DISRUPT YOURSELF

“I think as you scale, there's a pressure to go hire that big strategy person who has more credentials than you. And it's kind of, it feels almost confidence-inducing as a founder to like get to that level. And I think you have to fight that at all costs. I've made mistakes. I've hired people like that because I thought it was the right move. And I've always come back to find people who love the mission, who love to build, who are tactically excellent.”

“We changed it, actually, it was KIND because we believed very strongly, not only in well-functioning communities, but in collaborative communities that support each other. But ultimately, in today's world, when you put something like that out there, it's more a reason or becomes a reason for people to attack you versus something to stand for. And so we changed our ticker to NXDR in a way because we said, look, the ticker is not the representation of Nextdoor.”

“If you're a highly competitive person, you get to put out high benchmarks every 90 days and see if you can actually deliver on it. And you can build a high performance team to say, hey, we put this out and it's a big stretch. Let's go kick ass and figure it out. When you're private, it's so easy to get cozy.”

“a small group of us, five people, we had a dinner together in Palo Alto and we talked about, gosh, if we started a company, what would it be like? We weren't even going to start a company together, but each of us individually were dreaming about being founders. And it was so powerful to have that mini community of people that wanted to do the same thing. You didn't feel alone... And we called it Round Zero because it was prior to Round One Financing”

“If you want to continue to scale in our organization or any organization that's growing, you have to realize that your job is changing every 12 months to level yourself up to the next, next highest leverage focus area. In order to do that, you have to replace yourself every 12 months with talent equal or better always.”

“I think if your business is ready from a predictability standpoint and you have a long term orientation, then I would encourage you to go public. I think those two things have to be true. I think you have to actually be able to predict your business with consistency because you can't enter the markets without that confidence.”

“we moved to Dallas, Texas, which is where my parents are, where my only sibling is with his family. And I grew up in Texas. You know, I mentioned Odessa, Texas. This is where I grew up. When we moved here and we moved into a neighborhood, we had multiple neighbors drop off fresh baked cookies on our front door. Now, it's the middle of the country. It's a suburb. It's not this amazing mecca of innovation and metropolis known as San Francisco, right?”

“the second thing is the internet has memory. And so if you go to one of these subreddits, for example, and you're engaging in the conversation and you say things, those things that you say, which are then created as bits on the page, that may last for decades. Whereas when you're just SMSing with a friend of yours, telling jokes or a family member, talking about things that don't really matter, that just goes off in the ether and is forgotten”

“Data is a great support system for decision making, but data should not be the thing that's driving the decision itself. And it's one of the things, particularly in our industry, as quantitative as we are, I think data is extremely powerful and I would never make a decision without looking at the data, but I wouldn't just look at the data. I would need to interpret it.”

“I have a very good friend, Jim Lanzone, who's now the CEO of Yahoo! He came over to visit me one day and on his way into the office, his wife called him and they had a conversation and he mentioned that he was visiting me. And his wife set me up with the woman who is now my wife. And that all happened prior to Jim coming into the office. And it never would have happened if he wouldn't have come to that office because as he was talking to his wife, his wife said, what are you doing? Where are you?”

“as I often tell people, if folks know who you are, you have a reputation to protect. And if you have a reputation to protect, you will act a certain way versus if you feel like no one knows who you are and your reputation can't be harmed by what you do, people will act very differently.”

“I found that in many cases success is not the right environment for innovation, because success is something people want to hold on to, whereas failure and struggle is when you have that expression, necessity is the best form of invention or whatever the expression is, right? If you're struggling, you have to make changes. If everything's working fine, you kind of take your hands off the wheel and say, why would I want to mess anything up, right? But then before you know it, that creative destruction happens”

“I do believe that COVID was something that was not organically created from a wet market in Wuhan... At the end of February, we were skiing in northern Italy in the Dolomites and with our three sons. And we came back to Florence where we were living. And we noticed that there were Asian tourists that were wearing masks. And that was really striking to us because we were not familiar at all with anyone wearing a mask. And then obviously, days later, we realized that there had been this outbreak in Wuhan.”

“I seek out grit. Because I think when you're disrupting an industry, which we are, and even in the last year, our category has exploded and changed and been fraught with all types of chaos. You have to have a team that is used to being uncomfortable and used to getting through it and used to staying calm and having that resilience.”