Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia on bowling alone, AI bots, and why the heartland is happier than the coasts

**Auren Hoffman** (0:00)
Well, fellow Daaners, my guest today is Nirav Tolia. Nirav is the co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor, a neighborhood social network with over 100 million users across 345,000 communities worldwide. After stepping down to Nextdoor CEO in 2018, he returned to lead the company in 2024 Nirav, welcome.

**Nirav Tolia** (0:19)
It's a pleasure to be here, and you did not mention that not only am I one of the founders of Nextdoor, I am a friend of Auren Hoffman for multiple decades now.

**Auren Hoffman** (0:30)
We're all 30 year friends. I mean, that's how old we are.

**Nirav Tolia** (0:34)
I saw that in the notes. I was hoping that you wouldn't actually give the amount of time we've been friends specific shape, because that ages us, but we're okay.

**Auren Hoffman** (0:43)
That's a good point. It's a good point since we're three years old. And by the way, disclaimer, I'm also a Nextdoor shareholder, so I want to just disclaim that for everyone to know that. Now, you spent your career like, you're kind of like the OG of communities. You know, you did opinions back in the day. Now you're doing Nextdoor. What do you think like the Internet still hasn't figured out about communities and identity?

**Nirav Tolia** (1:05)
It's a great question. And I don't know that I think that the Internet hasn't figured it out per se. I just think the different eras of the Internet require different things when it came to creating online community. And Reid Hoffman has this expression, or maybe it's a theory that entrepreneurs tend to work on the same problem. Their entire careers. And that has certainly been true for me. The reason that I'm even working on the Internet is because when I was an undergrad at Stanford, I was exposed to Usenet, which was the Internet pre-web browser. So Usenet was a series of news groups where people would come together and talk about things that interested them. And that was the earliest implementation of online community. Then, of course, there was the web. We actually had the explosion of chat. We had social media services, right? So I think there are a couple of trends that I would point to in online community that I think are worth mentioning. The first is the Internet originally was anonymous when it came to online communities. Identity tended to be more around your login name, LonelyGirl13, if you remember that. That was a little meme way, way, way back, right? And then progressively, particularly with the introduction of Facebook, you had to verify who you were. You had to use your real name. And in the case of Facebook, you had to have a university email address, which gave you some credibility. And so I think this trend of going from anonymity to verified identity, that is one of the biggest and most important things that has happened when it comes to community, because as I often tell people, if folks know who you are, you have a reputation to protect. And if you have a reputation to protect, you will act a certain way versus if you feel like no one knows who you are and your reputation can't be harmed by what you do, people will act very differently.

**Auren Hoffman** (3:02)
Yeah, or if you can burn it, which is like, you know, if your reputation gets bad, you could just start a new one all of a sudden. Like if I could just keep changing my name and get a new identity every month, it'd be different.

**Nirav Tolia** (3:12)
Yeah, one of the things I learned very early on when we were starting Opinions is that the notion of incentives is a very important one when it comes to building online community. And to your point, if your incentive is to protect your reputation, then you will actually try to be the best version of yourself online the same way that we are offline. If there is no incentive, because the reputation is not harmed or frankly even benefits from what you do, then you can act very differently. You may be flip it. You may not care if you do things that offend people, right? So this arc of people caring deeply about their reputations, that's nothing new. What's new is on the Internet for a long time, you couldn't tell who people were. And now you can. I think what's so interesting about that trend is with the emergence of AI now, and in particular AI agents and bots, I'm hearing crazy statistics like 30% of the tweets or the responses to tweets and 30% of the responses to LinkedIn posts are created by AI bots. And so now you have this notion of identity that's not even really human, which I think is kind of problematic and will continue to be problematic. The other big trend that I would point to is community originally was thought of as almost a set of hobbyists that are getting together because they're really passionate about sports or DIY or technology.