution that everyone's talking about, but with AI, we can do this so much better. And so I'm very excited about, we call this broadly speaking, moderation.
I'm very excited about AI-assisted moderation, because we do want to be our best selves, whether it's offline or online. And yet sometimes we get emotional, and in the real world that manifests, and in the online world it manifests at all. And so if we can disagree without being disagreeable, I think that's kinda the first step. The second step is in a neighborhood, if you are broadcasting your view on something, you don't necessarily want to broadcast it to everyone in the neighborhood, but you do want to broadcast it to the people who care about that issue. So the next thing we try to do on Nextdoor is we say, \"Look, if you're going to have a conversation about something that's potentially controversial or something
where there are going to be two or more sides that might actually start to emerge as a result of the conversation, maybe create a private group.\" And that group can be opt-in, so everyone who chooses to be part of that conversation can actually choose to be part of the conversation. And everyone else can say, "Look, I'm not really part of this because I don't care whether we put a shopping center there or whether it remains as a place to walk dogs," right? And so these are some of the things that we do, but in reality, it feels like the world in general is getting more isolated, more people who are not wanting to express themselves. And the people who do, in some ways, they're actually less concerned about how they come across.
And I think those are all things that we want to work on. [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Yeah, and I wanted to pick up on that last point you made, so that people that are expressing themselves maybe are less concerned about how they come across. So you said that there are people retreating from conversations. I'd argue that certain people are retreating from conversations, and then there are people who are happy to step into the breach with more and more Intense point of views, right? And you could argue that- [NIRAV TOLIA] Well, if you think about kind of three sets of people, there are the people who are the rabble-rousers, right? And they're gonna poke people because they want reactions, right?
There are the people who truly want the debate, but are seeking some intellectual honesty and want to have the debate versus they wanna argue with people, but they wanna argue about the issue, right? And then there's third set of people, and they don't know yet, so they're gonna stand on the sidelines and they're gonna observe, right? If all of a sudden the people in the middle who are okay having the debate but wanna have it in an intelligent way in a reasonable way, if they start to be quiet Even if that first group, the rabble-rousers, even if they're at the same volume, the effect is that the volume of the rabble-rousers goes up because the volume of the intelligent people who want to have great
conversations but understand there may be disagreements, that's actually gone to zero. So then what does that do to the third group? The third group that was now watching Right? Before, if you were watching, you see an intelligent conversation, you might think, "Oh, you know, that's a really good point. I wanna join in." But if you're watching from the sideline and it looks like a fight, most of the time you're gonna say, "This is a waste of my time.
I got enough stuff to worry about. I'm just gonna leave." Mm-hmm. And so not only does it affect that middle group that's so critical because they're the ones that are actually Really encouraging us to have intellectually honest conversations, not only do they go away, but the group of people who were just watching and trying to decide whether they would engage or not, they tend to go away as well. The only people that are left are the rabble-rousers, and that's not good. [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Yeah, my fear is a little different.
My fear is that I take those three groups, and here's my fear: that the people who are the rabble-rousers are loud and become louder. The people who are in the middle maybe try intermittently to engage but find it's unproductive and eventually stop. And the people who aren't involved just watch. And so here's my concern. My concern, and I think this is, you can see some of this in other social platforms, social media platforms, and I'm curious about yours, is if you are based on attention, if your business model depends on attention,
it's not only okay for it to be dominated by rabble-rousers, it's possible that it's even beneficial because there's evidence to suggest that people are Drawn to intense, outrage-driven content. Like they might not want to contribute to it, most people, but they are more than happy and actually are drawn to watching it. And so how do you deal with something like that on your platform where it's possible that if all you want is attention, the way to get attention is to allow people to have, make incredibly, um. Intense, extreme flames, yeah, extreme statements to, like, have conversations about the most controversial things because those are
the things that people will pay attention to. Like, that seems like a way to get more people to not participate, but to engage. So I wonder how you deal with that. [NIRAV TOLIA] Yeah, look, there are three points, and they're each distinct, and I think they're all important to consider. The first is in any system where advertising is the primary way that you're making money. It is absolutely the case that attention, now attention is typically referred to as engagement.
Engagement is the thing that you are trying to encourage, and you're absolutely right. I mean, if we're driving down the street and everything's completely fine, we're not looking out or paying attention that closely. If we're driving down the street and there's a car accident, you know the expression, everyone's rubbernecking, looking at the accident, wondering what's happening, right? I mean, the other thing is, if you think about historically the role of news, there's this expression, if it bleeds, it leads, right?
We do have this almost primal urge To engage when the volume's the loudest, when the stakes are the highest, when the intensity and the emotion is the most extreme, right? And that really is hurt by the fact that you can monetize that attention through this advertising and through increased engagement. So that's kind of point number one. Point number two, though, is, and we've seen this at Nextdoor, it's actually one of the reasons why I had to boomerang, right? To bring that expression back, right? In the near term, what may boost engagement at times can actually result in the erosion of long-term attention and engagement. And so you may actually create a marketplace or create a kind
of forum where there's a lot of argumentation, or there's a lot of discursive conversation and people are drawn to that because, again, we have that primal urge to move towards that because it's controversial. And is there something there that's interesting? But almost certainly, We don't feel great if we experience that over and over again. And ultimately, we have a stronger primal urge to seek things that lift us up, that make us feel better, that don't make us feel worse. And as a result, you go the first time and you're like, "Wow, that was quite a fight. I'm gonna go the next time too, 'cause that was kinda interesting," right? But by the third or fourth time, you think to yourself, "Okay, that's very predictable."
That's just people who are yelling at each other. There's nothing that I can take out of that except for the entertainment value of watching people fight, which is something that is not going to be entertaining the second, third, or fourth time. And at that point, if the platform is solely focused on that, people stop coming. It's actually what happened at Nextdoor. Nextdoor, because it is an ad-driven model, and because engagement, particularly as we went public, as a public company and the demands of growing the audience and showing increased engagement, if you give a bunch of smart product managers a goal
They will figure out how to achieve that goal. And if the goal is to increase engagement, they're probably gonna do things that create more controversy because people are more interested in controversy than a lack of controversy, right? And so that happened to Nextdoor, but ultimately, below the surface, and while an engagement metric like weekly active users or the number of stories one views in a newsfeed, while those may be going up. You look at equally important, if not more important metrics like NPS, customer satisfaction going down. And so what we saw at Nextdoor is those engagement metrics were going up and as a result, revenue was going up as well.
But NPS was going down and consistently going down until at some point, the only people left on Nextdoor. Were the people who really wanted to observe a lot of those controversial expressions. And there isn't an unlimited audience of those people, and so you stop growing. And when you stop growing, then you can't actually, you can't squeeze any more blood out of the stone. You've actually hit the wall in terms of engagement, and that happened to us. And so, I think there are a couple of ways you can get around it.
You can build a business model that is around utility or delivering explicit value, right? You can say to yourself, well, we're gonna build a service where The value is so high, even if it's advertising-centric, that the way we're going to get engagement up is multiple visits versus the same visit and all eyes focused on that discussion. Because typically, when you have this discussion where people are arguing, that's one discussion and people are sticking around. That's like a five-hour movie, right? But what if instead you said, "You know what?" We don't want any five-hour movies.
We just want a series of five-minute shorts where you're getting value and then you're leaving, but you got so much value that you came back. Now that, in an internet sense, is Google. Google doesn't care about you do a search, you get results, you leave. In fact, they want you to get the information that you need as quickly as possible because they know that if you get that information over and over again, you're gonna come back. And so Google never looked at this metric of time spent, which was the overall most important metric for advertising-driven websites in the early days.
It was: How much time are people spending on the platform? Google instead looked at number of searches. Now, if you add up all those searches, there's a lot of time spent. So the end result ends up being the same thing, but they got there a different way. That brings me to kind of the third point, which is the things we're talking about, creating environments where disagreements can be had, but not in a disagreeable way, where the silent majority, in most cases, feels like they do want to. Start to participate. That's not true just of social media communities. That's true of all communities. In fact, I could make the same claim about running a company. In a company, when you ask for feedback, you have the small set of employees that always
Come back to you, either with praise or with criticism, right? Then you have the middle section, which is kind of always changing, where a particular issue is really important to a particular person, and so they decide to chime in. And then you have the majority of people who, they're just kind of quiet. Now, the same thing happens in a company as happens in the social media atmosphere, which is if in the company the majority of people feel like, oh, they're the same employees who are always complaining or they're always praising what's going on, I'm just going to opt out. And then the conversation stops being had, and the most important thing is the conversation.
I was reading recently about Anthropic. This hot AI company and how they have tried to create an environment internally of disagreement. Now, you might think, "Oh my gosh, that's a terrible idea. You-- who would want to work at a place where the environment is one of disagreement?" Well, actually, what they're doing, which I think is quite smart, is they're creating an environment where it's okay to disagree. And people think of that as, "Hey, this is my company."
I care deeply. If something is expressed on strategy or the way that we've done things that I disagree with, I wanna feel like I won't get punished for being part of the conversation. And if I'm part of the conversation and the points are made in an intelligent way that makes sense, maybe the company will even change. And I think that creates a very strong culture if done correctly. And so the takeaway is not, it would be too easy to say, "Well, let's just create a bunch of environments where people never disagree." I think that's unrealistic. Right? And again, going back to what I said at the very beginning, we learn the most when we hear things that are not obvious to
us, 'cause if they're already obvious to us, then we have nothing else to learn, right? But we need to create those environments with the kind of atmosphere and the kind of vibe that makes people feel safe. I know that's a very loaded word, but that makes people feel safe, makes people feel like they can contribute, and makes them want to be part of the conversation [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Mm-hmm. I like the way you're talking now. There's a personal component as you as a CEO and responsibility for an organization you run, and it makes me think about how platforms are treated. So often you hear people talk about platforms like, "Look, we support,
we create the platform," but we're not responsible for what goes on that platform." So I'm curious, as a CEO of a platform, how much responsibility do you think you bear for the consequences of the platform? Not just. So there's the shaping of the platform, right? And that affects-and this is, I think, what you're pointing to- what people use it for or how they use it. So there's some, you know, you are designing a platform, and in that design you're affecting how people behave a bit. So I wonder how you feel about your responsibility for the consequences of the platform. Is that something that you think about as you, as you manage your company?
[NIRAV TOLIA] Well, you know, to me the key point is not that one, because whether it's an economic responsibility or an emotional responsibility. The creator of the system should always bear. We get the credit if things work, so we need to take responsibility if things don't work as well. Again, whether that's something that shows up in the business model or something that shows up in regards to your ability to sleep well at night, I think you can't just choose the good and not the bad.
You have to choose everything. I think the more important question is really, and you brought it up a little bit, which is when architecting these systems How do we take a step back and say, "Look, what are some unintended consequences?" Because I don't believe that the creators of these systems woke up one day and said, "I'm going to create a system that's really good at driving disagreement, or that's really good at making people feel small," or, "I'm going to create a system where people argue like crazy all the time." Right? I think people wake up and say, "Oh, I want to create a place where people can express themselves on this subject."
Right? And then they say, "And I'm not going to make anyone use their real name because I want to reduce friction." But then they realize, "Oh, wait a second. If I'm not forced to use my real name, maybe I will be a little bit more discursive than I would typically be because there's no cost to me of being a bad actor." And so it's really about establishing the mechanics of the system in a way where you start to ask the hard questions, which is, the hard question is not what could go right, which is what every entrepreneur is thinking about all the time, right? Because, you know, you start a company and there's nothing there. And so you have to be thinking to yourself, "Okay, if I do this, will it work?
If I do this, will it work?" And that's the mode you're in, right? Then all of a sudden, improbably, the thing you're working on actually is gaining some traction. You never ask the question, "Wait a second, what could go wrong?" Right? But by teaching ourselves to start asking that question at an early stage, we can start to debug before we put something into motion, right? The things that could lead us into directions that, while not intentional, will be harmful and will be things that we have to take responsibility for.
[PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Yeah. And I guess the way I was thinking about the question is, I don't know, maybe perhaps a tiny bit more cynical. So sometimes when I deal with students in the past, I'd say, "Okay, let's imagine you won." And by that I mean, and what they mean is financially, like it's big success, you won. Is the world a better place? And I guess that's kind of what I'm asking. Do you have responsibility for that, or is it solely to win financially, to win as a for-profit organization? And let's assume Nextdoor is winning, but you look and you aren't sure if it is making the world a better place.
You're saying there's responsibility for both those things, for the financial and for the kind of social, emotional, whatever other consequences. [NIRAV TOLIA] The human. Yeah, the human. Yeah. The human. Look, I would have a very hard time personally working for a company that creates anything that results in an addictive substance. As an example, right? That, that wouldn't feel right to me. It's such a personal question, right? Do shareholders care? I mean, again, they only care if ultimately the ethics that are used will make the stock go down, right?
I mean, and we've seen that over and over again. But as company builders, as founders, as entrepreneurs, as leaders, There's no way to distinguish between the economic success and the human success in my mind, right? Because you have to wake up every day and go to work, and you're doing things because hopefully you believe in what you're working on. And so we've said at Nextdoor, we're very fortunate, and it wasn't some genius idea that we came up with, but we're very fortunate that research has proven That's where community is strong, there are lots of other societal benefits. That's not a Nextdoor point of view.
I mean, that's been studied by sociologists over and over again. The story of Nextdoor is one where we were inspired by a book called Bowling Alone, which was written by the former chair of the Harvard Sociology Department. And the core thesis of Bowling Alone is the popularity of the sport bowling has not gone down over time, but we are now bowling alone instead of bowling in leagues. And so the sub- The subtitle of the book is The Decline of Community in America, and what are the consequences of that decline? And so our business model is based on there being strong and healthy neighborhoods, and strong and healthy neighborhoods require active, vibrant communities.
And so if we can build active, vibrant communities or be part of helping people build active, vibrant communities where they live, we'll actually make more money, and we'll be a successful business. But we're very fortunate because, in the process of doing that, we do believe that those healthy, vibrant communities will also create good for the world. I will say that in some ways this feels a little bit generational, which is when I was at Stanford in the early '90s. The idea of working in technology as the dot-com boom started in the mid-'90s and then continued through the late '90s was this idea of
I'm not gonna make a lot of money. I mean, maybe I will, but no one had done it yet, so that wasn't the big prize. There was a prize, though, around having impact. And around making people feel more efficient, more effective, and more excited about things. And so there was this notion of, I want to change the world. And my metric for success is not going to have a dollar sign attached to it. It's going to have a number of people attached to it. How many people have I lifted up? I mean, what else can you work on where if you're successful A million, 10 million, 100 million, a billion people can feel like they're lifted up.
That's the scale of technology companies. Unfortunately, as time went on and the corresponding result of impacting people was huge dollar signs, you saw a lot of people start to say, "Okay, wait a second. I became a banker not because I wanted to do well for the world, but because it paid the bills and allowed me to live a life that I wanted to live. It turns out now I can work the same amount of time, make more money in technology. Okay, I'm gonna go over to technology, right?" And then all of a sudden you had people come in who, the famous venture capitalist John Doerr had a slide
that he would put up: missionaries versus mercenaries. Right? So the missionary says, "I'm starting this because it's a problem that I believe the world needs to solve." The mercenary may say, "I'm working on this because I believe if we solve this problem, we're gonna get paid really well." Now to me, that is a little bit of a false dichotomy. I don't wanna say to myself, 'Hey, how much revenue we generate and whether we're profitable or not and the return that we deliver to shareholders, that doesn't matter as
long as we do great things for the world.' I don't think that's reasonable. I don't think that's the way capitalism works, and I'm a big believer in the value of capitalism, not just for people's bank accounts, but for the world as well. At the same time, I don't subscribe to the 'doesn't really matter what-' Intended or unintended consequences this has, as long as the P&L looks good, right? I think the key here is we gotta harmonize the two things, and we have to hopefully gravitate towards ideas where harmonizing those two things is not an inherent conflict.
It's actually very natural. It's authentic to what you're trying to do. So if you're a doctor You actually do well if people live, not if they die. It's just, and that's not something that you have to think about as a doctor. That's just the way it's set up from the beginning. If you're a teacher, you do better if your students actually learn the material. That's just the way the whole thing's set up. And so what I would tell entrepreneurs and founders is, Yeah, you're absolutely responsible for both the pros and cons of whatever you create, and so be mindful about what you're choosing to work on, and be mindful about the
potential unintended consequences of success. You know, because having a think about those things, what idea am I gonna work on? Once you decide that, okay, what are all the ways this can go right, and what are some of the ways this can go wrong? It's so accessible to you in the early days, whereas once you get started, boy, you're in the inertia of the system. And at that point, it's very difficult to go back and break whatever you've created because you don't think it's creating the right kind of output.
[PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Mm-hmm. Well, I really appreciate all the time and the engagement you're having with trying to make communities stronger and society better. So I really appreciate the work, and I wish you well on that. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. [NIRAV TOLIA] Well, I so appreciate having the opportunity, and I love the work you're doing. And, you know, the leaders of tomorrow are going to be the students that you're showing this to. And so I hope they are inspired by the challenge of creating things that are not only amazing business enterprises, as measured by whatever financial metric you want to choose, but also are amazing human enterprises, which can be measured by, say, a brand,
and does a smile come to someone's face? Does it make their life Better. Because that really is, to me, the incredible privilege of working in technology. You don't have to choose. You can create hugely successful businesses that are good for the world. [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Yeah. Well, thank you for that, Nirav. Thanks so much for your time. [NIRAV TOLIA] Thank you. ♪ (upbeat music) ♪ (silent)
