How I Built This with Guy Raz15 Sep 2025

Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global

Many of us don’t know our neighbors anymore — and Nirav Tolia wanted to change that. He walked away from millions in stock options at Yahoo and eventually co-founded Nextdoor, the hyperlocal social network where neighbors share local news and recommendations. Along the way, he learned that for a digital service, Nextdoor demanded a ton of manual work: drawing neighborhood boundaries with Sharpies, sending individual “invite” postcards by snail mail, talking to neighbors about the information they wanted. After 8 years of grind, Nirav stepped away as CEO, only to return 6 years later to spearhead an ambitious rebrand of Nextdoor, which now has 100 million users around the world.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

Why Nirav walked away from millions in stock options to launch his own business
How the failure of an early business helped fuel Nextdoor’s success
How not having an initial vision for your brand can be a superpower.
Why apps that focus on “local” are so hard to master
Why Nirav believes” local” is a massive untapped opportunity in tech.

This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant. Our audio engineers were Kwesi Lee and Jimmy Keeley.

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