Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Nirav Tolia - Nextdoor Co-Founder & CEO | The Man Who Connected 100 Million Neighbors Says AI Is About to Make Us All Lonelier

Transcript

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

• 0:00
  You said the age of information gave us the internet, the age of intelligence gave us AI.
• 0:05
  So what does that actually look like?
• 0:07
  We need to pair the age of intelligence with human connection.
• 0:11
  As the machines get more powerful, we cannot lose our humanness.
• 0:15
  That's connection with each other.
• 0:17
  How do we successfully use AI in our day-to-day?
• 0:20
  We don't keep losing our sense of humanness and our human connection.
• 0:23
  We cannot use AI as a substitute.
• 0:26
  We can only use AI as a tool.
• 0:28
  Today's guest is Nirav Tolia, CEO and co-founder of Nextdoor, a longtime technology entrepreneur and investor.
• 0:35
  He has spent decades building companies around online communities and human connection.
• 0:39
  In this conversation, he explores how AI can help us connect without replacing the human relationships that matter most.
• 0:45
  Use technology as a tool, but understand that it's no substitute for ultimately meeting people in the real world.
• 0:52
  Do you believe that we have a true loneliness epidemic?
• 0:56
  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.
• 1:09
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• 1:11
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• 1:17
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• 1:20
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• 1:22
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• 1:25
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• 1:28
  Not whether I was eating well, but whether I actually knew what the big picture looked like.
• 1:33
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• 1:34
  I wanted to see what I was actually eating, not what I assumed I was eating, but the real numbers, what my protein intake looked like, what my macronutrient breakdown was, where my calories were actually going throughout the day.
• 1:45
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• 1:47
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• 1:50
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• 1:53
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• 1:55
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• 1:56
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• 1:58
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• 2:03
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• 2:04
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• 2:06
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• 2:09
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• 2:12
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• 2:21
  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.
• 2:33
  So what does that actually look like?
• 2:35
  Well, we live in an amazing time with incredible transformations in this lifetime.
• 2:40
  And I feel so fortunate to have been around at the beginning of the dot-com boom, which I consider the age of information.
• 2:47
  We suddenly had access to information in a way that we've never had before.
• 2:52
  Now we're in the middle of something which I believe is even bigger and even more transformational for society and even better.
• 2:58
  I'm an unabashed lover of AI.
• 3:01
  And AI is bringing us the age of intelligence.
• 3:04
  We're moving from just access to information to intelligence with that information.
• 3:09
  So the question is, what's going to happen next?
• 3:12
  And the truth is, I don't know.
• 3:13
  But what I do know is we need to pair the age of intelligence with...
• 3:18
  with human connection.
• 3:19
  Because as we get closer to machines and as the machines get more powerful, we cannot lose our humanness.
• 3:28
  We cannot lose what makes us unique as a species, and that's connection with each other.
• 3:34
  So I'm not sure that human connection comes next.
• 3:36
  I don't really know what comes next.
• 3:38
  But what I do know is in this age of intelligence, which I think will be unprecedented for the world...
• 3:44
  We need to pair it with human connection.
• 3:47
  It can't just be our reliance on AI.
• 3:51
  It needs to be our reliance on AI paired with our continued reliance on each other.
• 3:57
  And that's what I mean by the age of human connection.
• 4:00
  I also think that the more we depend on AI, the more human connection becomes an exceptionally valuable commodity.
• 4:11
  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.
• 4:26
  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.
• 4:37
  And then I don't think social media helped that much.
• 4:41
  I think that it isolated us even more.
• 4:43
  And then now in the age of AI and Zoom meetings, I feel like we're getting information from AI.
• 4:50
  We feel like...
• 4:52
  Even half the content we're consuming is AI generated.
• 4:55
  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.
• 5:05
  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.
• 5:18
  So how do we do that properly?
• 5:19
  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?
• 5:33
  We cannot use AI as a substitute.
• 5:37
  We can only use AI as a tool.
• 5:39
  And so let me go back to build on that argument.
• 5:42
  So the first thing is, AI and its emergence is not the first time that technology has left us isolated.
• 5:49
  And you talked about COVID, but this happened much, much, much prior to even the internet.
• 5:55
  The television, which was a piece of technology,
• 5:59
  started to keep us inside the home.
• 6:01
  And when we were inside the home, we weren't outside meeting with people.
• 6:04
  So that was the first thing that really started this epidemic of isolation and loneliness.
• 6:11
  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.
• 6:26
  That leverage is great.
• 6:27
  And we've seen it continue with Zoom and everything that we can do virtually, right?
• 6:33
  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.
• 6:44
  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.
• 6:52
  So now AI comes along.
• 6:54
  And not only do we have access to information, we almost have access to a personality.
• 7:01
  When you're talking to an agent, it's no longer a computer that's spitting back lists of links.
• 7:08
  It's almost a dialogue that you're having with another person.
• 7:11
  And so will that make us stop talking as much with each other?
• 7:15
  Almost certainly it will.
• 7:16
  So the thing we have to remember is that we have to pair that use of AI with,
• 7:21
  with continued human connection.
• 7:23
  Another way to think about it is, so COVID comes along and we're forced to stay inside.
• 7:28
  After COVID passes, what industry skyrocket?
• 7:32
  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?
• 7:44
  And so I'm gonna do more of it.
• 7:46
  I think you use that word scarcity.
• 7:48
  I think scarcity does drive value.
• 7:50
  So the scarcity of these human interactions is going to make them more valuable.
• 7:55
  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.
• 8:01
  This is where I think most people are mistaken.
• 8:03
  They're trying to set this up as AI or humanness.
• 8:07
  And I think that's very much a false dichotomy.
• 8:09
  I think the idea is use AI as a tool.
• 8:14
  Allow it to give you leverage in all the ways that it can.
• 8:17
  But don't lose sight of the fact that real connection happens when you're with another person or with a group of people.
• 8:23
  And that's what we call community.
• 8:25
  And so even something like Nextdoor,
• 8:27
  which is built on the principle of community.
• 8:30
  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.
• 8:42
  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.
• 8:50
  So this has been happening for a long time.
• 8:52
  But we're not saying...
• 8:53
  Abandon technology and go out into your neighborhoods.
• 8:57
  We're saying use technology as an icebreaker.
• 8:59
  Use technology as a tool, but understand that it's no substitute for ultimately meeting people in the real world and being with them.
• 9:07
  Because when we're with other people, that's when we feel truly alive.
• 9:12
  And when you're with an AI, you can feel empowered.
• 9:16
  You can feel like you're high leverage.
• 9:18
  You can feel like you're getting a lot of things done.
• 9:20
  But it never feels like you're part of something bigger than yourself.
• 9:24
  The only way to feel like you're part of something bigger than yourself is to be part of a community.
• 9:29
  And that's what's so powerful about being in the real world.
• 9:32
  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?
• 9:51
  maybe like LinkedIn would promote a meetup or Facebook would help you or meta would help you promote an event.
• 9:59
  But majority of social platforms basically said we are recreating your in life.
• 10:06
  community online.
• 10:08
  And that's really what all these platforms optimized for.
• 10:11
  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.
• 10:22
  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?
• 10:32
  Is it frictions?
• 10:33
  Is it too difficult to build for the, you know, when when Zuck was starting, he was taking people.
• 10:41
  that had communities at various schools across the U.S. And he moved those people online.
• 10:48
  He didn't use Facebook to augment the in-person experience.
• 10:52
  But that would have been the perfect opportunity.
• 10:53
  So I'm trying to figure out why, again, 9 out of 10 social platforms don't optimize for in-person.
• 10:59
  What is the toll that's taking on the average social media user?
• 11:04
  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.
• 11:13
  So that part of it, no argument.
• 11:15
  But as someone who's lived and worked in Silicon Valley for my entire adult life,
• 11:20
  I'm a huge believer in technology, and I'm a huge supporter of the people who've created these platforms.
• 11:26
  So you said, why did nine out of 10 social platforms focus on online interactions, right?
• 11:32
  The reality is almost 100 out of 100 internet companies.
• 11:36
  focused on what was happening virtually.
• 11:40
  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.
• 11:47
  In most cases, and I think this is true of Zuckerberg, and I think this is true of all the social platforms,
• 11:53
  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.
• 12:03
  Remember, the Facebook was about people at Harvard in the physical world.
• 12:08
  It wasn't about people you don't know.
• 12:10
  It was actually a less friction way to learn and get more information about the people that you were going to school with.
• 12:16
  So it started not as a virtual platform necessarily.
• 12:20
  Right.
• 12:20
  but as a virtual mechanism to get more leverage from the real world platform.
• 12:25
  But then all of a sudden the revolution happens.
• 12:29
  More people use the internet, mobile phones come along.
• 12:31
  The leverage becomes so powerful that before we know it,
• 12:35
  The algorithms know us better than other people do.
• 12:38
  And so we spend more time on them.
• 12:40
  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.
• 12:55
  I think this is largely about unintended consequences.
• 12:59
  And then all of a sudden you wake up one day and you realize that the building blocks of your platform...
• 13:04
  have done what you didn't necessarily intend to do, which is they have pulled people away from their real world communities.
• 13:11
  And they have created loneliness because they make it easier to spend time online.
• 13:16
  With Nextdoor, what's so interesting is my entire career up to Nextdoor,
• 13:21
  I was creating virtual communities as well.
• 13:24
  That was my whole intention.
• 13:26
  That was my dream, my aspiration.
• 13:28
  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.
• 13:35
  I grew up in Texas, so I'm a fan of the Dallas Cowboys.
• 13:39
  I went to Stanford, which is in San Francisco 49ers territory.
• 13:42
  So in the 90s, when the Cowboys were last pretty good, when they won their last set of Super Bowls,
• 13:48
  I wanted to find a place where I could talk to other Dallas Cowboys fans.
• 13:51
  And I wasn't living in Texas at the time.
• 13:53
  I was in Palo Alto at Stanford.
• 13:56
  So I went online and I found other Dallas Cowboys fans in a virtual space, no matter where they lived.
• 14:02
  Some of them were in Texas.
• 14:03
  Some of them were in other places.
• 14:04
  And I realized the power of being able to rely on a virtual space to meet people like me.
• 14:10
  That was real community.
• 14:12
  And then I ended up starting a company, Opinions, that was about online community.
• 14:17
  Now, when it came to Nextdoor, which is the summer of 2010, the first wave of Internet companies had already passed.
• 14:24
  Remember, the Internet boom started around 1995.
• 14:27
  Then there was the dot-com bust in the early 2000s.
• 14:30
  Then the cloud and mobile brought things back.
• 14:32
  And now we're sitting in 2010.
• 14:34
  Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter are just emerging.
• 14:37
  And my co-founders and I of Nextdoor, we said to ourselves, okay, these social platforms are amazing.
• 14:43
  And you have one that makes it super easy to connect with friends.
• 14:46
  That's Facebook.
• 14:47
  And you have one that makes it super easy to connect with business colleagues, and that's LinkedIn.
• 14:52
  And you have one that makes it super easy to follow your interests, and that's Twitter.
• 14:57
  But how come there isn't a social platform that makes where you live possible?
• 15:03
  more powerful, more leveraged, more impactful.
• 15:07
  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,
• 15:19
  We knew that the building blocks of our social platform needed to be grounded in the real world.
• 15:24
  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.
• 15:38
  But we do today because from the beginning at Nextdoor, we really did want to strengthen offline communities.
• 15:45
  Our goal was not to build a better virtual neighborhood.
• 15:50
  Our goal was to build a better physical neighborhood and to use virtual tools to do that.
• 15:55
  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.
• 16:03
  Your inputs ultimately drive your outputs and you don't always know how successful you're going to be.
• 16:09
  The other social platforms, their inputs are.
• 16:12
  were sound, but they've become so successful that they have created some of these unintentional consequences.
• 16:18
  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.
• 16:42
  Do you believe that we have a true loneliness epidemic?
• 16:47
  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.
• 17:03
  And so it will be an epidemic when there is a generation that prefers to spend time on
• 17:10
  with their computer, with their mobile phone, with their AI, versus spending time with a human being.
• 17:17
  And we're starting to see some of that.
• 17:19
  There are the stories that in South Korea, women would rather date virtual AIs than have real boyfriends.
• 17:26
  You think about the people who on a Friday night would rather stay at home and endlessly scroll through Instagram.
• 17:33
  versus go out into the real world, right?
• 17:36
  It's starting to happen.
• 17:37
  When it reaches a point where people start to use machines as a substitute versus as a tool, that will be epidemic.
• 17:46
  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.
• 17:52
  We have an opportunity right now to not shy away from technology, but to pair it with human connection, right?
• 17:58
  When COVID happened,
• 18:00
  and we were forced to stay inside, that was an extreme.
• 18:03
  But when COVID ended, we didn't say, we're only gonna spend time outside.
• 18:08
  We figured out a way to enjoy where we live and also travel and be in other places.
• 18:13
  We found some harmony.
• 18:15
  What I think we're really looking for here is a harmony between the power of technology
• 18:21
  and the humanness of connection.
• 18:23
  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.
• 18:32
  It is something you experience on your mobile phone.
• 18:35
  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.
• 18:46
  And so that harmonization
• 18:49
  is the thing that ultimately, I think, gives us the best of both worlds.
• 18:52
  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.
• 19:00
  But it also keeps us grounded in what makes us unique and special, and that is our connections to each other.
• 19:08
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• 19:09
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• 19:12
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• 19:30
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• 19:34
  I try to write everything down.
• 19:35
  I remembered and I'd probably get about 70% of it, but the other 30% would be gone.
• 19:41
  Usually the small details that end up mattering a lot later.
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• 19:53
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• 20:42
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• 20:58
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• 21:05
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• 21:09
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• 21:13
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  Links in the show notes.
• 21:58
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• 22:01
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• 22:12
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• 22:18
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• 22:21
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• 22:27
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• 22:35
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• 22:40
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• 22:45
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• 22:49
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• 23:21
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• 23:38
  Why is that?
• 23:39
  Why are we so bad at making in-person connections when it seemed like it was so easy for our parents?
• 23:44
  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?
• 23:50
  And then I guess the follow-up question is, you know, I grew up in a...
• 23:55
  not analog, but more analog world than what my kids will grow up in.
• 23:59
  So if it's worse for us because we were online for the majority of our life, what does that mean for our kids?
• 24:06
  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?
• 24:13
  Because I don't feel like we are now.
• 24:14
  That's a long-ass question.
• 24:15
  That's bad form for a podcast, but there's a lot of thoughts and a lot of stress around this.
• 24:19
  Right.
• 24:19
  Well, I think that this trend started well before our generation.
• 24:25
  That's the first thing I'll say.
• 24:26
  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.
• 24:37
  And that was in the summer of 2010.
• 24:39
  And like you, when I grew up in West Texas, in Odessa, that had a very strong sense of community,
• 24:50
  That would make no sense whatsoever.
• 24:52
  I knew many neighbors.
• 24:53
  In fact, not only did I know them, I was friends with them, as was my parents.
• 24:58
  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.
• 25:06
  Right.
• 25:06
  We were integrated with them.
• 25:08
  And then over many years because of television, because we commuted to work, because things kept us inside our homes.
• 25:15
  Right.
• 25:17
  We started to lose touch with people.
• 25:19
  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.
• 25:27
  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.
• 25:37
  That turned into the nosy neighbor versus the nice neighbor.
• 25:40
  So you fast forward to today, and I think you actually had the right point, which is
• 25:45
  It's bad enough for us, even though we grew up in a different period of time.
• 25:50
  What about our children?
• 25:51
  I have three sons, ages 14, 12, and 10.
• 25:55
  They are not at all familiar.
• 25:58
  with going and introducing themselves to people they don't know.
• 26:02
  It's just not the way they've grown up.
• 26:03
  In fact, if anything, people tell them, don't talk to strangers, keep to yourself, only interact with the people you already know.
• 26:12
  So there have been many societal trends, not just technology, but many societal trends that have gone in the wrong direction.
• 26:19
  Then you add technology, right?
• 26:20
  And we see what's happening again to the children.
• 26:22
  Now social media being outlawed until the age of 16 in Australia.
• 26:27
  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.
• 26:42
  We don't believe, my wife and I.
• 26:44
  that our kids are never going to use technology.
• 26:46
  It's not like we say, we don't like screens at all.
• 26:49
  You can never pick up a phone.
• 26:51
  You can never use Instagram, et cetera, right?
• 26:53
  But we want to balance these things.
• 26:55
  So for example, we've taken our kids.
• 26:58
  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.
• 27:07
  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.
• 27:17
  It's the end of the summer.
• 27:18
  We sent our kids just a couple of weeks ago to a camp in Switzerland for almost three weeks.
• 27:24
  They didn't know a single person.
• 27:27
  And it wasn't just Americans.
• 27:28
  It was people from 39 different countries.
• 27:30
  So we try to do the things that we can within reason.
• 27:35
  that get them to exercise those muscles that are largely active because of the way society is set up today.
• 27:42
  I think we need more block parties.
• 27:44
  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.
• 27:52
  And we need to exercise that muscle of getting to know them.
• 27:56
  We need to go outside and smile at people and shake their hands and introduce ourselves.
• 28:02
  And that's something that I think for whatever reason –
• 28:05
  We've stopped doing and we haven't stopped doing it out of some real intentional focus away from community.
• 28:13
  But things like looking at our phone when we walk across the street, that influences our ability to meet people.
• 28:20
  We were in Italy this summer and I gave a keynote speech at Stanford has a small campus in Florence, Italy.
• 28:28
  And I gave a small keynote speech there and I said to get to this palazzo.
• 28:34
  where you're currently sitting, you sat and walked across a piazza that was probably 500 to 800 years old.
• 28:42
  And what did you likely do?
• 28:45
  You looked at your phone the entire way over.
• 28:47
  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.
• 28:58
  And I appeal to them that when they left the speech, put the phone in the pocket.
• 29:03
  And when you walk back across that piazza...
• 29:07
  Look at the art.
• 29:09
  Look at the people.
• 29:10
  Go and meet someone.
• 29:11
  So you just need a reminder.
• 29:14
  Even the way that we planned America, for example, versus Europe.
• 29:18
  Europe is built around piazzas where people come and congregate, right?
• 29:23
  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.
• 29:33
  You know, when we started Next Door...
• 29:35
  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?
• 29:46
  What's the best place to get pizza or pasta around here?
• 29:50
  Almost always the person in Italy would say, well, it's the place that's right close by to where I live.
• 29:57
  Whereas in America, if you ask someone, where's the best coffee?
• 30:00
  Where's the best pizza?
• 30:01
  Where's the best fill in the blank?
• 30:03
  They'll largely say, well, get in your car, drive 18 miles or drive across town and you'll be at the best place.
• 30:10
  And that may be the best place, but it's outside your neighborhood.
• 30:13
  So that connection you have with it is totally different.
• 30:15
  So I think a lot of this is larger than technology and larger than AI.
• 30:21
  But technology and AI is amplifying technology.
• 30:25
  that epidemic, as you call it.
• 30:27
  And it will be an epidemic if we don't do something about it.
• 30:30
  One last thought on this.
• 30:32
  For parents, what's your advice to them if they can't move overseas, for example?
• 30:37
  Like, what's the way that they should raise their kids so that they don't succumb to this loneliness?
• 30:42
  I think you got to find the balance.
• 30:44
  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.
• 30:56
  Because I think the schools that say, oh, no, you can't use AI at all.
• 31:01
  they're actually putting their students at a disadvantage.
• 31:04
  But obviously, we don't want the students to only use AI, right?
• 31:08
  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?
• 31:25
  Because you have to know how to use these things.
• 31:28
  but doesn't become over-reliant on them.
• 31:32
  And that requires harmony and that requires nuance and that requires true parenting.
• 31:40
  And unfortunately we're so busy these days.
• 31:42
  Sometimes we either say, well, just take your iPad and do whatever you want.
• 31:46
  Or we lock up the iPad and say, you can't touch it.
• 31:49
  Right.
• 31:49
  And even my wife and I are guilty of that.
• 31:52
  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.
• 32:02
  Let's come up with some projects.
• 32:04
  Would you like to know something about world history?
• 32:07
  Would you like to know something about the world of arts?
• 32:09
  Would you like to know something about business?
• 32:11
  Would you like to learn something?
• 32:13
  Because, gosh, think about the power of AI for our children in teaching them things.
• 32:19
  It's like having the world's most advanced tutor.
• 32:23
  in your pocket.
• 32:24
  So I don't think we should ignore that at all, but you have to find the balance.
• 32:27
  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.
• 32:36
  And that's not very big during the weekdays and it's a little bigger during the weekends.
• 32:42
  So maybe 30 minutes of screen time during the week per day.
• 32:46
  and then maybe a couple hours on the weekend.
• 32:48
  The challenge is these pieces of technology have become messaging devices primarily.
• 32:55
  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.
• 33:01
  And so if you stand outside of that,
• 33:04
  You're out of the flow of information.
• 33:06
  And you know what it's like to be a teenager.
• 33:08
  You don't want to be out of the flow of information.
• 33:10
  So these are serious, serious, serious challenges.
• 33:14
  I don't think they're unsolvable.
• 33:15
  But I think it will require nuance.
• 33:17
  It will require hard work.
• 33:18
  And it will require, I'll bring up that word again, harmony.
• 33:22
  between understanding that there is tremendous power and leverage, and we want our children to be facile with technology.
• 33:31
  But we don't want them to treat it as a substitute.
• 33:34
  Learn to treat it as a tool, but not as a substitute.
• 33:38
  One thing that I'm very impressed with is how you built Nextdoor almost against the wisdom of technology,
• 33:47
  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.
• 34:01
  This is the way to grow a company, right?
• 34:03
  This is how most people assume this is how they're going to be successful.
• 34:08
  You added friction.
• 34:10
  to your growth playbook.
• 34:11
  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?
• 34:25
  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.
• 34:32
  That wasn't a particularly economical way to verify identity.
• 34:36
  But you know, it's, it's,
• 34:39
  It is the case that as an entrepreneur, you need to balance between what we might think of as best practices –
• 34:47
  And then a contrarian point of view, because you use the best practices to learn from everything that's come before you.
• 34:56
  But if you don't have the contrarian point of view, you're not going to create something that's different.
• 35:01
  You're largely just going to create something that's already there.
• 35:04
  And so you need to have a point of view that says, look, what currently exists is
• 35:10
  is not good enough, or there can be something that we can build that's better than what currently exists.
• 35:16
  But you don't build that better thing by doing the same thing that other people have done.
• 35:22
  And so you got to learn from the best practices, but you have to understand what is the high order bit.
• 35:27
  So for us, it wasn't, we never said to ourselves, let's increase friction.
• 35:31
  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.
• 35:36
  If you add more friction, there's already enough friction that's actually right there in everything you're doing.
• 35:42
  Right.
• 35:42
  And so it's not that we said, let's add friction.
• 35:45
  We said, let's increase trust.
• 35:48
  We said, let's more accurately simulate the real world set of connections that people have.
• 35:55
  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.
• 36:05
  And gosh.
• 36:06
  we would have chosen solutions that didn't add more friction.
• 36:11
  In retrospect, it's easy to say, oh yeah, we added friction and it was a good thing.
• 36:14
  At the time, we were just ripping our hair out, saying, are we really going to send postcards to a billion people?
• 36:21
  Because we want to have a billion people using Nextdoor.
• 36:24
  Now there are over 110 million people who've registered to use the service.
• 36:28
  You multiply that times the postage of that many postcards.
• 36:31
  That's a lot of money.
• 36:32
  We never would have wanted to spend that.
• 36:34
  starting out.
• 36:35
  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.
• 36:46
  But when we were building, the thing that was driving us was not adding friction.
• 36:51
  The thing that was driving us is, how do we increase trust?
• 36:54
  And in some cases, the way to increase trust is to add friction.
• 36:58
  In fact, what's so interesting now as we think about 15 years after that,
• 37:03
  AI reduces even more friction.
• 37:05
  If you think about AI search versus Google search, right?
• 37:09
  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.
• 37:23
  There's some friction there, a lot less friction than there used to be, but there's some friction there.
• 37:27
  You go to AI and you type in a natural language query that's conversational.
• 37:32
  And it takes not just 10 links, but every link it's ever found.
• 37:37
  And it amalgamates all of them into this bite-sized summary.
• 37:41
  You think about that incredible leverage you just got.
• 37:44
  The friction just went...
• 37:46
  I mean, it went bye-bye immediately, right?
• 37:48
  But sometimes the friction is where you learn to ask better questions.
• 37:53
  Sometimes the friction is the thing that uncovers the nuance that everyone else is missing.
• 37:58
  And so I think the friction, in an odd way...
• 38:02
  is actually what makes us human.
• 38:04
  We hear a lot about imperfection of humans versus the perfection of a machine, right?
• 38:09
  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.
• 38:18
  There's a meme that's going around in Silicon Valley
• 38:22
  Maybe you've heard it, 20, 60, 20.
• 38:24
  It's a way to use AI.
• 38:26
  Have you heard this before?
• 38:27
  No, I haven't yet.
• 38:28
  What is this?
• 38:29
  The idea is you as a human do the first 20% of the work.
• 38:34
  So you have something to do.
• 38:35
  You have a podcast guest to research.
• 38:38
  Okay, the first 20% of that research, you do.
• 38:41
  You're getting to know it, you're understanding, why would I have this guest on the show?
• 38:45
  What would I want to ask them?
• 38:46
  What can they add to the community, right?
• 38:49
  Once you've done 20%, though, you turn it over to AI.
• 38:52
  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.
• 38:59
  And what are some great questions and what are some great themes that we should get into?
• 39:03
  And how is this very topically relevant to what's going on in the world today?
• 39:06
  And then the AI will give you a lot of information, but you don't stop there.
• 39:10
  You take that and then you do the last 20% yourself.
• 39:13
  You look at the list of questions the chatbot has created for you and you decide which ones are the best ones.
• 39:18
  You prioritize them in the order that you believe they should be prioritized.
• 39:22
  I think that's an interesting heuristic.
• 39:24
  20, 60, 20.
• 39:26
  We're not relying on the machine.
• 39:29
  Nor are we saying that we shouldn't use the machine.
• 39:32
  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.
• 39:39
  And I think at the beginning, there's some friction because you've got to get started, and it's hard to get started.
• 39:44
  In the middle, the machine's just taking all that stuff, that activation energy that you've created, and it's doing the work.
• 39:50
  But at the end, the refinement is...
• 39:52
  You want a human to look at that and bring nuance and elegance and beauty and those things that machines typically don't have.
• 40:00
  So I think there are ways that we can use the AI without losing what makes us special.
• 40:06
  And sometimes friction is the thing that makes us special.
• 40:09
  I mean, friction is the thing that helps us understand that we're not talking to a machine, right?
• 40:15
  And this is gonna be an issue, particularly with online content.
• 40:19
  If something's written perfectly,
• 40:22
  increasingly people believe you use an AI to write that.
• 40:27
  If it's got em dashes and it's perfect from a grammar standpoint, you probably used chat GPT, right?
• 40:33
  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.
• 40:42
  You're gonna know that that came from a human.
• 40:44
  And the human can make it better, but that friction, that imperfection, right?
• 40:49
  That's ultimately the thing that we put into something that gives it soul.
• 40:54
  I like that 20, 60, 20.
• 40:56
  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...
• 41:07
  it always falls flat.
• 41:08
  It never captures the topics the guest actually cares about.
• 41:11
  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.
• 41:25
  Like you really have to, at least for me, when I prep for these,
• 41:29
  I have to listen to other podcasts you've been on.
• 41:32
  I have to read the book, at least a bit of it myself, and then I can understand what matters to you.
• 41:36
  And I found that when I figure out what matters to you, then that's the questions you ask.
• 41:41
  Those are the things that you triple down on and that creates the best content.
• 41:44
  But to your point, when you just rely on AI, when it's not 20, 60, 20, but it's a hundred percent AI.
• 41:52
  It'll try and do a good job, but it always misses the mark.
• 41:55
  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.
• 42:05
  It may not be things that are relevant to them now.
• 42:10
  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.
• 42:25
  But I think that's a really good framework for people to use AI in a 20, 60, 20 format.
• 42:32
  I don't think we want AI to be the first word or the final word.
• 42:35
  Because then if it's a first word, it's like garbage in, garbage out.
• 42:38
  If it's the last word, then there's no human audit of the content before it gets posted or before it gets used.
• 42:46
  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.
• 42:55
  But think about it.
• 42:55
  You wouldn't go to an AI and say, tell me how to make a million dollars.
• 43:00
  it's not going to tell you anything, right?
• 43:02
  You wouldn't even go to an AI and say, tell me which stocks to invest in.
• 43:05
  You might actually ask the AI, you might say, I have this much money that I've just inherited.
• 43:10
  I'm thinking about creating a balanced stock portfolio.
• 43:13
  Can you give me some suggestions for names that I should consider?
• 43:16
  And it'll give you great names, which you can then spend some time thinking about.
• 43:20
  And then ultimately you decide what the portfolio looks like.
• 43:22
  So again, I want to be really careful about,
• 43:26
  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.
• 43:37
  Neither of those statements are true.
• 43:39
  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.
• 43:45
  But I would say it's magic at doing a particular set of things.
• 43:50
  And it's not magical at doing the very end.
• 43:54
  It's not magical at coming up with the right question to ask at the beginning.
• 43:58
  So let's use it as a tool the same way that we use all the other tools in our lives.
• 44:02
  When you were building Nextdoor, and I think it's still, you always have to balance trust versus friction.
• 44:10
  I'll just call it friction so people understand what we're talking about.
• 44:12
  Yeah.
• 44:14
  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.
• 44:23
  I think you also blocked Google from indexing your content on Nextdoor.
• 44:28
  These decisions...
• 44:31
  For example, sending out the postcards, blocking Google from indexing content, killing the SEO.
• 44:37
  How do you think about trust versus friction?
• 44:40
  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?
• 44:48
  Like, this is this fine equilibrium, this balance that you're trying to figure out.
• 44:54
  And it's a smart play to increase trust, but it's a difficult idea.
• 44:58
  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.
• 45:08
  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.
• 45:19
  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.
• 45:28
  But for those two in particular, because they're related, it's less that we talked about
• 45:34
  the challenge of choosing those solutions.
• 45:37
  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.
• 45:47
  And that truism for us was, how do we build a virtual space
• 45:51
  that is as analogous to the real world space as possible.
• 45:56
  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.
• 46:05
  You've probably seen them or they've just walked out of their front door, right?
• 46:09
  And so we knew we needed verification of identity.
• 46:12
  And that's what drove it.
• 46:13
  It wasn't that we want to just pick the thing that's most high friction, right?
• 46:17
  It just so happened that that was more friction than what people...
• 46:21
  had done in the past.
• 46:22
  With the no SEO, there are a couple things there.
• 46:24
  The first is when you're having a conversation with a neighbor,
• 46:28
  You don't think that the contents of that conversation is going to be accessible to anyone in the world.
• 46:34
  You're just having a private conversation, right?
• 46:36
  You and I are having a conversation that we both know is going to be accessible.
• 46:39
  And so we're going into it with the right amount of transparency into what the end result is going to be.
• 46:44
  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.
• 46:53
  Right?
• 46:54
  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.
• 47:05
  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.
• 47:17
  And after we went public, we dropped out of the Google index for a month because of a clerical error that an engineer made.
• 47:25
  He put a robots.txt file saying, do not crawl me on the main site accidentally.
• 47:30
  And so for a month, we fell out of the Google index.
• 47:33
  As a result, we missed our numbers.
• 47:34
  The stock tanked.
• 47:35
  The company had to be sold.
• 47:37
  And so there was a part of me as a repeat entrepreneur that said,
• 47:42
  I know whatever company I start, there are going to be big intractable challenges.
• 47:47
  That's kind of the definition of being an entrepreneur and starting a new company.
• 47:50
  But at least as a multi-time founder, I want to pick the challenges that I'm comfortable taking.
• 47:56
  And I don't want to pick the challenge of SEO because I don't know if I can sleep at night
• 48:02
  knowing that most of my traffic is not in my control.
• 48:06
  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?
• 48:21
  Can you imagine what it's like to get most of your traffic from Google today?
• 48:24
  You know that's not gonna continue, but you haven't built the muscle.
• 48:28
  on how people will come to you directly.
• 48:30
  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?
• 48:38
  We were very, very, very fortunate that we chose a path because we wanted to protect our users' conversations from a privacy standpoint.
• 48:47
  We're very lucky that that's led us to a place now where all of our distribution is our own distribution.
• 48:54
  It's completely earned.
• 48:54
  And that's why, you know, when I came back to the company,
• 48:57
  Two and a half years ago.
• 48:59
  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?
• 49:09
  Because we're in the age of AI.
• 49:11
  Nextdoor is not an AI native company.
• 49:13
  We've already spent a lot of time on this.
• 49:15
  Right.
• 49:16
  Is this a company worth spending time on?
• 49:18
  And we looked at the core assets and we looked at the verified identity.
• 49:22
  We looked at the fully owned distribution.
• 49:24
  We looked at the unique content.
• 49:25
  We looked at the conversational interface.
• 49:28
  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.
• 49:41
  So let's come back and try to turn those assets into something that has real material value.
• 49:47
  And so, again, I wish I could say that we predicted where the world would be today.
• 49:52
  There's no way that that's the case.
• 49:55
  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.
• 50:06
  Thank you.
• 50:06
  HubSpot is a success story partner.
• 50:08
  Now, customers are using traditional search less and less to find the businesses they want to buy from.
• 50:13
  Now, when a buyer or a customer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up?
• 50:19
  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.
• 50:25
  If your company isn't showing up, you're missing out.
• 50:27
  And most companies have no idea if their business is showing up or even how to show up.
• 50:32
  And by the time they figure it out, they've already lost a deal to somebody to figure it out
• 50:36
  AI.
• 50:36
  This is what AEO is.
• 50:38
  Answer Engine Optimization.
• 50:40
  HubSpot AEO helps you show up in those moments with the right answers that your buyers and your customers are looking for.
• 50:46
  It could be before the first click, before the first form fill.
• 50:50
  That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for.
• 50:53
  So check out HubSpot.com to learn more about AEO.
• 50:55
  HubSpot is the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.
• 50:59
  NetSuite Next is a success story partner.
• 51:01
  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.
• 51:09
  So how do you keep up?
• 51:11
  Well, fortunately there is NetSuite Next.
• 51:13
  Now you probably already know NetSuite.
• 51:15
  NetSuite is the AI powered business management suite.
• 51:17
  It's trusted by over 43,000 customers.
• 51:20
  It securely connects all of your data, financials, inventory, commerce, HR, CRM, into one single source of truth.
• 51:27
  But NetSuite Next is the next huge leap in how businesses get done because AI is built into everything you do.
• 51:35
  So NetSuite Next automatically shows you all these custom insights for your business throughout your day.
• 51:41
  You'll have AI agents work alongside you to solve problems and handle routine work.
• 51:45
  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.
• 51:53
  NetSuite is customized for a wide range of industries, so it supports the way that your business truly works.
• 51:59
  Whether your company earns millions or hundreds of millions, it's time for NetSuite Next, where your business meets AI.
• 52:06
  If I needed a solution like this, it's what I'd use.
• 52:08
  For the first time ever, you can try NetSuite Next for free.
• 52:12
  If your revenues are at least in these seven figures, go to netsuite.ai.scottclary.
• 52:18
  It's built for every industry.
• 52:20
  It's ready for every boardroom.
• 52:22
  NetSuite.ai slash Scott Clary.
• 52:24
  Monarch is a success story partner.
• 52:26
  Now, quick question.
• 52:27
  Do you know where your money went last month?
• 52:29
  Not roughly, but exactly.
• 52:30
  And most people don't.
• 52:31
  And I didn't for years.
• 52:32
  And that is most of our money stories, right?
• 52:35
  When we first start our career, we have one income and one account, and you can kind of wing it.
• 52:39
  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.
• 52:47
  Monarch fixed that for me.
• 52:48
  It is the personal finance app that tracks everything.
• 52:50
  everything.
• 52:51
  So that means accounts, investments, savings goals, spending all on one screen.
• 52:55
  The first week I had it, it fired recurring charges I've been paying for months without realizing.
• 52:59
  And every single week, the AI recap tells me if spending spiked, if my net worth moved, and what bills are coming.
• 53:04
  And I can just ask it, hey, can I afford this trip without touching my savings?
• 53:08
  And I can get a real answer based on my actual numbers.
• 53:11
  It is a financial advisor in your pocket.
• 53:13
  It costs less than an hour with a real one.
• 53:15
  So write your own money story with Monarch.
• 53:17
  Use code success at monarch.com and get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50.
• 53:22
  That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code success.
• 53:26
  A couple thoughts.
• 53:27
  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.
• 53:35
  So I don't think that it's fair to just say it's pure luck.
• 53:38
  There's a lot of people that could have the same circumstances, same company, same situation, and fumble to a degree.
• 53:44
  So you still have to understand when you are getting lucky and ride that wave.
• 53:48
  So you did a great job.
• 53:51
  One thought about the decline in organic search.
• 53:54
  this is something that is hitting companies very hard.
• 53:57
  I mean, I'll speak from personal experience.
• 54:00
  This podcast is sponsored by HubSpot.
• 54:02
  It has been for several years now, and every year I speak at Inbound.
• 54:06
  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.
• 54:16
  They were the company where if you Googled almost any business term, you could find a blog article on it.
• 54:21
  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.
• 54:29
  And this is a company that understands organic search better than almost any company on earth.
• 54:36
  And then they started figuring out, okay, how do we have earned distribution?
• 54:40
  How do we go through influencers, different media and content formats?
• 54:45
  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.
• 54:55
  But this is...
• 54:56
  This is, actually, I'll ask you, what's the lesson for entrepreneurs?
• 55:01
  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.
• 55:11
  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
• 55:23
  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?
• 55:39
  Like, what is the lesson in all of this for somebody who's starting out on how to navigate this?
• 55:43
  Because for somebody starting, this is just scary.
• 55:46
  Like we're having this conversation about how you lucked out.
• 55:48
  I'm talking about how HubSpot navigated, you know, their main, their decline of their main traffic source.
• 55:53
  And somebody's like, oh, my God, I just want to get one customer.
• 55:56
  And that's my main goal right now.
• 55:57
  And I don't have any of these things figured out yet.
• 55:59
  This is overwhelming.
• 56:01
  So to that entrepreneur, what is your advice to them?
• 56:04
  Well, we mentioned Bill Gurley and has this great expression, and it is be a learn it all, not a know it all.
• 56:11
  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.
• 56:24
  There's an obstacle side too.
• 56:25
  Almost everything is a two-sided coin.
• 56:27
  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.
• 56:38
  If on the other hand, you say, I don't want to have SEO.
• 56:42
  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?
• 56:52
  So the first thing I would say is you can never stop as an entrepreneur, particularly in the tech industry.
• 56:59
  trying to understand where the industry is going.
• 57:03
  Because in almost all cases, the great companies are the beneficiaries of megatrends that are bigger than any one company.
• 57:13
  And if you time one of those trends well, well, you see what happens.
• 57:17
  And if you're not prepared for one of those trends, you can be flattened instantly.
• 57:22
  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.
• 57:31
  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?
• 57:38
  So you have to be a learn it on, you have to be hungry
• 57:42
  Think about where is this industry going?
• 57:46
  And at the same time, you can't be too early because pioneers get arrows in their backs, right?
• 57:51
  So if you were too early with agentic AI and you gave up all of your SEO, maybe you never would have gotten there.
• 57:58
  If you're too late, you know you obviously will die.
• 58:01
  So as an entrepreneur, you constantly have to be living in the past, the present, and the future.
• 58:08
  The past is, okay, what has worked?
• 58:10
  The present is what's working right now.
• 58:12
  And the future is what do we think is going to work in the future?
• 58:16
  I know, for example, that AI...
• 58:19
  is going to be a boom that we're in the early innings up.
• 58:22
  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.
• 58:31
  Next year, the year after, and I think for a decade,
• 58:35
  for now.
• 58:36
  And so I would tell any entrepreneur, make sure you're deep in AI.
• 58:39
  I don't know exactly where it's going to go.
• 58:41
  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.
• 58:45
  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.
• 58:56
  And so I can say that as an entrepreneur who's lived through dot-com boom,
• 59:01
  and then transition from desktop to mobile, mobile to cloud, now cloud to AI, right?
• 59:06
  I've seen the way these transitions work, but you cannot get stuck where you are.
• 59:11
  I mean, the great companies in our industry, they either don't last very long,
• 59:16
  or they reinvent themselves.
• 59:18
  Look at Apple and Microsoft.
• 59:20
  They were both left for dead.
• 59:22
  It's amazing to think this, but left for dead.
• 59:26
  And then they transformed themselves for a new generation.
• 59:28
  And today, you may ask yourself, where's Apple on AI?
• 59:33
  What has Microsoft done at?
• 59:34
  They're going to have to do it again, because today they're not the leaders when it comes to AI, right?
• 59:40
  So as an entrepreneur in this industry,
• 59:43
  If you make it a priority to be a learn-it-all, you're putting yourself at a competitive advantage, right?
• 59:50
  Because you are more likely to be able to adjust to the changes that are made, right?
• 59:56
  I mean, it's that old Clayton Christensen book, you know, The Innovator's Dilemma, right?
• 1:00:01
  I mean, the other thing I'd say is almost always success is...
• 1:00:05
  is the wrong kind of lesson to continue succeeding.
• 1:00:09
  Whereas failure, if you learn from it, can equip you to succeed in the future.
• 1:00:15
  I mean, if you're successful, you kind of sit back and you're pinching yourself, saying, wow, this is amazing.
• 1:00:21
  Can you believe what's going on right now?
• 1:00:23
  And you won't see the tidal wave that comes behind you.
• 1:00:26
  and takes your company away with it.
• 1:00:28
  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.
• 1:00:33
  You say, gosh, this isn't for me.
• 1:00:35
  I'm hanging it up.
• 1:00:36
  Or you say, I never want to be at the bottom of this ocean again.
• 1:00:40
  What am I going to learn from this experience to make sure that the next time this tidal wave comes...
• 1:00:46
  I'm writing it versus being buried by it.
• 1:00:49
  And that's all about learning.
• 1:00:51
  I think the ultimate competitive advantage for an entrepreneur is to learn.
• 1:00:56
  If you can learn, and this is why AI to me is so powerful.
• 1:00:59
  Because before, where could you learn?
• 1:01:02
  You learn from other people, you learn from books, you learn from what you read and what you saw, right?
• 1:01:07
  Now, all of that is coming to you in the form of one agent.
• 1:01:11
  And you can talk to it for hours and hours and hours.
• 1:01:14
  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.
• 1:01:22
  But that doesn't mean that the AI is going to do the work for us.
• 1:01:24
  We still have to do the work.
• 1:01:26
  But if we do the work, we'll be able to anticipate what's ahead.
• 1:01:30
  You've said that leaving next door was the hardest thing you've ever done professionally.
• 1:01:35
  I want to know what was going on in 2018.
• 1:01:37
  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.
• 1:01:45
  When you came back, you were just speaking about these companies that almost died and came back.
• 1:01:50
  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.
• 1:01:57
  Refounding, not a turnaround.
• 1:01:59
  So please tell everybody the story about why you stepped away, why it was so hard, what was going on.
• 1:02:05
  But then let's talk about...
• 1:02:07
  You coming back, we could talk about Bill Gurley's.
• 1:02:09
  He's been on the podcast.
• 1:02:10
  He's a great guy.
• 1:02:12
  Incredible, incredible investor.
• 1:02:13
  If you don't know who we're talking about.
• 1:02:14
  So please go look up that episode, but talk about this, you know, this hiatus, this refounding, and then also why, why refounding?
• 1:02:22
  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.
• 1:02:34
  Yeah, no, you said a lot of powerful things in there.
• 1:02:36
  So I'll start with leaving next door and why it was hard.
• 1:02:39
  And it kind of...
• 1:02:42
  It echoes what I said before about success not being a great teacher.
• 1:02:47
  I started Nextdoor in the summer of 2010.
• 1:02:48
  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.
• 1:03:02
  So we were very steady in terms of our growth.
• 1:03:05
  And our growth was getting bigger and bigger and bigger as we compounded.
• 1:03:10
  But my performance as a CEO was kind of doing the opposite.
• 1:03:14
  I had plateaued and then I was actually, I think, starting to become less effective all the time.
• 1:03:19
  And maybe a part of that was the company was larger and it required a different set of skills.
• 1:03:25
  A lot of times founders are really good in the early days and then they get worse and worse as the company gets larger.
• 1:03:31
  Maybe it was because I was really tired.
• 1:03:33
  I'd been a CEO for, gosh, I don't know, almost 20 years at that point.
• 1:03:37
  Nextdoor was the third company that I started.
• 1:03:40
  And then I think the third thing is I wasn't that self-aware.
• 1:03:44
  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.
• 1:03:52
  And he was like a mirror for me as I developed as a young CEO.
• 1:03:58
  I was a CEO for the first time at 27 or 28 years of age.
• 1:04:00
  I knew nothing.
• 1:04:01
  I didn't deserve to be a CEO.
• 1:04:03
  I was lucky to be there.
• 1:04:05
  And Bill helped me take that luck and make the most of it.
• 1:04:09
  Bill sadly passed away and I didn't really have a CEO coach, nor was I open to seeing what my weaknesses were.
• 1:04:19
  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.
• 1:04:31
  And I don't think they felt that
• 1:04:34
  If I ran it as CEO or continue to run it as CEO, we would get there.
• 1:04:38
  So it was hard to lead because it wasn't my choice, for one.
• 1:04:42
  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.
• 1:04:54
  So I went to Stanford and I worked in Silicon Valley.
• 1:04:56
  And when I thought of myself and my identity, it was as the founder and CEO of Nextdoor.
• 1:05:04
  And so if I'm no longer the CEO of Nextdoor, who am I?
• 1:05:08
  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.
• 1:05:19
  And that identity for me was as CEO of Nextdoor.
• 1:05:22
  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...
• 1:05:30
  You're not able to do it even if you want to continue.
• 1:05:32
  And the second thing is you're going to have to pick up the pieces and figure out what you do next.
• 1:05:37
  And so I left at the end of 2018.
• 1:05:40
  It turned out to be one of the greatest blessings ever because it allowed me to take a step back.
• 1:05:47
  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?
• 1:06:00
  What do I want to learn from this experience?
• 1:06:02
  How do I want to change?
• 1:06:03
  How do I want to grow?
• 1:06:05
  I talk a lot about being a learn-it-all, right?
• 1:06:07
  I needed to be a learn-it-all, right?
• 1:06:10
  And so it provided the breath of fresh air, right?
• 1:06:14
  For me to say, I'm not worried when I wake up every morning about the company because I'm not running it anymore.
• 1:06:21
  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?
• 1:06:31
  And then maybe a CEO.
• 1:06:33
  The truth is I was so burned out at that point.
• 1:06:35
  I never thought I'd be a CEO again.
• 1:06:37
  I didn't want to be.
• 1:06:38
  It's a lot of pressure.
• 1:06:40
  It takes a lot of life force to run a company.
• 1:06:44
  I was really lucky.
• 1:06:45
  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.
• 1:06:55
  He said, why don't you join Hedda Sophia as executive chairman?
• 1:06:57
  He
• 1:06:58
  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.
• 1:07:04
  You know, one side of the table is the entrepreneurs.
• 1:07:06
  The other side is investors.
• 1:07:08
  And I loved the time that I spent at Hedo Sophia.
• 1:07:11
  I loved helping entrepreneurs.
• 1:07:13
  I joke and say I love giving them advice.
• 1:07:16
  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.
• 1:07:27
  And so I never thought I would come back to next door.
• 1:07:30
  Why did I come back?
• 1:07:31
  I mean, the company was failing.
• 1:07:33
  Yeah.
• 1:07:33
  It honestly was.
• 1:07:35
  And I was on the board and Bill was on the board.
• 1:07:36
  And so you can't blame that on anyone, right?
• 1:07:40
  I mean, it's collective responsibility, but it wasn't working.
• 1:07:44
  And even though it would require a tremendous sacrifice to leave a great job at Hedda Sofia and go back to next door,
• 1:07:53
  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?
• 1:08:05
  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.
• 1:08:12
  And so I went back and...
• 1:08:15
  You talk about a refounding.
• 1:08:16
  I mean, there were so many reasons that we needed a refounding.
• 1:08:19
  You mentioned one of them, which is we needed to massively disrupt
• 1:08:24
  the trajectory that the company was on.
• 1:08:26
  The company had lost 90% of its value.
• 1:08:28
  The company was shrinking.
• 1:08:30
  The company's product was not performing the way that it was intended to perform.
• 1:08:35
  And so turning that around, I mean, can you think of that many consumer internet properties who've gone from shrinking to growing?
• 1:08:42
  It's very, very, very hard, and it rarely happens, if ever.
• 1:08:46
  So we needed something radical.
• 1:08:48
  The other thing is, I needed to be a much more effective CEO.
• 1:08:53
  to be part of that turnaround.
• 1:08:55
  I knew that.
• 1:08:55
  I knew that if I came back and operated the company the way I had in the past,
• 1:09:00
  Nothing would change.
• 1:09:02
  In fact, maybe the company would fail even more quickly.
• 1:09:04
  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?
• 1:09:20
  And we start thinking about things like the power of community.
• 1:09:23
  And we start thinking about things like the age of human connection.
• 1:09:26
  We start thinking about things like making people love where they live even more than they do.
• 1:09:32
  And those are really powerful building blocks.
• 1:09:35
  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.
• 1:09:45
  They exceed the mission.
• 1:09:47
  But when you're a founder, you don't have any metrics.
• 1:09:49
  It's all about mission.
• 1:09:50
  And so we needed to get back to the mission.
• 1:09:52
  And I needed to get back to my own personal mission as a CEO too.
• 1:09:56
  Because when I left, I think like many CEOs, I was beating people down to get things done.
• 1:10:02
  You know, I was persecuting people to get results.
• 1:10:06
  It's an easy way to do it.
• 1:10:07
  You intimidate, you threaten, right?
• 1:10:11
  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.
• 1:10:18
  I want to lift people up.
• 1:10:20
  I want to inspire them.
• 1:10:21
  I want them to feel empowered to do the best that they can do.
• 1:10:25
  And I knew that that was going to take a refounding myself.
• 1:10:28
  It was going to require more patience.
• 1:10:30
  It was going to require more clarity.
• 1:10:32
  It was going to require more poise, more calmness.
• 1:10:35
  Those aren't things that you typically associate with a founder, right?
• 1:10:39
  I mean, founders are impatient and we're stressed out and we're anxious and we're pulling our hair out, right?
• 1:10:44
  And so it was a tremendous challenge for me and a tremendous challenge for the company.
• 1:10:48
  And we're still in the middle of that, but I think we're making progress.
• 1:10:51
  When you think about your decision to come back and to participate in this refounding and this disrupting of Nextdoor, what?
• 1:11:00
  Have you thought about who the most influential person was in that decision?
• 1:11:05
  And when I say that, I mean, were you the most influential person convincing yourself?
• 1:11:10
  Was it somebody like a Bill Gurley?
• 1:11:12
  Was it somebody on the board?
• 1:11:13
  Was it your wife?
• 1:11:14
  Was it your kids?
• 1:11:15
  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?
• 1:11:25
  You know, I'm really lucky.
• 1:11:26
  I have this old friend, Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn.
• 1:11:31
  And I met him in 1996.
• 1:11:32
  And so I knew him before he started LinkedIn.
• 1:11:36
  I knew him when he was Reid Hoffman alone, not Reid Hoffman, the billionaire founder of LinkedIn.
• 1:11:40
  And he has this really interesting experience.
• 1:11:44
  theory, which is founders tend to work on the same problem their entire careers.
• 1:11:49
  It may be through various different companies, various different efforts, investments, et cetera.
• 1:11:54
  The through line for me is not just professional that way.
• 1:11:58
  It's personal, which is I crave community, both in my professional life and my personal life.
• 1:12:03
  And what that means is a decision like coming back to next door, it could never just be me.
• 1:12:10
  Who's the reason behind that decision?
• 1:12:12
  It was a community.
• 1:12:14
  It was all of the people that you mentioned.
• 1:12:16
  It was my wife.
• 1:12:18
  It was my parents.
• 1:12:19
  It was my kids.
• 1:12:20
  You know, my kids are now 14, 12, and 10.
• 1:12:24
  When I left next door in 2018, I mean, you can do the math.
• 1:12:28
  That was eight years ago, right?
• 1:12:29
  They were much younger.
• 1:12:30
  I don't think they really knew what it was like.
• 1:12:33
  for their father to be the CEO of a company.
• 1:12:35
  Now they know, they understand the sacrifices.
• 1:12:37
  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.
• 1:12:49
  Bill Gurley was a big part of it because if he felt given his ability to really understand sacrifice,
• 1:12:56
  value and how to unlock that value in a very radical way.
• 1:13:00
  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.
• 1:13:11
  My co-founder, Sarah Leary, I was lucky that she came back to the company.
• 1:13:15
  She was pivotal in the decision.
• 1:13:18
  But look, at the end of the day,
• 1:13:21
  I love community.
• 1:13:22
  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...
• 1:13:36
  That really is my purpose, certainly professionally.
• 1:13:39
  That is my happy place.
• 1:13:42
  That is what I want to do when I wake up in the morning, regardless of the sacrifice.
• 1:13:47
  And so it required all of those things.
• 1:13:49
  And even with all of that, there were a lot of scary moments and there still are.
• 1:13:55
  And that is the entrepreneurial journey.
• 1:13:58
  For people who are listening, who are, a lot of them are entrepreneurs.
• 1:14:01
  A lot of them are building their first company.
• 1:14:04
  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.
• 1:14:14
  What's that one lesson that you want to leave everybody with?
• 1:14:16
  The most important thing that I have learned over and over again is the most important question is not what, it's who.
• 1:14:25
  And who could be, who am I starting this venture with?
• 1:14:29
  Who am I going to seek for investment funds?
• 1:14:31
  Who am I building this for?
• 1:14:32
  Who is my customer?
• 1:14:33
  But so many entrepreneurs start by asking what?
• 1:14:37
  What should I build?
• 1:14:38
  What's the competitive advantage?
• 1:14:40
  What's my distribution strategy?
• 1:14:41
  All of those things are important, but to me, way more important by an order of magnitude
• 1:14:47
  is the question of who.
• 1:14:49
  First of all, thank you for everything.
• 1:14:51
  I just want to give people the opportunity to connect with you.
• 1:14:53
  So where do you want to send people?
• 1:14:54
  So we'll put everything in the show notes, all the links, everything, but social, where do you want them to go?
• 1:14:59
  Easy to find me on X and LinkedIn.
• 1:15:02
  And increasingly, I'm going to start on Instagram as well.
• 1:15:05
  So any of those three.
• 1:15:07
  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.
• 1:15:14
  You can only pass on one lesson.
• 1:15:16
  What would it be and why?
• 1:15:17
  The lesson would be to enjoy the journey because the only asset that we cannot make more of is time.
• 1:15:25
  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 –
• 1:15:39
  I wish I could just hold on to those moments forever.
• 1:15:42
  And so enjoying the journey and taking advantage of the roses along the way, it's so important because it all goes too fast.