The Trust Economy: Nirav Tolia on Communitas, Al, and Rebuilding the Internet Around Human Connection

Watch on Youtube

Listen on Spotify

What becomes valuable when artificial intelligence makes information—and misinformation—nearly limitless? According to Nextdoor CEO and Co-Founder Nirav Tolia, the answer is trust.

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Nirav joins Brett House and Rio Longacre for a wide-ranging conversation about the internet’s evolution from the age of information to the age of intelligence—and why that transformation must be accompanied by a renewed age of human connection.

Nirav reflects on lessons from his career as an entrepreneur and early Yahoo employee, his return to lead Nextdoor, and the challenge of building a digital platform around real people, verified identities, and actual neighborhoods. He also speaks candidly about the unintended consequences of optimizing social platforms for short-term engagement, including how outrage and complaints can drive clicks while ultimately eroding loyalty and trust.

The conversation explores Nextdoor’s effort to move beyond the traditional attention economy. That includes protecting neighborhood conversations from outside AI models, using technology to elevate constructive local recommendations, connecting residents with small businesses, and bringing professional local journalism into the same environment as neighborhood discussion.

Nirav also shares a personal experience in which an AI system admitted to fabricating information to make its response more compelling—a moment that challenged even his deeply optimistic view of the technology. His conclusion is not that we should reject AI, but that we must pair its extraordinary intelligence with human judgment, transparency, and authentic relationships.

Brett, Rio, and Nirav discuss:

• Why trust becomes more important as AI-generated content proliferates

• The tension between building trust and removing friction

• Why Nextdoor does not license private neighborhood conversations to large language models

• How platforms can resist outrage-driven engagement loops

• The difference between advertising that interrupts and advertising that provides genuine utility

• Why verified human identity matters in a world increasingly populated by bots and AI agents

• Nextdoor’s approach to recommendations through “Faves” rather than negative star ratings

• How local journalism supports civic engagement, informed debate, and healthy communities

• The risk of AI disintermediating publishers and other original sources

• Why online conversations should become gateways to offline relationships

• How AI agents might serve residents and neighborhood businesses without pretending to be human

• Why the next generation of the internet should be measured by human value—not simply time spent

At the center of the episode is the idea of communitas: the solidarity, warmth, and shared sense of belonging that emerges when people genuinely come together. AI can summarize knowledge, accelerate work, and help us make decisions—but it cannot replace community itself.

As Nirav argues, the future should not be framed as artificial intelligence versus human beings. The opportunity is to use AI to strengthen human judgment, facilitate real-world connection, and help people love where they live.

Listen now and join the conversation about what it will take to rebuild the internet around trust, utility, and human connection.

#SignalAndNoise #NiravTolia #Nextdoor #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #TrustEconomy #Communitas #HumanConnection #FutureOfTheInternet #SocialMedia #OnlineCommunities #CommunityBuilding #LocalCommunities #LocalJournalism #DigitalTrust #TechLeadership #Entrepreneurship #ResponsibleAI #AIEthics #VerifiedIdentity #LocalBusiness #CivicEngagement #FutureOfMedia #Technology #Podcast

Read the full transcript below.

---

Brett (00:00.829)

Hey everybody, w welcome back to Signal and Noise. I'm Bret House, joined by my co-host Rio Longacre, and today's guest is Nirav Tolia. Got that right, CEO and co-founder of Nextdoor. welcome to the show. Nextdoor for those that have missed the memo is a hyperlocal social Yeah, I doubt that there's many, it's a hyperlocal social network that connects verified neighbors with their actual neighborhoods to show recommendations, local news.

Rio Longacre (00:06.272)

Everyone?

Rio Longacre (00:20.002)

I doubt I doubt there's many, but you never know. Yeah.

Brett (00:29.223)

Community information I actually just went and re-signed in. I hadn't signed in for a while. I do get the the next door newsletter emails. it's got roughly and these these numbers might be a little outdated, Nerav, but it's it's roughly 110 million verified neighborhoods, 22 million weekly users, across nearly 350,000 neighborhoods and 11 countries. So I actually did not realize the one point of that I didn't realize was how global it is.

I actually thought it was much more of a r a US at least North America oriented company. So you

Nirav Tolia (01:01.054)

And and in the US, one of three households. So you were right in that the majority of the users are in the US. That's where we started, obviously. And that's where we have I think over ninety percent of neighborhoods using next door and one in three households.

Brett (01:04.313)

One in three households.

Brett (01:15.035)

Yep, yeah. And my neighborhood is Montrose, which is a small n a historical section of South Orange, so I get the Montrose news, which is really interesting. yeah, it's it's very it's actually hyper local to my specific neighborhood within the the larger village or town that I live in. And but you just returned as CEO in twenty twenty four. You've been working on this for a long time, right? And you've led, you know, arguably a significant transformation of the company. Reimagining X doors around trust.

Rio Longacre (01:23.884)

I get the Platte Park news here in Denver. Yep.

Brett (01:43.77)

AI powered experiences, verified identities, local utility, at a time when consumer expectations for digital platforms is obviously and clearly changing. consumer behavior is certainly changing. and beyond next door, you're known as a well-known entrepreneur investor. you're a recurring guest shark on Shark Tank, right? and you've advised and invested Zillow, SurveyMonkey, Quip, Stack Exchange, and a whole bunch of other companies. You're a Stanford grad.

Rio Longacre (02:04.876)

On Shark Tank, yeah.

Brett (02:12.731)

And I think even though you're in Texas now, are you a are you a Bay Area? is that where your main

Nirav Tolia (02:17.447)

For thirty years, for thirty years I was in Northern California, Stanford grad, as you mentioned, and living in San Francisco and loved it. But now I'm back in Dallas, Texas, and I grew up in Texas and my parents are here. My wife and three kids are here. My only sibling, my brother and his family is here. So I got my entire family back in Texas, but I'm also in San Francisco where we have a big office in New York where we have a big office and and I spent some time in Italy too, which I did after leaving next door the first time and before coming back.

Brett (02:47.365)

Yeah, yeah. And it's funny, I th when you start to talk about being from Texas, I can actually hear the twang starting to enter your voice a little bit. Like I I do the same thing when I say I'm from Saint Louis, Missouri originally. I'll start to sound a little bit more Midwestern. I I So you know

Nirav Tolia (02:59.601)

It's been beaten out of me, but maybe now it's coming back a little bit.

Rio Longacre (03:03.566)

Well, after a couple of drinks I sound like a New Yorker, so yeah.

Brett (03:05.763)

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Nobody can tell me from a New Yorker nowadays. But but one quote that I wanted to to throw out that I think is is really tied to your your founder story, 'cause you're kind of a serial entrepreneur, is is the story that nine quote unquote nine hundred and ninety-nine failures leading to one big success. And I think that's a pretty important lesson for people to understand that that not only have you pivoted next door out of a what was a f like a failed startup, right? Fan base, right? And and you don't really feel

the highs without the lows. And so you know the the founder story is fascinating. We'll certainly talk about that. But welcome to the show. That wasn't as rambling as I thought it might be. Great to have you and this is going to be a terrific conversation. And did I miss anything about your background that you want to highlight for the audience?

Nirav Tolia (03:51.696)

No, it's look, it's it's great to be here. And I know that there are a lot of entrepreneurs and founders that are listening. And so we can use lots of different metaphors. We can use the metaphor of the iceberg where all people see is what's above the surface and what's below the surface is a lot hairier and a lot more difficult with much more adversity. But yeah, that line you used about nine hundred and ninety-nine failures leading to one big success. That is in many ways what it feels like to start a company. And and in in

Some ways you have to have the failures to learn enough to enable the success. And I would say with Nextdoor, we are still experiencing that learning. And I don't think we've had nearly the amount of success that we have the potential to have. But as you mentioned, I've come back to the company two years ago. You said relatively recently, I think of entrepreneurship as doggier. So even though it's only been two years, it has felt like a long time.

Brett (04:25.617)

Yeah.

Brett (04:45.477)

Like an eternity?

Rio Longacre (04:46.733)

It's like fourteen in dog years, yeah.

Nirav Tolia (04:47.205)

It has felt like an eternity, and we started the company in in the summer of 2010. So, you know, I'm I'm not at two decades, but you know, I am more than one and a half decades into this company. And at the same time, founders will know this as well. It is a privilege to be building something that one was lucky enough to create from scratch. And so it was me and my co-founders, obviously. It wasn't just me, but to be working on this company and working on this concept of taking

Taking the power of technology to strengthen local community, that's a privilege. And it's something that gets me out of bed even today, after 15 or 16 years, just as excited as I was back in the summer of 2010.

Brett (05:32.228)

That's awesome.

Rio Longacre (05:32.568)

Well it's well we're thrilled to have you on here and I know we tried to make this happen at Cannes but schedules didn't align. I think by the time we started talking we only had a couple of slots left, but this worked out better because this we have a chance to do a longer form conversation now, which I think is going to be a lot of fun and then I also love the fact that you've come back to your company, yeah, to go into founder mode, I'm guessing. And it sounds like it's gonna be a lot of fun. you know, th I think that's been an interesting trend in tech. like Sergei Brennan went back to Google, right? I think was it about eight

couple of years ago and there's been some really like they've been shipping incredible product and product updates ever since. So I'm sure there's something similar happening over there. But near like we wanted to have you on this for for I mean hearing the story about next door is super cool. And we're all, as Brett mentioned, we you know we both are on the list and interact with it. But we thought the bigger kind of theme here, if you really look over the past 20 years or so about the internet, everyone's optimized for scale, engagement, attention. Those have been the metrics people

Yeah, people invest in, they you know, that's how how companies are built, right? And we measured success by things like clicks, right? Impressions, followers, time spent, engagement. But I feel with AI becoming more prominent, it's starting to change the equation and the term trust is becoming much more important, right? Like which when every when the c the cost of content production goes to zero, when

a lot of things that humans do and become totally automated, it all boils down to something that's that's f I think harder to define and harder to generate and more imp more valuable, which is trust itself. And that's why we've been we've been fascinated by what you've got going on next door, whether it's the verified journalist or AI powered neighborhood recommendations or the privacy first advertising approach you've taken, it's a it's a really cool service that helps people make real world decisions that impact their lives. So we wanted to dig into that and

Get your opinions on it. And maybe we can start out by by asking a question about that. Do you believe we're entering a new era right now where trust is more important more important than things like attention and it's becoming maybe even the internet's most valuable currency now? Thoughts on that?

Nirav Tolia (07:42.238)

You know, I I felt that trust has been critical to internet success.

Really from the very beginning. And I was lucky to be one of the first hundred employees at Yahoo. Some of you may remember the old internet powerhouse Yahoo. And Yahoo was a trusted brand. And it's one of the reasons why it emerged in those early days as a guide to the internet that people relied on because they trusted it. And they trusted it because of the quality of the content. Now, what's happened over time is we have started to focus a little bit less on the what in terms of defensive.

Brett (08:06.447)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (08:17.387)

And we started to really rely on the who. Who's behind this? Who wrote this? Who's making this claim? Who's giving me this information and what's in the

Brett (08:24.625)

Yeah.

Brett (08:27.964)

'Cause we've been overwhelmed with so much synthetic content that you don't know where it's coming from, to your point.

Nirav Tolia (08:33.725)

Well, the synthetic content is actually AI in terms of the era of synthetic content, right? But even from the beginning on the internet, it felt like an explosion of information. In fact, we c we can talk about attention economy to trust economy, which is I think one of the transitions that we're going through. But in reality, the trust economy has always been important on the internet because it's not the real world.

Brett (08:46.426)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (09:02.737)

Right? One of things that's so interesting about next door is in the real world, when you meet someone, you know so much about them just by the fact that you're in the same physical space. You know what they look like, you know how they dress, you know how they carry themselves, you know how they treat you. Those are all things that are very difficult to understand in the virtual world, right? But if you think about that virtual world, because it's two-dimensional, because you can start to manipulate it through filters or avatars or other

Brett (09:04.764)

It's true.

Brett (09:24.239)

Yep.

Nirav Tolia (09:32.604)

Other things, right? What do we rely on to trust the information and the people that we see online? And I think that's really been from the very beginning. In fact, if you think about, let's contextualize next door for a second, right? In the early days of social media, and social media has really been the proponent of this attention centric economy. In the early days of social media, I'm talking about prior to Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace, you didn't have to use your real name.

Brett (09:57.946)

Mm. Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (10:00.775)

You could be Lonely Girl thirteen, right? Like that was the avatar. Your avatar could be anything, and then you would have no idea. Facebook comes along then and LinkedIn comes along and they say you have to use your real name. And LinkedIn says you have to you have to verify that you work at the company that you say that you

Brett (10:02.619)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (10:19.057)

you work at. And Facebook says you have to verify that you go to the college that you say that you attend. And that was absolutely innovative at the time and it was innovative from a trust standpoint. Because you can trust someone if you know more about them that's verified.

Brett (10:24.891)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (10:32.174)

But

But digging into that a little bit, like the scalability of trust. Like so Facebook started out, you're right, like you had to v verify you were at this college. This is probably when it was called the Facebook, right? back back when it first started. And people had that trust and they were able to build communities. But I I think the perception is that as it scaled, as the incentives started to pile on to more engagement, more money, more data, more more at no more advertising.

Let's it maybe it lost something of that trust along the way. And I think a lot of people don't trust platforms that much anymore because of this a as they scaled, they they maybe lost their way a little bit. Thoughts on the scalability of trust and like what you've done at next door.

Nirav Tolia (11:16.189)

Well you no but you're you're articulating you're articulating the conundrum, right, which is trust is built through things that create friction. If you think about how do you trust someone, well you trust them after you get to know them. But getting to know them takes time. That's friction. Right? On the other hand, you have the internet where companies want to get to a billion users as fast as possible. And so what are we taught?

As entrepreneurs and founders, we are taught to remove friction. So Facebook started by saying you had to verify that you were at a particular college, but to really grow and to really follow that hockey stick, that was removed. LinkedIn used to be a place where you had to verify that you worked at a particular place, but you don't have to do that anymore. And so as a result, you now have Facebook.

Rio Longacre (11:51.47)

Yeah to get rid of that, yeah.

Brett (12:01.861)

But you still you still have to authenticate Yeah, you still have to you

Rio Longacre (12:02.466)

God, you LinkedIn's gotten s well, you can authenticate, but that's an option. But it's gotten so bad. It's funny. I posted this thing on LinkedIn the other day about a lot of people using it to try to like for dating, which I think is super creepy and weird. And I it was an article that was in the San Francisco Examiner, I I think, right? or San Francisco Chronicle. And then I posted that and a lot of people commented. It's funny, I when I went home that that night, my wife said, you know, I saw that post you made. I can't tell you how many creepy guys

Brett (12:15.065)

Yeah, I saw that.

Rio Longacre (12:28.44)

try to like reach out to me on LinkedIn. She's like, I just blocked them, but it's really weird. You posted that. It's an increased trend we're seeing more and more and more. And to your point, it's because they're they're not there's I don't even know if they're real accounts. It could be bots, but let's assume they are. They're certainly not showing who they're who they really are in real life or where they work.

Nirav Tolia (12:44.061)

Well, the number that I hear is 30% of the comments on X and LinkedIn are created by bots. And so that there are two really interesting mega trends that I think are critical for all of us as CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs, senior executives.

Rio Longacre (12:51.544)

Yeah, believe it.

Nirav Tolia (13:00.369)

We have to be tuned into these things. One of them is the one that you've articulated, right? Which is it's not just about attention. Attention's important because you want an engaged audience and if you're trying to reach that audience or if you're trying to provide distribution to others that are trying to reach that audience.

You need to make sure that the audience is engaged. And that's where all of these attention metrics like time spent and loyalty and repeat visitation and all of these things come into play. And they are relevant. We can call them attention-centric metrics, right? But they are relevant because they are communicating that the audience is engaged and that the audience is paying attention. And that's really important. However, you need to make sure that the audience is who you think it is. And so that's one of the big mega trends as we go from attention to trust.

Brett (13:36.293)

Yep.

Nirav Tolia (13:46.044)

Right. The other big mega trend to me is, and we've talked about it a little bit with we we've said synthetic information, but if you go back to the very beginning of the internet, the internet when it was born was really about the age of information. It was about providing access to information that was locked up. I mean, can you imagine the old days when you didn't have the internet, you would go to a library, right? Before Amazon, you'd have to go to a bookstore, right?

Brett (14:08.217)

Yeah. Microfiche. I used I used to run through microfiche, you know, you're pr projecting it onto a screen, right?

Rio Longacre (14:12.428)

You remember doing that? If you had to research something, yeah.

Nirav Tolia (14:14.609)

And so you've got you've got the age of information, right? And we've been living in the age of information and we've seen these incredible innovations that have made access to that information easier and easier and easier. It went from mainframe to desktop to laptop to mobile phone where you could carry in your pocket information.

Around the world, right? You didn't have to go anywhere. You could just carry it in your pocket. Now I think the mega trend, in addition to going from the attention economy to the trust economy, the other mega trend is we're moving from the age of information to the age of intelligence. And that's what AI brings, right? And

Brett (14:50.543)

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, it's the n it's the Nespect action, it's the it's the predictive analytics capabilities that that allow you to go from just insights and dashboards to some action.

Rio Longacre (14:59.832)

Yeah, but it intelligence, you c you can buy intelligence. You can you can using these large language models or different different applications of AI, you can actually access intelligence and it's getting it's very smart, which I think is fascinating.

Brett (15:03.578)

Yeah.

Brett (15:09.229)

Yeah. Yeah. Well the

Nirav Tolia (15:10.535)

Well, and and let me let me tell you why I think trust matters even more in the age of intelligence than it did in the age of information. In the age of information, it was about access to millions of different sources that were very difficult to access in the past, right? So if you think about it before, you'd pick up the newspaper and you'd have one article about something that was going on, and that would be the source of truth. Then the internet comes along and you can access any information, right? And you have all of those sources of truth.

Brett (15:17.659)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Brett (15:26.021)

Yeah.

Brett (15:34.573)

Yeah, and they index all of this information.

Nirav Tolia (15:39.89)

Then you move to the age of intelligence. Now what does the age of intelligence do? The AI doesn't say to you, here are fifteen different articles about the same thing. The AI says, Here's my amalgamation of

Brett (15:47.789)

It curates and synthesizes.

Nirav Tolia (15:52.42)

All of those sources and I'm gonna hand it to you so it's as if you read all 15 of them, but now I'm giving you the summary, right? And many of us use LLMs to take so much information and the amount of time that it would have taken to take all that information and summarize it is massive and we can do it with LLMs. But here's the question: how is the LLM ranking one source against another?

Brett (16:17.337)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (16:17.457)

Right? And so that's where the trust comes in. And so before, at least we could say, all right, in the age of information, there are 20 sources, and I can decide on an atomic basis which one to trust and which one I don't trust. And that's based on brand, and that's based on my experience, and that bait, that's based on who has the byline. Right now you go to ChatGPT. ChatGPT did not write the article. ChatGPT just took 15 different versions of the article and summarized it.

Brett (16:42.158)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (16:47.371)

For you, but you have no way of knowing what came from what source. And that's dangerous.

Brett (16:50.073)

Yeah.

Yeah, and and it sh and it shifts that sort of responsibility back to the consumer to say, Hey, am I willing to interrogate the sources to ensure that I actually trust their summary? Right? and

Rio Longacre (17:03.521)

but it's the best when you asked it, show me the sources for this. And I've actually had this happen a couple of times where it found it found I found one time it found the perfect number for a slide I was creating for a client that really proved a point. And I said, Okay, that's almost too good. Sh show me the source, because I I won't need to put in footnotes for the slide. And it came back and said, I actually can't find the source. I said, Well, where'd you get it? I actually made it up. I took these other and it explained how how it made it up. Well, I found these three sources and I averaged these two and I did this. It's okay, it's actually very smart what it did, but

It's not I can't use it in a slide 'cause it's not it's not true. So I I I can't trust what it's showing.

Brett (17:34.935)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (17:34.974)

You know, I love that story because I am an unabashed believer, deep believer that AI is the biggest, most positive transformation that we will see in our lifetimes. And so I am not a doomer. I'm not a doomer. I I am a lover of technology generally, and specifically, I'm a deep believer in the power of AI. That said.

Brett (17:46.296)

Yeah. And I I think Ryu you and I agree to that, right? Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (17:57.0)

We have to pair it with human connection. Trust is actually in human connection. Human connection is only created when there's some kind of trust. And to your point, many of us now, when we have our LLMs, we create these markdown files. Right? So I have a markdown file that says, I'm Nirov Tolia, the CEO of next door. Here's how I like information. And in the markdown file, it says things like never lie, never make things up, never exaggerate, never believe that I'm right unless you prove

Brett (18:17.423)

Yep.

Brett (18:23.225)

Yep.

Cut off the dashes, please, and the arrows and the

Nirav Tolia (18:26.923)

in a third party. But then to but then to your point, Rio, I was working on something and the AI spit something towards me and I thought to myself, Wow

I had no idea that those things had happened in this particular case. I was not aware of those things. So I asked the AI, where did you find this information? Because this is really interesting. And the AI came back to me. This is after the markdown file has already been in the AI for months, and the AI comes back and says, I made it up. The information that I had for you was not compelling enough. I wanted to make it more compelling. So I made these things up. And I have to say that was a moment for me where all of my

Rio Longacre (18:52.478)

Right.

Rio Longacre (19:07.021)

That's wild.

Nirav Tolia (19:08.267)

Techno optimism. My utopian view of all of this stuff was shattered. And I'm still a huge believer, right? And I'm still a massive optimist. But to see that, I realized the technology is not infallible. And we need to pair it with human connection. We need to pair it with all the things that make us judges of the things that we see.

Brett (19:25.071)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (19:35.16)

Well, it but it's interesting. The technology is almost more human though in a lot of ways, because it's not deterministic. It's giving you probabilistic message outputs based on what it thinks you probably want, which I think is is wild. Actually shows the cre incredible creativity. so I understand it it can maybe shatter your view, okay, it's not gonna give me per like perfect results every time. I actually do still need, despite the markdown files, I'll still d still need to interrogate these things. But the fact that the power of this thing that it can actually think creatively to actually make up something

Brett (19:35.514)

Yeah yeah, you have to you have to you have to

Rio Longacre (20:03.607)

that sounds reasonable and give it to you is is is is is absolutely insane. And we could like and I think we talked about this in a previous podcast, Brett, how people don't realize that these L L Ms, they've they passed a Turing test several years ago. Like they can like they can when you're w interacting with them, you will like if if you don't know it is, you might actually think you could easily be fooled to think it's a human, which I think

Brett (20:05.538)

Yeah.

Brett (20:15.833)

Yeah.

Brett (20:22.968)

Yeah. You cannot tell the difference. That's the Turing test is you can't tell the difference. We said in the last in one of the last podcasts. You can't tell the difference between human and artificial, when given a test and they run this across space f like like focus groups basically. And if you can't tell the difference, if it's almost impossible to discern the difference, then you pass the Turing test.

Rio Longacre (20:39.959)

Okay, but but but looking go ahead.

Nirav Tolia (20:40.019)

Well and and let me and let me give you l let me build on that for a second because I think you're exactly right. And and I tell fellow CEOs and I tell other executives, you're not really using AI until you are using these L LMs and these AIs as if they were people.

You literally have to treat them like people, right? But here's the interesting thing. When we talk about human connection, we talk about judgment, we talk about the ability as humans to know what's right and what's wrong and what's accurate and what's inaccurate, that's all fine and good if you're interacting with an AI in a subject area where you have some knowledge, right?

Brett (20:56.441)

Yeah.

Brett (21:15.194)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (21:15.911)

So if I go to an L L and I say, My earnings are next week and I need you to help me write my script and please take all of my previous transcripts and here's some articles that I think are really interesting and here are our results and here's my first draft and put it all together and give me something that I can start to chew on.

Right. And that's a that's a great use of an LLM and it's how we do it at next door, and it's really useful. But here's the thing. We can work with the LLM because all that information is our information, it's our first party information. Right. On the other hand, now let's go to another use of an LLM that lots of people have, which is asking an LLM about a medical condition, right? Or something related to health.

Brett (21:46.265)

Yeah.

Brett (21:55.738)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (21:55.89)

If I wake up one morning and I don't quite feel right, and I start asking the LLM, and the LLM leads me in a direction that makes me think I have something or I don't have something, I have no domain experience in the thing that I'm asking the LLM about. And so at that point, the AI is not only like sitting next to a Nobel Prize winner in terms of its capabilities and its access to information and its compute power, right? It's not only smarter than any human being. I have

Brett (22:22.115)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (22:25.833)

No way of really knowing whether it's right or wrong because I don't have any expertise in that area. So take a step back and think for a second. AI is amazing in areas where you have expertise because you can use it to harden your point of view and you can use it to further educate yourself, and you can use it to really question your assumptions in a way that's really powerful. But when you get into the use of AI, where it's most spectacular, which is areas that you don't know anything about.

Brett (22:32.77)

Yeah.

Brett (22:38.678)

Yeah, it's harder to apply critical thinking when you don't have expertise in that domain.

Brett (22:47.801)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (22:55.723)

That's also where it can be the most dangerous. So this is gonna be one of the interesting conflicts that we're gonna have to figure out.

Brett (22:57.956)

Dangerous, yeah. That's a good point.

Rio Longacre (22:58.902)

Yeah.

Brett (23:02.222)

Well, and and do you think the confluence of of of AI, one thing that we talked about in a couple of our our episodes is this con the the danger also lies with the fact that you've got these the social media trends that we've seen from a tr and and I think this ties back to the trust theme, kind of simultaneously happening with the with the growth and explosion of AI, right? Where you have kind of a lot of junk content. and I think the the point the larger point I want to make is that is that social media has certainly hurt consumers.

Rio Longacre (23:02.508)

Yeah, I ru

Brett (23:32.148)

Consumer trust in digital ecosystems, arguably. Right? And I and I'll and I'll say this anecdotally without you know quoting a study, but just hearing from my own children who are 17 and 19, and they feel like their engagement and their attention has been gamed, right? That they have been gamed to engage with content, whether it's on TikTok or go to Facebook, Instagram, Reels, because these algorithms are are.

Rio Longacre (23:36.045)

Well the algorithms have, yeah.

Brett (23:58.42)

optimizing content based on engagement and attention and time spent. And so they tend to drive people down these paths. you know, so you kinda you almost lose serendipity, right? You lose like the

Nirav Tolia (24:09.661)

You you you completely lose serendipity and in fact just to point out a couple of very specific things that I know we've all experienced. So the first is we have a conversation about something and it's a conversation. We're not on a device. We're talking with someone about something, right? Maybe we should go see that band this this weekend or hey, did you hear about this new restaurant? It looks really compelling, let's go try it. And the next time you open Instagram, you're seeing a story about that band or about that restaurant.

Brett (24:36.053)

It's spooky. Yeah. Yep.

Nirav Tolia (24:39.313)

Right. And you start to realize, wait, we've given these entities permission.

To listen to what we're saying. Now they aren't preying on our attention per se, at least in my opinion, they're not the way you said, right? What they're doing is they're trying to create, based on their algorithms, the content that one would find most compelling. And the greatest signal to know what's most compelling is me asking you, right? So if I ask you or I listen to you, I will know here are the things that Brett really cares about, and then I'll show them back to you. The problem is there

Brett (24:52.066)

Yeah.

Brett (25:05.09)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (25:14.859)

There's no way that listening to a conversation can tell me everything I need to know about bread, right? I mean you're a multifaceted person.

Brett (25:19.831)

Yeah. And and and there's not an ex and there's not an explicit ask from your device or your platforms as to whether or not they can listen to you. Right? And so it's perceived as surveillance versus

Rio Longacre (25:30.488)

Well yeah, yeah. Well that's been that's been an ongoing debate or devices listing. It's funny. I I I remember one time I was in LAX waiting for a flight at the at the bar there and I went I ordered a Jim Beam and then I looked down at I think it was Twitter at that point hadn't switched to X yet, and then I saw an ad for Jim Beam and I said that you know, that it's and then you could make the argument that it actually geofenced me 'cause I was I was I was logged into the Wi Fi and knew I was probably at the bar and knows my

it it knows my relative age, I'm a male, so it would be the right and assuming they were already advertising on on the platform, I would be the the right I would be an audience they'd want to market to, but I thought that was really interesting and mak makes you think, are they listening? But like you were looking at the con like definitely listen yeah, yeah.

Nirav Tolia (26:13.267)

We're definitely listening. Just so there's no doubt. They are definitely listening.

Brett (26:14.859)

Yeah, there definitely isn't. And and and there are ways to there are ways to turn it off, but you've gotta actually inter you gotta you gotta look into how to do that. You've gotta ask how to turn it off. Yeah. Yeah.

Rio Longacre (26:19.446)

Again.

Nirav Tolia (26:22.739)

You'll also get worse content if you turn it off. That's the crazy thing, right? You're not gonna get as much stuff that is that is too cheap, right?

Rio Longacre (26:26.177)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You won't get you won't get the targeted stuff that that is true, right, right. But but looking at content itself, like with AI it's easier to create content. The cost of producing content's c plummeting close to zero. And the cost of creating like I mean if thirty percent of the comments on LinkedIn are by bots right now, I mean that's only going increase. So it's like in this world where AI is like you can create fake people, more content, like what happens to community? Like does

Brett (26:30.773)

It's less personalized.

Rio Longacre (26:55.447)

Does it does the community become obsolete or does it become more important? Thoughts on that?

Nirav Tolia (26:59.879)

I mean, I have a lot of thoughts on that. In fact, I think that's the whole premise of Next Door, and it has been since we started, which is I'll go back to pre-AI and then I'll bring it into AI. The reason we started Nextdoor is because while the internet had been unbelievably valuable in making geography and the physicality of the real world not nearly as relevant as it was prior to the internet. You know, think about pre-internet. If you wanted to meet someone, you had to go to a physical place and occupy that same space.

Space with them to meet them. Then the internet comes along. You can meet people virtually. There's a lot of leverage and scale there. There's a lot of good stuff that comes out of that, right? I mean, if you wanted to know what was going on in a particular place pre internet, you had to go travel there. Now, there are a lot of benefits to traveling there, right? But a lot of people can't afford it, they don't have time, whatever. Then all of a sudden the internet comes along and you can go there virtually, right? So there's amazing things that technology has done, I mean, to make us feel like we are in a

Place virtually, even though we're not there physically. With next door, we said to ourselves, okay, that's all great, but what has internet technology done to make us feel closer when we are in the same physical space? Because what had happened is we were so busy looking down at our devices and we were finding it so easy to meet people virtually that we stopped taking the time to go outside our front doors and meet people in physical space. So there had been a decline, and this started with televisions, by the way.

It was even prior to the internet because you could sit at home in your living room and watch television, and that was a lot easier than sitting on your front porch and talking to your neighbors. And so we start next door thinking. We believe in technology. We also understand that technology has had some unintended consequences in terms of making people more isolated and making people more likely to communicate virtually versus in the real world. Can we do something about that? And that was the original premise behind Next Door. As we think about it fairly,

Fifteen years from now.

Nirav Tolia (29:01.499)

I think that premise of using technology to make us closer to people in the real world, I think that's more important than ever. In fact, I would say that you have to follow or at least pair the age of intelligence with the age of human connection. You have to for practical reasons, and we've talked about a lot of the practical reasons, which is wait, is this synthetic content that's been made up that's trying to manipulate me? Or is this real, right? You only know it's real if you're talking to the person.

Brett (29:18.158)

Yeah.

Brett (29:26.733)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (29:31.356)

Person who created the content, so that's more utilitarian. But even from an emotional point of view, if we're only interacting with AIs.

It's very different than the connection we feel when we're connecting with human beings in the same physical space. So I believe that next door, with things like verifying the addresses where people live and trying to drive people off of the app into their neighborhood so that they can meet with each other in physical space in person, those are things that were the pioneering instincts that we had back in the summer of 2010 when we started the company. I think they're more important now.

I think they will become increasingly important because today, I mean, think about post-COVID travel has just shot up like crazy. It's grown much more than it was prior to COVID. Why is that? Because during COVID we realized we really love to go places, and yet during COVID we couldn't.

Brett (30:09.792)

No no

Nirav Tolia (30:30.873)

I believe that with the age of AI, we'll start using AI so much and it'll be so useful that we'll start to remember, hey, it's also kind of fun to have a real conversation with people. But it won't be easy to have those. And so we'll see.

Brett (30:41.622)

Yeah. And and Yeah. And do pe and do people do people go to a place like a domain like nextdoor dot com to do that, or do you have some concern with sort of AI disintermediation? Right? Where if if if a you know, think of like Reddit, right, and even Wikipedia that are that are primary sources for a lot of the L L Ms, where where I mean are you guys just a data layer that's powering

the chatbots when people are asking specific local questions? And is that where people arguably that's where people are largely going in terms of time spent and number of queries made directly to their their LLM of choice, right, to ask these questions. I mean do you fear from a from a disintermediation perspective that people will less likely go to nextdoor.com and more likely

Nirav Tolia (31:28.979)

Th the there there's massive disintermediation happening if you think about the folks who relied on Google search results as a traffic source in the past, right? Again with next door when we started the company, we were thinking deeply about trust. And one of the ways that we felt that we could build trust is by keeping all those neighbor conversations private. And so from the very beginning, next door conversations between neighbors were not available on the free web.

Brett (31:36.407)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (31:56.84)

You had to actually join the service, verify your address, and then you had access to them. It's not that people were talking about weird confidential things that we needed to keep secret, right? But it was more this idea that when you have a conversation with a neighbor, if you knew that it were being recorded and that Google would then take that recording and make it accessible for anyone to search, you would probably have a different conversation. Instead, let's just try to simulate as much as we can the real world. And in the real world, when you're having conversation with a neighbor, it's just between you and your neighbor. And so for Nextdoor,

Brett (32:00.759)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (32:26.763)

We've never relied on outside distribution. And even today, we have made the explicit decision to not license our information to any LLM because we feel like, look, if you can get next door content outside of nextdoor, yes, that could be valuable because a lot of us start our journeys today on Chat GPT or another LLM. But when you start it there, you don't have the context.

You don't know who the neighbor is. You don't even know the neighborhood that it came from. And so for us, it it it is a it is a difficult business challenge because we would undoubtedly get more awareness about next door and more people could access next door information if we were weaved into the LLMs. But we really want to make the point that next door is a special place where it's just for you and your neighbors. And in order to get that

Brett (32:57.826)

Yeah.

Brett (33:19.8)

So you haven't done any licensing agreements and I'm I'm assuming you've had to s s set up some tech, like robots dot txt text, you know, to to prevent crawlers from from entering the site.

Nirav Tolia (33:28.903)

From the very beginning we've had the robots.txt files. We've required, you know, real authentic logins and, you know, we're looking all the time for bots and that sort of thing, right? But you know, it's it's it's less for us, I would say, of a business driven decision. And it's more for us

Rio Longacre (33:36.29)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (33:46.896)

In our nature and in our DNA to say, look, let's take a step back and ask ourselves, how do these conversations happen in the real world between neighbors? They're not broadcast conversations. They're intimate conversations. And you know, if if you're in a conversation with someone and you don't recognize them and you're not sure they live in the neighborhood, it's a different conversation than the one you have with the person you recognize that you know who lives in the neighborhood. And so how can we simulate that?

Brett (33:58.722)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (34:16.779)

What we're trying to do is to make it easier for you to connect with people who live around you and to help you love where you live even more than you do. Right. And so to do that, we we have to create that same kind of environment that exists in the real world.

Brett (34:25.867)

Yeah. And and

Brett (34:31.595)

Yeah, which which part of it like creating that trust, you have to create d verifiable identities. So you can't have, you know, Lisa three one three that lives in Montrose in South Orange, which gives a certain amount of trust. But there has been some sort of reputation challenges and this might have been why you le when you left the company around and and it's funny 'cause I I

heard this from directly from friends and then I read about it as I kind of researched this podcast, right? That that the it's kind of a a a a place where you it's kind of a complaint it's sort of harnessing a complaint culture, you know, where you where you go to your your you know, like I'll go to my email. I actually stopped looking at my next door emails because I kept seeing these sort of sort of downward spiral complaint conversations about local things within my neighborhood. And I'm like it just had this sort of vibe to it where I'm like why do I want

Interact with that. So, how have you guys countered that sort of bad reputation sort of news that that we've heard a little bit about?

Nirav Tolia (35:27.805)

You know, it's a great point because what ended up happening with the emergence of the attention economy is that you would actually uprank any of the things that generated more clicks. And in the short term, people complaining generates more clicks than people saying nice things. It's a it's a strange quirk of human nature. It's not something that is next door centric, right? It's a little bit I mean

Brett (35:39.125)

Yeah.

Brett (35:46.591)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (35:50.989)

Well it's a lot of the problems with with Facebook, right? Is is exactly that.

Nirav Tolia (35:53.63)

You well and you've heard the expression rubbernecking, right? Like you're driving down the highway and you see the accident and you know you shouldn't look, but you rubberneck, you look at the accident and it's not like you care about watching people who are driving well, but you want to see the person who didn't drive well and and have the accident, right?

Brett (35:54.741)

Yeah.

Brett (36:09.121)

That's what creates the traffic jams around accidents oftentimes.

Nirav Tolia (36:12.219)

And so in the short term, that does actually drive clicks. And I think at Next Door, we got away, like many social platforms, we got away from thinking about the long term because you get very short term minded. And it it had this really, I would say, unintended but damaging effect, which is in the short term, yeah, the metrics went up. But in the long term, people said, gosh, my life is complicated enough. Last thing that I want to do is spend time on a service that makes me

where I live less. You know, remember what I just said a couple minutes ago. I said our job is to make you love where you live more.

Brett (36:43.882)

Yeah yeah.

Nirav Tolia (36:50.523)

Not less. And so the big change that we've tried to enact is if we think about long-term drivers of engagement and loyalty, it's delighting people. It's not giving them a place to moan and to complain, even though people want that, right? Particularly people who are frustrated. Like if you go have a bad experience in your neighborhood, you want to tell people about it. If you have a great experience, you want to tell people too, but not with the same urgency. So what we've tried to do is operate the good stuff.

Brett (37:03.755)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (37:16.247)

Well you probably it's probably the barbells though, right? You're getting the people who either like are r con con complaining about things like and then they they go to your to your site to complain or the people are really happy and want to share it. you're probably not getting a lot in the middle I I imagine typically when you look at engagement

Brett (37:29.621)

Yeah, yeah. Well and and that's but that's also something that's confirmed in statistics. Like when in the statistics course that I took at BU, not to not to go back to my academic background, but

Nirav Tolia (37:30.171)

You know, the the the intensity.

Brett (37:38.55)

That was one of the key sort of proven facts that he basically said when you're you know when you go to a Yelp, when you go to any sort of review site, that there tends to be a high propensity of people that are that are going to write reviews, that are gonna actively engage in this platform, that are either very negative or very positive, and it leaves out a statistically s significant sample, a huge sample, of everybody in the middle that's less likely to actually go and commit an action. Right? Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (38:00.702)

Well it's it's it's the bimodal distribution challenge. And actually I wanna I wanna dive into that because I think it's it's a really important point. So so the first thing is as it relates to human nature, which we're describing human nature now. That's why this was in your statistics class, you know, at BU versus it's not next door specific, right? It's not even social media or internet specific. It is human nature. And so the human nature part

Brett (38:13.472)

Yeah.

Brett (38:18.411)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (38:24.775)

We cannot control. We have over a hundred million verified neighbors. They're gonna talk about what they want to talk about, and that's good. That that is the way that natural community is, right? But here's where next door can actually drive the output. We can decide what to uprank and what to downrank. We can decide: are we gonna give more oxygen to the complaints? Are we gonna give more oxygen to the stories about neighborhood heroes? And let me actually dive into the reviews and what you mentioned about Yelp for a second, because I think it's really

Brett (38:46.379)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (38:54.699)

Really important to illustrate how our control is something we can exercise even amidst human nature. So you talked about it the right way. On Yelp, people are either giving something five stars or one star. And that's not really helpful at the end of the day because there are most businesses are going to be two, three, four stars, right? They're not going to be five or one, right? But you've got Yelp and you got the star rating, and then they start to average it, and you've got 3.72. And what does that really mean, right? Now, what do we do on next door? Because we also have lots of recommendations, in fact, historically.

Brett (39:08.811)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (39:09.025)

No.

Brett (39:19.915)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (39:24.619)

Historically, it's been one of the most popular things on next door is neighbors telling other neighbors who they love, like what they love and who they love in the neighborhood. And I'm talking about service providers, restaurants, etc., right? So we have taken a tact. We have this program called Faves. So you can fave, favorite a business. There's no star rating. And by the way, you cannot unfavorite.

Brett (39:36.79)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (39:50.076)

A business. So all you can do on Nextdoor from a rating standpoint is you can say, I love this pizza place.

I love this ice cream place. I love this plumber. I love this school. I love this place to go see the sunset in my neighborhood. And it's one vote per neighbor, so it's tied to a real person, never anonymous, right? It's not a star rating, so it's not, I kinda love it, I'd give it a 3.5. It's binary. It's either I recommend it or I don't, which is so much higher leverage for the person reading it. And then finally, we don't want to focus on the people.

Who say, and I hate that pizza place. I love this pizza place, but I hate that pizza place. So you don't come to next door to find the worst pizza places in your neighborhood. But next door is an amazing place for you to find the best ones. And so that to me is how intelligent technology design

Brett (40:32.917)

Mm.

Rio Longacre (40:37.057)

Right.

Brett (40:37.631)

Yeah, exactly.

Nirav Tolia (40:46.737)

can yield the right outcomes even amidst human nature where people say well I want to tell you the bad pizza place and we say look okay fine you want to talk about the bad pizza place what we're gonna bring to the top what we're gonna bring to the top is we're gonna bring we're gonna bring the best ones we're gonna bring the best ones because we have a core belief that people choose where they want to live because they want to love

Rio Longacre (40:57.75)

Go to Facebook.

Brett (40:59.159)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. If you want the doom loop, go to Facebook.

Nirav Tolia (41:12.019)

where they live. And let's make it easy for them to do that by showing them the best places to spend their time and money.

Rio Longacre (41:18.826)

I I love that. So pivoting for a second, I was reading some news about your company and I really liked some of the the moves you're making in new in the news journalism space. And and and on this pod, by the way, we've talked a lot about news journalism. We've had different people want to talk about the future of it, some of the challenges it's facing in terms of monetization with a referral traffic drying up and just some of the challenges they've had generally with advertising. love to dig into that a little bit. So combining verified identities

Brett (41:29.217)

Yes.

Rio Longacre (41:47.521)

community but credibility and like the emphasis on news journalism, which I think a lot of other social media sites have have pulled away from. I thought that was a very cool thing you're doing. Love you can tell the audience a little bit about that, what you're doing in this space.

Brett (41:56.139)

Hundred percent.

Nirav Tolia (42:01.236)

Well we have we have another big challenge in our country, which is civic engagement is way down.

Brett (42:05.461)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (42:05.737)

I mean, we we look certainly at national politics as something that we should avoid, right? Most people are like, that's the last thing in the world I want to talk about. But even politics on a local level where we are united, it's not a two-party system. I mean, we're all paying our taxes and the taxes are going towards certain things in the local community. But how do you really know what's going on? And how do you have a debate as to whether it's a good decision or a bad decision? How do you give feedback to local officials, right? That's a very natural place for next door to be helpful.

Because you don't have these conversations with your friends. You have these conversations with the people who live around you. And so that civic debate is really important. Unfortunately, we've seen a rapid and extreme decline in civic discourse because so much of it was driven by local journalism. Well, civility, civility in general, for some of the reasons that we talked about, right? But

Brett (42:53.928)

Yeah. Or in civility in discourse. Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (43:03.837)

There hasn't been a kind of foundation of information that we can go to to really understand the facts. Everything's in

Rio Longacre (43:12.608)

Well a lot of these local news sites have go have have not or the local newspapers have not survived. They've been scooped up by big by bigger ones and they and they ha and they ha a lot of them just have the same con same general content. Yeah. Sorry, cut you off.

Nirav Tolia (43:17.895)

They haven't survived or they're writing things that Yeah, they're they're

Brett (43:22.42)

Yeah, yeah, I was I was at Gannett when they did that. I mean they they absorbed a lot of local local newspapers and then basically ran national feeds into all of these local environments, which kills the whole purpose of local news, right? And then you're left you're left with a world where it's either fireman putting out a fire in a in the in a building or or rescuing a cat from you know, from a tree or like a local shooting and that's about all you see in local news. And so that's it's a challenge because

Nirav Tolia (43:50.202)

One one of the legends in our industry is a guy named Sir Michael Moritz. He's the original investor in Yahoo, which is where I went, you know, as I mentioned, and also the original investor in Google and, you know, many other huge companies. And he was quoted, I think about maybe it was a year ago, saying he believed that local news was as valuable to a local community as air, water, and electricity. Right? And and the reason for that is it the local news and the journalism.

Brett (43:56.384)

Yeah.

Brett (44:13.63)

Yeah, yeah. I did read that. I did yeah.

Nirav Tolia (44:19.985)

Provides the foundation of facts.

upon which we can have public discourse. And so what we realized at next door was, okay, we've got a lot of the discourse that's happening right now between people, largely because there's no other place where it can happen. We don't know our neighbors anymore. We don't go to places in the physical world to discuss things with them. But next door can be can be a force for good in that area. What we didn't have on next door though is we didn't have the local journalists. We didn't have the experts who were reporting about

Brett (44:49.418)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (44:53.067)

The factual things that were happening in those neighborhoods. And so we had a big, big, big effort over the last two years to bring local journalists to the platform through their publications. And look, we never said give us your content, we're gonna monetize it, and then we don't care what happens to you, right? We actually said we we said look.

Rio Longacre (45:09.664)

Fact you're sending content back to them, right? Back to these websites?

Nirav Tolia (45:13.405)

We think that you are really valuable and we want to drive you more traffic, and we think our audience may be interested in the stories you're writing. And so if you give us pointers, if you give us summaries, we'll link right out. And there's no economic exchange. We don't pay them, they don't pay us. It's simply do our users find the articles valuable? And I can tell you as a user of Nextdoor, I love the fact, and I live in Dallas, Texas, I love the fact that in addition to news about Highland Park, the neighborhood I live in, the Dallas Morning News.

one of the newspapers that I love and rely on is showing its teasers in the next door. And then not only can I access that information, but my neighbors are commenting about those stories. So I get the story itself and I get the discourse around it. And so we we think that there's a a really valuable way and symbiotic way for local journalism and professional journal journalism really to coexist with user generated content in a way that actually benefits both sides.

I think it would be a really, really dark world if we had no local journalism. That would be really difficult. How would we know what's really going on? I mean, we talk about trust as well, right? The AIs don't know. The AIs can't create content on their own. They don't have access to the information if local journalism goes away. So I think it's critical and I hope we do figure out a way to sustain these these institutions, because they're really important.

Brett (46:35.413)

Yeah.

Brett (46:42.132)

Yeah, no i they're important for democracy and I think I think when you have the balkanization of of sort of journalism that we've seen and in the firing of entire you know teams

across publications across this country, you know, it it leaves a vacuum, right? And what fills that vacuum, you know, Candace Owens fills that vacuum, right? There's people like that that come in and and I hear it from my own kids. I'm like, where are you getting this information? And then they quote something like that, a person like that. You know, you get charlatans and and that come in to to exploit the fact that you don't have facts. You don't have a foundational

That's based on journalistic the journalistic code and integrity, right? and it's a threat to democracy. It's a threat to civic discourse. Yeah.

Rio Longacre (47:27.249)

And civic engagement too. I mean if people like they're getting they're getting conspiracy theories. They're not getting the the local news, right? And s and I think that's definitely a problem. And the trend you you cited before, Brett, is I think accelerated as private equity's got into the into the news business as well. They're buying these local stations, local newspapers, and then just pumping national feeds in them and then getting rid of a lot of the staff and even trying to do a lot with AI. So it's so it's unfortunately a trend. But so Nairov, just to to summarize what you're doing, I really like this. So you're post your the journalists are getting access to your platform and you're able to post summaries.

Which then link back to the let's say the local local papers website. Is that correct?

Brett (48:00.17)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (48:00.402)

Yeah, they can monetize any way that they typically do, whether it's through a subscription or through advertising, right? and and we don't own their content. We are actually just giving them distribution and much more than Google used to, right? And look, we we want people to feel like they can get all the information they need about where they live on next door. And while our expertise is in user-generated content and what we might describe as local word of mouth.

Rio Longacre (48:09.365)

You're not monetizing it at all.

Brett (48:28.788)

Yep.

Nirav Tolia (48:29.369)

There are multiple kinds of information outside of the purview of local word of mouth that are really valuable. Local journalism is one of them. Another thing that we think is really critical is bringing in public agencies, whether it's a police department or a fire department or any kind of disaster recovery agency, when they have information to get out to people, how do they do it? Right? I mean, a lot of times I'm getting Amber alerts on my phone today, and it's for things that are happening 200 miles away that I can't do anything about.

Brett (48:48.415)

To share. Yep. Yep.

Nirav Tolia (48:59.243)

Next door is hyperlocal intelligence. I mean imagine if you could send that alert out to the five hundred people that are in that exact area. That has to be higher fidelity. And that's one of the things that we can

Brett (49:12.371)

Yeah, that was the first thing that I saw when I logged back into next door after being off for a couple of months. Apologize. I did see it was, you know, it was severe weather reports. It was it was stuff that was kind of really bumping up to

the immediacy of things happening in my neighborhood that that I probably should be aware of. So so it sounds like you guys are not trying to co-opt people's information. I think this is a a super positive story considering what's happening in the larger publisher ecosystem. you know, whether it's whether it's the Googles of the World or the LLMs that seem to be exploiting content availability and using it for their own benefit.

Rio Longacre (49:35.315)

It is

Nirav Tolia (49:47.432)

Well, I mean look, I I think other people's businesses and again, entrepreneurs and founders who are listening to this, they know like we we're so busy trying to make our own dream become possible that we rarely look outside. So I can't comment on the other companies, but what I will say about next door is we don't want to co-opt anyone. We we want to send traffic to amazing local news sites as much as possible. And we just want to make sure that people have the information they need to make where they live better.

Brett (50:04.095)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (50:17.355)

And to do that with other people. And we know that local journalism is a really important piece of that chain.

Brett (50:25.427)

Yeah. And it's a and it's a very b

Rio Longacre (50:25.759)

Well, it's a b very different approach, by the way, to the you look at the the walled gardens, right? I mean you mentioned you mentioned Meta Facebook, or it is Google. I mean the the accusation the publishing industry's made is that they're using the content that's produced by these publishers to draw people into their platforms and then and then they're making sure they never actually leave, right? They're keeping them there and keeping them engaged. You a lot of times with content that it it the outrage content, right, of the user generated content and that's how they monetize and

Brett (50:30.312)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (50:53.237)

I think that the estimate I saw was ten billion dollars per year on average is if you if you believe the pub these reports put out by the publishing industry is being siphoned off just by these. It's a very different approach. I actually like it quite a bit. But pivoting maybe to advertising a little bit. I did read a little bit about your partnership with Fresh Paint. I thought that was interesting, th enabling healthcare organizations to advertise, but doing it in a very like privacy, privacy safe, privacy first way. Love if you could talk about that a little bit, Nerv.

Brett (51:18.314)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (51:19.879)

Well, I think in general, I mean, the more relevant I mean I I would kind of bump it up

even even outside or or amplify it above a buzzword like privacy. And I would say we want our advertising to be really relevant. And when you talk about healthcare advertising, it's most relevant when it's best targeted and it's best targeted when privacy is maintained. And it's it's kind of a key foundational value of any kind of healthcare advertising. And so whatever we can do on next door to make people feel like the ads they're seeing are relevant to the concerns they

Have or the needs they have in their local lives, that is that should be our advertising strategy, and that is our advertising strategy. When it comes to healthcare-centric information, right, we actually have a lot of genericized information just based on where people live. I mean, you can go out and get public information about in a particular zip code, here's the proliferation of certain diseases and conditions, and here's kind of what you'd find. And that's not even going down to a house-by-house level, right, which is something that can

Can happen on next door. Because you can go to a house by house level, right? It makes sense for us when we're doing healthcare advertising to ensure that we're working with partners that give us the ability to target people in a way that makes them feel like, hey, they don't know something about me that I wouldn't tell other people. But they're still showing me something that's relevant to me. And so to me, that that is, I mean, it's it's almost table stakes for next door, and it's table stakes for the entire advertising industry. I mean, the advertising industry, if you think about how it's

Brett (52:43.796)

Yeah yeah.

Nirav Tolia (52:54.611)

It's evolved, and you know, this is where I'll give companies like Meta and Alphabet, and in particular Instagram and YouTube a lot of credit. They have created systems now through targeting where the advertisements feel as high quality as the other content. And so ultimately, I think that's the aspiration of any advertising platform, which is the user sees the ad.

Brett (53:11.145)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (53:20.881)

And doesn't think, this is an advertisement. They're trying to hijack me in the middle of what I'm doing. And this is the cost using, this is the cost of me using the service, right? But rather the user says, I go here because they're showing me things that are really interesting to me. And they're showing me things that I would find useful. And I can tell you, like, and you probably had this experience as well. When you go to Instagram now.

Brett (53:26.589)

It's not an interruptive play, yeah.

Brett (53:36.244)

Yeah yeah.

Nirav Tolia (53:43.792)

Amazon's the place you go when you know what you need to buy. And it's the ultimate search engine for buying anything. But if you don't know what you need to buy or you don't know a product exists,

Brett (53:48.074)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (53:54.8)

Instagram has figured out in some way that you really like fill in the blank and this is a new offering in fill in the blank and I think it's probably becoming an incredible place for shopping and e-commerce as a result. And so are those advertisements or does it feel like utility? Because in reality, I mean if you help me find something that I want to buy, that's a service to me. That's not an advertisement.

Brett (54:06.566)

Yeah. Speak

Brett (54:13.812)

Well

Brett (54:17.842)

Yeah, that's the in its relevance. I mean to the point of utility, I mean that's powered by technology, right? So so we talked about sort of gaming

consumer engagement but but the the advent of sort of micro targeting and because all of these places the Instagrams the metas the googles have and and the next doors you have auth you have authenticated audiences right with people sharing and engaging in the platform which allows for you know and we've talked to a bunch of pharma people in fact it can and and they sort of zero in oftentimes on super micro targets right you know they might have a a a a a you know a a drug that's yeah

Rio Longacre (54:33.163)

They know so much about you. Yeah.

Rio Longacre (54:51.179)

Well especially for rare diseases, right, where it might only be a patient population of five of five thousand. It might only be five thousand for some of these in the whole US at any time, right? So they being able to target them is is difficult.

Brett (54:53.244)

Yeah, there's five million people in yeah, in the population.

Brett (55:02.62)

Yeah, so I think I think that's a positive story around targeting.

Nirav Tolia (55:02.823)

Yeah, and I wanna I wanna say something. I wanna say something I think is really important and it's a very, very deep belief of mine, which is you know, I went to Stanford and I've been in Silicon Valley most of my adult life and and I've been so blessed to be part of the first dot-com boom and to have been part of this big revolution. In fact, I feel like a lottery ticket winner, you know, my whole career and whatever I've been able to accomplish with other people has been because I've been in the right right place at the right time, and that's Silicon Valley. And yes, technology has had some uninteresting.

Unintended consequences. There's no doubt about that. I mean, it's created more loneliness, more isolation. In some cases, there's been discrimination as a result. Like we we know, because these are the headlines, we know some of the bad things that have occurred because of technology. But I will tell you, I don't think the people who are building these products are bad people at all. In fact, I think the opposite. These are unintended consequences that happen. So, for example, take advertising, right?

Brett (55:34.291)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (56:02.603)

Folks at Meta and the folks at Next Door, we're trying to show you the ad that we think is most helpful to you. Now sometimes

meta side that may feel like they're listening to you. You know, we talked about like them recording the conversations and that sort of thing, right? But it's always in the spirit of something good. I think the responsibility though of the builders, and this goes for all of the founders that are listening, our responsibility is to not just take into account the ramifications of the things we're building that are obvious and explicit. We have to take into account some of the unintended consequences. Right? You talked about people complaining

next door. Do you think that we started next door because we wanted to give people a place to complain about their neighborhoods? Of course not. But it took us too long to realize that that could be an outcome. But once we realized that, we started to work on addressing it. Right? We started to work on addressing it. I feel the same way about all of the Frontier Labs as well.

Brett (56:47.176)

Yeah.

Brett (56:53.99)

There was a technical solution to this problem, right?

Nirav Tolia (57:02.225)

I don't think they're trying to create a world where there's less human connection or where the AIs are giving us synthetic information. I don't think that at all. But they need to realize this could happen. And so what are they doing to help guard against it?

Brett (57:09.95)

So

Brett (57:16.862)

But but isn't this all power is

Rio Longacre (57:17.279)

Well, but say you want about meta meta sorry, say but you want about meta ads though. I mean, I have bought lots of things from Meta because like some of those ads have been right on. I mean, I've bought a tent, I've bought a a wallet, I've bought shoes. I mean, they're so h they n they're per they're some of them are so perfectly targeted because they know a lot about you, right? It's it's it's really so people people say they don't like advertising, but then I think about well, good the good advertising people generally do like, right? 'Cause it it it is it's

Nirav Tolia (57:27.325)

They're amazing. I mean they're amazing to stop.

Rio Longacre (57:42.079)

gives them ads for products and services they probably are interested in or would be interested in, so or and would have known about otherwise.

Brett (57:46.293)

But I mean ch well what about incentives though? So if you're Facebook and you've got or if you're an L L and you've got a huge amount of debt that you need to to sort of make up, you've got goals that you need to hit, revenue goals, profitability goals, either to pay off debt or to grow at at an exponential rate to Yeah. Yeah, y yeah, yeah, to to to to satisfy your investors, which is capitalism, right? can't that from an incentive perspective, that profit motive drive b drive certain

Rio Longacre (58:02.367)

Well coming back to the full circle to the big first questions, right? Yeah.

Brett (58:15.956)

you know results when it comes to your experience on Facebook and it's not just advertising it's the sort of balkanization of content right if I'm gonna engage back to that point of in negative content I'm more likely going to see more negative content or let's say it's it's hate content, whatever it might be. is that just the the nature of human behavior? Just give them more of what they want or are they gaming gaming dopamines to drive increased engagement?

to satisfy their investors because they can then advertise against that increased you know, so

Nirav Tolia (58:49.041)

I mean there there's so much there there's so much depth in in this particular topic, right? Let me actually try to pop it up a level and maybe oversimplify it. The first thing is we are for the most part for profit organizations.

And so we have a fiduciary duty. Now, a lot of people hide behind this and they say it's a fiduciary duty, right? But the reality is when you take money from investors, whether it's as a private company or a public company, you do so under the explicit and tacit acknowledgement that you are trying to generate a greater return on that investment, right? And that's the whole point. Now I think where it gets a little bit more nuanced is that there may be things that you do in the short term.

Brett (59:07.315)

Yeah.

Brett (59:21.488)

Yep. A hundred percent.

Nirav Tolia (59:32.231)

To juice results or to gain results, then in the long term have a deleterious effect on the franchise value or the enterprise value of whatever you're building. And so I think it's incumbent upon the business people to say, okay, this thing we're doing, yes, it's going to generate some short-term results, but the best investors, they care about the long term.

Brett (59:41.779)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (59:55.922)

And so what is the cost to the long term? And maybe if we do something that doesn't quite give us the results in the short term, we're still going to get great results in the long term.

Brett (59:56.04)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:00:04.491)

Yeah, well there's traders versus investors. Traders might care about short term, but real investors who believe in you, believe in what you're building, they'll they'll they'll understand that you're you are building for the long term.

Nirav Tolia (01:00:12.083)

Well, and more importantly, your users and customers, they want you to be thinking about the long term, right? I mean the users and customers don't want you to build things that are optimizing what they're doing right now at the risk of what they may want to do, right? And so I think long term the the way to build a successful business is to do the right thing. I don't think those things are in conflict.

Brett (01:00:18.737)

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:00:35.679)

Okay, look looking at long term, like with in like specifically large language models and traffic and internet traffic. I mean, I I read a stat the other day, Brett, we've talked about this recently. How I think more than fifty percent of all traffic is not human anymore. It's crawlers or agents doing things. Like, do you think within five years, majority of traffic on next door will will not be human? Are you preparing for that? What does that mean? And and how do you pair that with the

the approach where you're verifying everyone, which has created friction, but it's also created community for you. Thoughts there?

Nirav Tolia (01:01:09.105)

Yeah, I mean lot of thoughts. I mean, we don't allow bots to sign into the service. I mean, they they may try, like we're we're we're getting rid of them all the time, right? But I don't see a period of time, whether it's five days, five weeks, five months, or five years from now, where any

Of the content on next door is by bots. There may be a little bit, right? But we'll catch it and then we'll get rid of it, right? The whole premise of next door, it's you and your neighbors having discussions, right? Other sites, they may have different premises. They may actually want to bring bots in because they're indexing the web and finding related information and they want that related information to show up on the page. That's not next door. Next door's value is that you know that all of the content is created by.

You and your neighbors. That's why we verify, that's why we require login. That's why we will continue to invest in things that ensure that you know you're talking with your neighbors versus a bot. For the rest of the web, I think it's going to be a a pretty big challenge. And you know, does it matter if 90% of web traffic is is done by bots? I think what it'll probably do, and you hit on this a little bit, it'll it'll force us to redefine our metrics of metrics of success. We won't look

And maybe we're gonna look at outcomes. Maybe we're gonna look at paid subscribers.

Rio Longacre (01:02:32.949)

But but will there be certain types of age will there be certain types of bots of let's say it is an agent of someone that that has is doing specific tasks that you will potentially allow to like represent that person person authenticated and actually be verified as an agent? Is that something you're considering or not?

Brett (01:02:48.923)

A consumer agent.

Nirav Tolia (01:02:49.437)

You know, the so so here's how I could see that working. So we want to be aspirationally a connector between neighbors and small businesses that are in their neighborhood.

And let's take an example of a small business in a neighborhood. It could be someone who cleans windows, right? Now that person doesn't have an office, doesn't sit in front of a computer, right? Doesn't optimize an ad campaign on Meta, right? Or even next door, right? That person drives around in a truck that's got ladders in the back of the truck and then shows up at your house and works really hard to clean your windows and does an amazing service for you and is not at all a knowledge worker, like most of the people listening to this.

podcast right and so for that entity how do we as next door give them leverage to build their business we may have an agent or they may use an agent that helps them respond to people when they're driving from one job to another because they're not sitting in front of a of a desk with a phone that's right there and they can answer the phone. So that may be a place where an agent can be some of the glue

Brett (01:03:33.17)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (01:03:59.144)

Between the neighbor and the small business or the service provider, right? But in in no circumstance can I see us employing an agent without making it very, very, very clear that there's a very specific use case as to why that agent is there. Right? I think again, the magic of bonding with your neighbors.

Rio Longacre (01:04:19.103)

Makes sense.

Nirav Tolia (01:04:24.155)

Is that you're connecting with them for real? I mean, I I go back to what I said before, which is we're moving from age of information to age of intelligence, and the and that's an amazing thing. That is gonna unlock so much value for so many people. Economic value, emotional value, all kinds of value. But we have to pair the age of intelligence with the age of human connection. And if you don't know, if you don't know whether you're connecting with a human or an AI, I think that's where we fall down. If you know

Brett (01:04:45.522)

Yeah, I was gonna say yeah.

Nirav Tolia (01:04:54.109)

Well, you can actually modulate the way that you think about things. If you send me an agent on your behalf because you say, Hey, you're about to do this podcast and we want to get you prepared and we're in can and we're really busy and so here's an agent. The agent's gonna ask you a couple questions, you can answer the questions, that's gonna help us prepare for your for your podcast. I think that's great because I know it's

Rio Longacre (01:05:12.649)

That seems reasonable, yeah.

Nirav Tolia (01:05:14.577)

I know it's an agent, right? But if right now when I look at you, Rio, it's not really you. It's an AI version of you. That's totally different. Right? That is totally different because what makes this special is that we're looking at each other.

Rio Longacre (01:05:22.667)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (01:05:28.753)

Right. And you know that you're talking to someone who's a human being, right? And so pairing the AI, you know, we were joking about the pre-briefing document, and you said, we put that together ourselves. I said, Really? You didn't use any AI at all? That would be surprising because I think AI is a good thing, right? But it's the fact that you took that document with your brain power and the things that you thought about and and the things that you felt were important, and then you paired it with the AI. And so to me, the age of intelligence is an amazing thing. It is the

Brett (01:05:29.031)

Yeah.

Brett (01:05:42.162)

Ha ha!

Nirav Tolia (01:05:58.7)

the best thing to happen to humanity in our lifetimes, in my opinion. However, the cost of that great benefit is we have to pair it with human connection. And if we do, this is gonna be magical. It's gonna be incredible. And I'm very optimistic that we'll be able to do that. Not just at next door, but across the world.

Brett (01:06:08.306)

Yeah.

Brett (01:06:17.348)

Yeah. It's it's sort of taking what what is made humans human and allowed us to d to become the dominant species on earth is actually that connection and that ability to work together to solve larger goals. It's why it's why the Neanderthals went out of went out of went extinct, you know? It's it's and and it should carry through the technology. That same, you know, organizational capacity that human beings have and the connective capacity that we have should carry through all of our technology and and make it work, despite some of the the negative possibilities.

Rio Longacre (01:06:31.147)

Well well yeah, but also like

Rio Longacre (01:06:44.565)

Well and I think this technology is giving us more opportunity to have those connections as well. Like so you think about it, that discussion guide. So I mean I think I made ten, fifteen minutes of research to prep it, put a bunch of articles in there. I have my markdown files, I've already fed it. I have a bunch of examples. We we've done a hundred of these, right? So

Nirav Tolia (01:07:00.945)

Look, a really optimistic view is the time that we will save when we would do things by ourselves, research, summarization, compilation, editing, right? All that time that we've saved, when we were just working with ourselves, we can actually take that time.

Rio Longacre (01:07:15.371)

We can spend it on things like this.

Nirav Tolia (01:07:20.369)

And spend it with other people. Because the thing that we haven't talked about enough that I think is really critical is community, which is defined. I mean the literal definition of community is you cannot have community with yourself. And so you can't have community with an AI because an AI is not a human, right? Community is at least two people, and it gets really strong when it's more than two people, it's multiple people. Notice that we don't use these AIs. I mean, there's cowork, right? Anthropic has this amazing product called co-work, right? But it's still asynchronous.

Brett (01:07:33.105)

Yeah.

Brett (01:07:48.167)

Yep.

Nirav Tolia (01:07:50.456)

You're not synchronously working on something together. Think about that magical moment when you go into a conference room with a whiteboard and you have you and your colleagues and you start working on something together. That's community. That isn't something that AI is doing. AI is listening to the conversation now, and AI is giving you a summary or a transcript, which is great.

Brett (01:07:54.192)

Collaboratively, yeah.

Rio Longacre (01:08:10.728)

And it'll help you follow up, yeah.

Nirav Tolia (01:08:12.199)

Right, which is great. But that idea that we get together with other people, we gather, we congregate, right? That is a key building block of technology. That's what makes us uniquely human. And to your earlier point, I think most of the incredible advancements of the human race, going all the way back to Neanderthals, right? It wasn't because there was one person that just sat on the side and came up with something. It was because people got together, and AI was created by lots of

Brett (01:08:32.569)

Ha ha.

Brett (01:08:36.913)

Yeah.

Brett (01:08:40.188)

Good.

Nirav Tolia (01:08:42.193)

Of people working together and still is right, and so I think this idea that we have the age of intelligence and it's amazing, but we pair it with human connection. Human connection doesn't just mean you and one other person, human connection means actively seeking community, and community means connections not just with one person but with multiple people at the same time. And I think we'd all agree that that isn't something that any technology can really effectively simulate.

the World Cup that just happened. What was special about the World Cup? People getting together in those stadiums and at their watch parties and in their living rooms and creating community around those matches. And that was something that there was no technology platform that could proxy that. That was something that didn't happen in the whole world.

Brett (01:09:22.097)

Yeah.

Brett (01:09:28.208)

Yeah, that that was that was a great PR play for the US too because I mean it it changed the narrative that you hear oftentimes from people that that don't come to the US very often, that were a dangerous nation with you know, d a divided population and there's gun violence and all this sort of stuff. And then and then they come here.

Rio Longacre (01:09:44.222)

Yeah, people loved it. People drove around and and went and they were posting their their experiences. It was really incredible to see.

Brett (01:09:49.265)

Yeah.

And the narrative just completely changed of like, wow, you know, Americans are hilarious, right? They're they're they're incredibly well pig welcoming and warm and dot dot. And it's like, yeah, that's community. And they and they there was a shared global community in every stadium, at every game, you know, which was which was really it was it was heartening to see that. It was it just it it made you proud again, right? Despite all the criticism that our country receives globally.

Nirav Tolia (01:10:17.459)

Well, and it and it wasn't just the US thing. I mean, community to me is the thing that ultimately lifts us up. I mean, this idea of we, not me. Any time if you go back and think about the greatest moments in your life, I guarantee you that most of them were moments shared with other people. It wasn't just isolated. I mean, you know, we talked at the very beginning of the show, 999 failures leading to one big success. I'll tell you something.

Brett (01:10:33.433)

Or with somebody. Yep.

Nirav Tolia (01:10:43.899)

Having people around, having community, it makes those failures less painful and it makes those successes so much more meaningful, right? And that's what makes us uniquely human. That's the thing that that gets us up and and makes us want to go and achieve things. It's not just for ourselves. It's with other people and for other people.

Rio Longacre (01:11:05.054)

Have you have you you guys familiar with the term communitas? I I love this, right? I I I guess it probably comes from Latin, but you know, that the meaning would be like it's more than just community, it's the feeling you get from community, the feeling of solidarity, the feeling of mutual connection and warmth that really makes us human. So I I love that and I think that that kind of sums up what I think you're saying. Communitas, yeah.

Brett (01:11:27.483)

Communitas, yeah. It's like gravitas communitas. Yeah, that's a it's an interesting concept. Did you just look that up on a

Nirav Tolia (01:11:33.181)

Well and and to me to me human connection is communitas. It is community, right? It is it is feeling like we're not alone.

Rio Longacre (01:11:41.685)

Well, yeah, communitas comes from so there's a good friend of mine, Ronnie Batista, who's actually a a a a a UX professor at Rutgers and like he would always like in his course he had this term that he would talk about, building communitas. And I got this from him, so I'm not I'm I'm giving him credit for that, but it's a term I love and I I think it it it's very, very relevant and salient right now with all all that's going on and I think germane to this conversation. So do you think it's time for quick hits?

Brett (01:12:07.609)

I think it is. And and thanks. this was this has been an awesome conversation and it's it's just good to hear your sort of your mission, your vision, what's really driving and getting you up day after day to to do the hard work of of building and transforming a company for the second time. it's it's great to hear. so yeah, so let's start. So what's one neighborhood feature or tradition every community should have, right? And but too many have lost in our our age of balkanization.

Rio Longacre (01:12:18.772)

Cool to hear.

Nirav Tolia (01:12:37.479)

You know, I love the block party, but the block party rarely unites the entire neighborhood, so I'm gonna use another one and and this is one that our neighborhood in Dallas Highland Park does particularly well. Halloween is a great community holiday.

And it's so fun when you see the kids out trick-or-treating with their parents and everyone's together. And then people start to have block parties and they are in their front yards and they're giving away candy and they're getting to know each other and it's multi-generational. And I I just think it's it's so special. It's so special for the kids and it's so special for the parents. And it ends up being special for the entire neighborhood because it feels like communitas. It feels like everyone's coming together. So that idea of

really going to an extreme on Halloween and decorating your house and sitting out there and giving candy yourself and walking your kids around yourself, I think that's something every neighborhood should do.

Rio Longacre (01:13:36.538)

AI or human recommendations, what do you think people are going to trust more within the next four to five years?

Nirav Tolia (01:13:44.222)

You know, I I I really don't like what I believe is a false dichotomy where we say, is it AI or human? I like to think of them as both. So we will trust human recommendations more, but AI can play an amazing role in either summarizing those recommendations or making them easier to grok or bringing you a wide range of different recommendations based on something specific that you're looking for, right? So I would say in most of these cases, I would use a

Guy, but I would also want to use the human being. And when you combine those two, that's where the magic is.

Rio Longacre (01:14:21.416)

I love that. It's great answer, yeah.

Brett (01:14:21.871)

Yeah. Yeah, and that's where the trust is for sure. so what's the biggest mistake technology companies and you've been involved in a lot of them have made in building online communities over the past, let's say, fifteen, twenty years?

Nirav Tolia (01:14:33.339)

I've definitely thought about this one a lot. online community is never as good as as real community. So you you have to kind of believe and understand and be humble enough to understand that as good a job as you do to congregate people online, it's not the same thing as bringing them together in the real world. And so I think the biggest mistake is we haven't thought of the process of building online community as one that needs to go beyond the online community to drive

Brett (01:14:53.327)

Yep.

Nirav Tolia (01:15:03.253)

People to get together in the real world. And that, if we had done that, if you think about if Facebook had said, hey, look, events are going to be a huge part of what we're doing, right? So it's not just going to be you met someone on Facebook and you went back and forth, but we're going to find a way for that meeting to happen in addition to online in the real world. I think that's been a big mistake. And we're trying really hard at Nextdoor to think deeply about all right, these conversations that are happening between neighbors, the beautiful

Brett (01:15:05.125)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (01:15:33.183)

thing is that breaks the ice. It's an icebreaker. It's not a destination in and of itself or a solution. It's an icebreaker. And then when the people see each other in the neighborhood, the ice has already been broken, so then they can get together in the real world. But we need to actively look at ways to take those online conversations and have them translated to offline ones.

Brett (01:15:53.189)

Yep. IRL.

Rio Longacre (01:15:55.678)

There you go. Yeah. okay this

Nirav Tolia (01:15:56.315)

IRL FTW, as the kids say.

Rio Longacre (01:16:00.873)

Alright, so this will be the last one here. Finish this sentence. The next generation of the internet won't be built around attention, it'll will be built around

Nirav Tolia (01:16:10.845)

Human connection.

Brett (01:16:13.189)

Yep, love it. I think I think that's the theme, that's the thesis of this episode. Yeah, for sure. Communitas. I think we did we should put communitas in the title of this episode. I think that's that's a new word. And and it start using it.

Rio Longacre (01:16:16.169)

Immunitas. I love it. Yeah. That's awesome. This has been fun. This has been a really cool conversation, Nero.

Nirav Tolia (01:16:25.213)

I like immunitas and and you know what

I think has always been so inspirational about Nextdoor is, and we didn't talk about it as much. Next door is an incredible business opportunity. There is no definitive local internet resource, whether it's a social media service or a marketplace or you know, just generally speaking, a place that people go. Whereas in almost every other segment of the consumer internet, there's one giant juggernaut that people rely on, right? That isn't the case locally. Locally you have to go to lots of different places.

Brett (01:16:53.103)

Yeah.

Nirav Tolia (01:16:57.619)

I think next door because we don't have the answer, but we can bring you your neighbors who have the answer for you collectively has a great opportunity. And so it's an amazing business opportunity for shareholders, for the founders, you know, for everyone who cares about the business outcome, but the way to create that business outcome.

And the way to be really successful as a business is something that will require incredible human value as well, and that's the human connection. And so to be able to work on something as a founder that is that is very synchronous and connected in its business value and its human value, that's that's a real gift. And that's the way we feel it next door.

Brett (01:17:40.337)

That's awesome. I think I think I think that you just dropped the the mic on that one. So hey, thank you

Rio Longacre (01:17:40.733)

That's awesome.

Brett (01:17:46.627)

Narav for for being part of this this was a great conversation I know we all have to go to meetings in the middle of the week but for everybody that made it this far visit us at wdebdeb dot signal and noise dot ai and you can find us on TikTok, YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify lots of other places everywhere where you get your content Instagram or Reels Reels we're getting involved and we've got a newsletter sign up it's called the Signal and hey let's let's continue this conversation we'll have you on you know maybe down

Rio Longacre (01:18:04.777)

Yeah, wherever we get your podcast, we're there.

Brett (01:18:16.401)

the road and see how things have gone and and and how you have sort of left or or or or concluded the transformation of of Nextdoor. So it sounds like you're doing some great things. So thanks everybody and we'll we'll see you next time.

Nirav Tolia (01:18:28.283)

Appreciate it.

Rio Longacre (01:18:30.441)

Thank you.