Nextdoor

History

Nirav Tolia, Sarah Leary, Prakash Janakiraman and David Wiesen co-founded Nextdoor in 2008. Tolia had previously helped start Epinions. Early investors included Benchmark Capital, Shasta Ventures, and Rich Barton. The concept and patents that Nextdoor is based on were invented by "FatDoor" CEO Raj Abhyanker in 2006. Abhyanker pitched Benchmark Capital on Nextdoor in 2007. Nirav Tolia worked at Benchmark Capital as Entrepreneur in Residence at that time.

As of February 2014, Nextdoor had 80 to 100 employees. In July 2012, Nextdoor raised US$18.6 million in venture capital funding. Dan Clancy (formerly of Google) joined Nextdoor in February 2014.

On May 14, 2014, Nirav Tolia, then-CEO of Nextdoor, was charged with felony hit-and-run for allegedly fleeing a crash on Highway 101 in Brisbane, California, that left a woman injured. "It's ironic that the CEO of a company that is holding itself out as trying to promote neighborliness, crime watch and things like that flees the scene of an accident that he caused and doesn't bother to call 911 or stay around to exchange information or see if he caused any injuries," said the woman's attorney, Joseph Brent. On June 12, 2014, Tolia pled no contest and served 30 days of community service in lieu of jail time.

In February 2017, Nextdoor acquired the UK local social network service Streetlife in a "multimillion pound deal". Nextdoor's less stringent privacy and safety policies provoked concerns among some users of Streetlife—for example, full names and street addresses are visible to all members of a Nextdoor, but not Streetlife, neighbourhood—some reporting ensuing harm, such as abusive former partner finding out a woman's current address.

Advertising was added to the platform, including real estate advertising, in 2017. Advertising includes posts inside users' feeds about business services and products.

In July 2018, then-CEO co-founder Tolia announced plans to retire as chief executive officer (CEO), stating that he intended to become chair of the company's board following the transition. In October 2018, Square's former chief financial officer Sarah Friar became CEO, succeeding Tolia. Tolia subsequently retained his seat as a member of the company board of directors.

In 2019, Nextdoor acquired Hoodline, a local news aggregator that is considered Pink-slime Journalism. Later that year, HuffPost and Wired reported that Nextdoor paid a firm to improve its reputation by lobbying for changes to the Wikipedia articles on Nextdoor, NBC, and several other corporations.

In November 2021, Nextdoor became a publicly traded company.

Since at least 2019, Nextdoor has used addressed advertising mail to attract new users in several of the countries it operates in, using a form letter referencing the local neighborhood and credited to a local resident. According to Nextdoor, these letters only use the names of residents who have explicitly agreed to send invitations to their neighbors; however, some users claim to have been named in these letters without their permission, or that they thought they were merely clicking a link for more information about the invitations before agreeing to send them. On occasion, authorities not familiar with the service have issued alerts suggesting the mailings were potentially fraudulent, which Nextdoor has denied.

Disaster relief

The platform reports increased activity during disasters. In May 2017, the company offered its services to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to facilitate the delivery of geographically targeted "emergency and disaster preparedness" alerts through the platform. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration partnership allows Nextdoor to send out local-community alerts during extreme weather incidents. A study on the role of social media in disaster recovery following Hurricane Harvey revealed that communities active on Nextdoor were likely to recover at a rate faster than communities that were less active.