For his second stint as Nextdoor’s CEO, Nirav Tolia is ‘refounding’ the company

Nirav Tolia isn’t just a co-founder of Nextdoor, the neighborhood-based social network. After serving as the company’s inaugural CEO, then stepping away for five and a half years, before returning to the top spot in 2024, Tolia now considers himself a “refounder.”

And refounding, as Tolia explains it, means redefining and rediscovering the foundation of the company, which was necessary after its stock plummeted over 80% since its IPO five years ago.

Tolia spoke with Founder Brew about how his time apart from the company helped him come back stronger, Nextdoor’s future, and motivating employees to turn things around.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about the decision to return to Nextdoor, and what you learned while you were away.

When I left Nextdoor, that was the first time in my career that I can remember having enough time to truly reflect on that founder’s journey. A lot of founders talk about the founder’s journey, because it’s a very similar evolution that founders go through, where there’s nothing, and then if you’re really lucky, there’s something. And then that something starts to grow, and then you’re on a roller coaster, and you’re trying to grow that thing, and it ends up being very different at every stage than maybe what it was at the prior stage, and you don’t have a lot of time to reflect. You don’t have a lot of time to be introspective or to take a step back and observe what’s going on because you’re in it.

[Reflecting is] not something that founders typically do. So getting to refounding and getting to the idea of a multiple-time founder, one of the really powerful things is whether by your choice, or because you’ve been forced to step away—and typically it is the latter with founders. Because when you start a company, it’s like one of your children. You never want to leave. You never think you can leave. But sometimes you’re not the right leader anymore, and so you have to step away. Whether that’s through assistance from your board of directors, or whether you make the decision yourself, but you get away, you reflect, and then you come back. And not only are you refreshed from an energy perspective, you’ve had the opportunity to reflect on the things that you’ve learned, the things you like, the things that you didn’t like, the things that worked, and the things that didn’t work.

I left at the end of 2018. I was completely burned out. I was unable to have the space or even the calmness to reflect on some of those things I just mentioned. What do I like about the job? What do I not like? What am I good at? What am I not good at? What does the company need? What does it not need? And so I was no longer an effective leader for that reason. But I stepped away with no idea that I would ever come back, and frankly, I decided I’m never going to be a CEO again. I’m never going to be a founder again. I was lucky enough to do it three times; I was lucky enough to have some success, and there are enormous sacrifices in being a founder because there’s really no work-life balance when you’re a founder. And so I didn’t want to do it again, and that’s the way you feel when you leave.

Then, over a period of years, two things happened. One is, I was able to reflect and recharge, and in many ways, get my love back for the things that make you want to be a founder: creating something out of nothing, working with a great group of people, taking on an enormous challenge, and making it almost a mission, which is really what matters. It’s not just a business opportunity; it’s your calling. It’s the thing that you feel like you were put on this earth to do. You get all that magic back. So that happened. The other thing that happened is Nextdoor continued to succeed for a while, and then it hit a wall, and started to deteriorate. And when you watch that, and you’re running the company, it’s hard. When you watch that, and you have no control over the company, it’s devastating.

I was watching it from afar. I was still on the board, so I had a close vantage point, but I wasn’t operating the company, which is the ultimate vantage point. And it became clear to us as a board that in order to try and help the company regain its footing and survive, and then ultimately thrive, we needed a change in leadership. And that’s when I had the opportunity to come back—again, not knowing, literally until I was back, that I was going to do that. And so I came back more than anything for the love of the game, the love of Nextdoor.

What was going wrong, and how are you fixing it?

It was really [that] every part of the company was being operated in a suboptimal way, and again, it’s not because there were bad people or lazy people or folks who didn’t care…It was just headed in the wrong direction. And so every effort was leading it in that direction, and every effort needed to be evaluated and then ultimately modified. In particular, the company lost sight of the fact that we exist because of our product…And we had started, in the pursuit of business metrics, to do things that, in the short term, would drive business metrics, but in the long term, we knew were not good for our users. And when you do a couple of those things, OK, maybe it doesn’t make a difference. But when you do 100 of those things, it adds up, and all of a sudden, the product looks completely different.

Nextdoor has always been about community and building community, and it shifted from being about building community to, like many other social networks, being something that tried to amplify attention. To give you a very specific example, Nextdoor is sometimes criticized because neighbors argue on the platform. Well, it turns out that if you take away the specifics of a conversation, you just look at the metrics—the same way lots of people look at a car accident on the highway—a lot of people will look at a disagreement between neighbors that’s going on next door, and so those metrics may be high. [But] the overall vibe and feeling and ability to build community is actually going down. There were many decisions being made like that, where on the surface it looked like a good decision because it was driving business success, but underneath, the community was being underserved.

The biggest thing over the last two quarters [is] we’ve grown our audience. The audience was shrinking, and so to turn that around and even stabilize and then start to grow it is a pretty big deal. The thing that I’m probably proudest of is that I feel like we’ve rediscovered the focus on community. Ultimately, I think [that] will lead us to the promised land. And it’s not easy because the community had been ignored, and there were many things that were “working” and were more efficient because we weren’t community-building. Community-building cuts against most of the best practices when building an internet company, because you can’t really do it at scale.

You can’t turn this stuff around immediately—you have to do the same thing that got you where you were, which is 100 good things that then ultimately will add up to the results that we’ve had the last couple of quarters. We didn’t have great results the last two quarters because we’ve only been doing the right things for the last six months. It took us two years.

How do you create an environment where people are comfortable being honest that things aren’t working? Especially when you’re coming back and people have worked so hard, and then you’re saying, “Hey, this isn’t working anymore.”

I think that’s actually very simple. You model it as a leader. You don’t stop with the candor of what’s not working. You pair the candor of what’s not working with the optimism of where we can go. When I say the product’s not good enough, I don’t think of that as a criticism. I think of it as an opportunity.

This is an incredibly hard problem, and no one’s been able to solve it. Forget Nextdoor; no one has been able to solve this problem of, how do we use technology to create stronger neighborhoods and strengthen local communities? No one’s been able to do that, and so how lucky are we to have the opportunity and to have 100 million registered people that are going after it, and to have the passion we have, and have the talented people we have to go make a difference? And we are making a difference to 25 million people a week. How do we turn that into 250 million? That strikes me not as a deficiency but as an opportunity.

There’s a way to summarize or at least clarify the conversation into a very easy framework that founders can think about, which is “who,” “why,” “how”…I tried to bring together people who were like-minded in their belief in the power of the mission and the potential of the opportunity. That’s “who.”

Then we talked about the mission in this conversation. That’s “why.” You have the “who,” and then the next thing is “why”: Why do we think this is worth the enormous sacrifice that it is going to take? And then you get to the question you just asked, which is “how.” If you have the correct “who,” and you have a really compelling “why,” then you can start to say, “OK, well, the ‘how’ is, ‘Let’s articulate that mission.’” And the “how” is, “Let’s try some things.” The “how” is, “Let’s measure ourselves based on these criteria and see if we can actually move the dial in the right direction.” And then before you know it, you’re just executing.