Why Human Connection Will Become a Luxury | Nirav Tolia

Nirav Tolia (0:00)

Today, if you're not an AI created company, you're at risk, and that goes for every company, no matter how successful those companies are. The companies that will be able to make that transition from non-AI native to AI fluent, those are gonna be the ones that own their own distribution, that own their own content, and then they also have to adopt AI themselves. And so if you relied on Google for traffic, it's a very difficult landscape right now. If you don't own your own content, chances are it's already inside an LM.

SPEAKER_2 (0:32)

Hello everyone, and welcome back to MTS. Today I'm joined in person by Nirav Tolia, the co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor. Nirav originally founded the company and ran Nextdoor until 2018, and then he came back as CEO in 2024 to rebuild the company. And Nextdoor recently reported that this was one of their strongest financial quarters in history, and they're all making a way bigger push into AI. So Nirav, I'm so excited for you to join us today on MTS.

Nirav Tolia (1:02)

Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here.

SPEAKER_2 (1:04)

Thank you for joining as well. I've heard of Nextdoor.

I use it. I live in a neighborhood, and so it's like when I was a lot younger, it was one of my favorite social media platforms because you can get all the scoop from your neighbors. But I am curious because this last earnings report was pretty impressive. You shared how much you guys have grown. Tell me a little bit about those numbers and why that happened.

Nirav Tolia (1:27)

Well, we're transforming the company, and we've been around for 16 years, and 99 percent of American neighborhoods use Nextdoor today. So one of three households. So pretty good adoption, but I think the company can be a lot more successful. And so I came back in 2024 to try to spark that transformation. And as you said, this last quarter, we had a landmark of financial results, the best in our history, and I think we're just getting started.

SPEAKER_2 (1:50)

Oh my gosh, just getting started. And like you said, 16 years old. I remember as I was doing a bit of research for this, I was like, Nextdoor, that's, I was like, I used that company a decade ago. You know, I was using that product a decade ago. And so 16 years old, you typically don't see that. You typically see 16 year old companies where now with the AI boom, you either see them completely fall off the earth, other types of startups get a lot more involved, but that's not been your case. Do you know what's actually happening? So under the hood, tell me about what's actually happening.

Nirav Tolia (2:20)

Well, you bring up a really interesting point, which is today, if you're not an AI created company, you're at risk. And that goes for every company, no matter how successful those companies are. And certainly a company like Nextdoor, which was founded in the summer of 2010, there was no AI back then, right? And so we didn't have the opportunity to be an AI company because it didn't exist. So the real question is, what do we do now? And how do we survive? And the good news is the companies that will be able to make that transition from non AI native to AI fluent, those are going to be the ones that own their own distribution, that own their own content, and then they also have to adopt AI themselves. And so let me talk about all three of those things. The first is owning one's own distribution. Really, the story of the consumer Internet has been, where am I going to get my traffic? How are consumers going to hear about me and visit me? And what we've seen the last couple of decades is the majority of traffic has come from places like Google.

Now AI comes along and we go directly to that GPT or we go directly to another LLM of some sort. And even Google is showing its LLM results before it shows other listings. And so if you rely on Google for traffic, it's a very difficult landscape right now. The good news for Nextdoor is we never did rely on Google for traffic. All of our traffic, we have 100 million, actually more than 100 million registered users on Nextdoor, they all come directly to Nextdoor. They don't come through Google for the vast majority of them, right? And that's a great advantage. That gives us one great way to stay alive in this new AI world. The second is owning one's own content. If you don't own your own content, chances are it's already inside an LLM, and we would all rather go get it in that LLM that does a great job of packaging that content versus going to 10 different sites like we used to.