Sarah Friar, Chief Executive Officer, Nextdoor
Interviewer: Ellen McGirt, Fortune

MPW Summit 2020: The CEO Next Door

Sarah Friar, Chief Executive Officer, Nextdoor

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Connecting with neighbors has never been more important.

switching gears a bit a little quicker to home. A side effect of the pandemic and stay at home lifestyle has been how connected we become with our neighbors and our local community. Sarah friar is the Ceo next door, the neighborhood focused social network which saw a major uptick in users when the lockdown orders were issued. She has a unique and very welcome perspective on the transformative powers of neighbors, helping neighbors and believe next door has can create real change. Sarah joins us now a network nice to see you again island and thank you for being a good neighbor to in your neighborhood. Well, never really helped. And as I was preparing for this conversation, I was thinking that you really are sitting on a very unique data set of human beings and human behavior that can actually make things better for other people as we don't hear that a lot on social networks these days. Yeah, that's right. So next door for those who don't know it. Um, we are the neighborhood hub, the place you go to tap into your neighborhood any time you want to know what's going on around. You were in 11 countries around the world, 268,000 neighborhoods. Um, and tens of millions of neighbors clear life on their almost on a daily basis. We say you come for the utility, come to get something done and stay for the community. So I love that. And why don't we start with where next door was before Covid hit It is the one crisis that hit every neighborhood in the world. Um, what was your engagement? What were you learning about your users before? And how has that changed after? Yeah. So public clearly had a huge impact. We knew that local was important. There's tremendous power in proximity because if you think about it, we don't really live near our friends and family anymore. So neighbors are often the way that we get things done. In fact, we want to make neighbor a verb not announced so that you get out a neighbor and pre covid we could see that happening. In fact, one of the trends I saw traveling around the world going to all 11 countries was actually a big rise in social isolation and a lot of people talking about being lonely. And it really struck me because I was hearing it from people in Australia people in France people in the Netherlands and it actually didn't really matter what age or what demographic you came from. It was certainly a rising phenomenon postcode, but we know that's only gotten worse. Um neighbors are saying that they feel isolated and overwhelmed. Almost 84% of the neighbors that we survey say they have those feelings. The positive is that they are coming to depend on their community. And so while about 60% of them said pre Covas that community was an important constituency in their life. Now, we're seeing upwards of about 85% of neighbors saying that community has become incredibly important to them. So there's a silver lining there even though we know That many people are going through a lot of impact from COVID-19 right now. So I think the big advantage that next door has is that neighborhoods are by design and we've seen a lot of real neighborhoods that have shut down opportunities for people to interact and stroll and meet each other. But you're really focused on getting people together. In fact, you have a very interesting thesis about the decade that we're in now. I think it goes back starting with jane fonda. I didn't get my I'm glad that you remember that. Yeah, I really believe that this new decade is going to be about social connection, but if I take you back to jane fonda, I always think about the seventies when we all learned that aerobic exercise was important. I remember you know the village in Northern Ireland, I would try to go running and people would always try to give me a list in the car to see if I needed a ride home. Um from there we learned a lot about nutrition. If you think about the last decade, we've talked a lot about meditation and just you know what's going on in our brains, we've learned about why sweet matters too. But I think this coming decades people are going to talk a lot more about this impact of social isolation and and how it impacts not just us from a psychological standpoint, but also physiologically. In fact, the vic Murphy who is the former surgeon general, coined, I think the best kind of one liner on us that loneliness is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes per day. Um we're doing our own research at the moment on next door, were actually out there with communities in Australia, the UK and the US, and actually working with the top academics in the field. If you haven't read Julianne Holt once said here in the U. S. Highly recommend for work on what we're beginning to find, just even from early research findings is that knowing six neighbors is all it takes to massively diminish that feeling of social isolation. So for all of us, often we join us. I'd like next door kind of the point of view of what's going to do for us. Like I get on the site, what's going to happen for me And rather we want to turn it back on you and say, what are you going to do for the neighbors around you? And I think through covid people have stepped up, um, small acts of kindness, like maybe checking in with an elderly neighbor to see if you can go pick up a prescription for them. That's something that I personally have done. Um, but we've seen some great outcomes. Um, two young women, I definitely want to shut up Austria and Saffron Patel and they started an organization called Letters against Isolation. And they've actually sent over 50,000 letters into elderly care homes just from neighbors who took the time to write a note. Maybe draw a picture. But just a lot of people know they're not alone. Others out there are thinking of them well, neighbors and neighborhood. And clearly next door is also in the thick of the middle of some of the pressing social issues that people are really struggling with. And I don't want to necessarily get into politics. But I think we need to talk about systemic racism and racism and some of the language around that. And some of the protests around that, um, some of the tactical changes that you've made to help people feel more comfortable on the site have to do with inclusion, but also messaging. Maybe you could talk a little bit about some of your community leads and um, removing some of the Black Lives material from the site that caused, um, people to feel unwelcome in the past. Yeah, absolutely. So all platforms end up being a reflection of the communities that they represent. So in neighborhoods is systemic racism. We know is a thing. We know racism is happening. And clearly during the George Floyd post George boys killing, where we saw a huge surge in neighbors talking about this and not always in the best of life. So there's a couple of things that we have done subsequently. Um number one, we've actually asked everyone on our site to retake a neighborhood pledge. And again, this comes from the social sciences that we know that when people step up and take a pledge, they're more inclined to act in a way that you're trying to amplify. So the pledge says, you know, be helpful, don't be hurtful, don't discriminate, don't be racist. Um, so quick check the box, but it does kind of stay in people's psyche, the second thing and you started to go there with our moderators. So next door has always been built on this idea of local moderation with the point of view that you really need to be a local to have a context to understand why a neighbor is talking about something and if it should be content that gets removed or perhaps there's a reason for it to be there. Like certainly I wouldn't presume to moderate my dad's community in Northern Ireland With our moderators. What we heard particularly in the thick of the summer um was that number one, many people didn't feel the moderators were representing the full diversity of the neighborhoods that they were moderating. And then the second thing is of course how do we continue to help educate our moderators? Right today we have 445,000 of them around the country. So the first thing we did was actually open up a new role called the community reviewer role and I will admit to being a little skeptical of in this day and age that people want to step up and be moderators of how their neighbors are talking. I am so impressed with just human behavior and have facing humanity again Because we've had 79,000 community reviewers put up their hands and say I want to be part of this movement. And the great thing about those newer reviewers is they tend to more reflect the true diversity of the neighborhood itself. So they added up to that lead program. So one other thing I would talk about is where you can use technology like when you get deep in a beautiful white where it feels really simple. So we have something called kindness reminder. So as people are writing into next door, um we want you to stay and be a good neighbor. And so we actually, if we can see that this is content that is likely to be reported. We actually will slow you down with a little interstitial that pops up. And the first thing it does is it actually calling you out of this part of your brain back into your frontal lobe, into that frontal cortex because it's causing you to read. And it says great neighbors are great neighborhoods are created with kindness. The next thing that does, it implies that you're writing may get reviewed at some future state, which turns out in the social sciences is something that people respond to and they often don't want to be called out so they will modify their behavior or in this case modify what they're writing. What we didn't want to do was to shut people down because actually, personally and I crossed next door, we believe that there is a really big place for people not being stuck in thought bubbles with their friends or their colleagues. People who largely agree with them what we want you to be talking to people with diverse perspectives and diverse opinions. So it's kindness reminder we see over a third of post edited just great, taking out some of those words or phrases that might really insult, but the conversation is continuing so people can disagree, but they're not being disagreeable as they disagree. So it's a great example of working closely with an academic in this case, Jennifer Eberhardt from stanford, um bringing it into the product and using technology and design and all because it ladders to our purpose, which is to cultivate a kind of world. That's why we care and why we put the emphasis and how do we build that humane network in the end? So it's as I'm listening to you, it strikes me that there's a lot for business to learn about what you're learning about, What makes better communities. If you think of a corporation is a series of smaller villages and communities inside one big, big overarching brand organization, then all of these things about isolation, which I hear all the time from executives, they're feeling lonely and they're concerned about their legacy. And are they on the, are they in the bubble? Are they doing the right thing? It seems like it would be a good series of steps to take to redesign how people interact in size of the corporation. How do you, do you think about that when as as next door grows or are you talking to your peers about what you're learning and how they can be more inclusive? Absolutely. So I think that's starting point of isolation. You know, it's like you said, it happens in the boardroom, it can happen in the executive suite where you feel really disconnected. And I think what we've talked learned neighbors is start small. Like we all imagine it has to be some big things and we're going to do like a big all hands or a big moments. And often it's these really kind of small moments, but I think I actually win people's hearts, not just their minds so much more. Um one of the things I do every night, I call it my, my daily commute. So in order to really come off the 1000 miles an hour, I run out when I'm in a work environment, used to have to commute calm. And now I go for a walk commute and I offered that time out. But really anyone in the, the company wants to have a chat with me and I really actually try to orient it towards people who are maybe a little bit more junior, maybe at more early stage of their career. And frankly I get probably more out of it than they did. And I think that's one of the things that for an executive you really can think about. I think on the slowing people down, we're all dealing with workforces right now that are tired, they're dealing with crisis, they're easily triggered. And it's just how do we remind people, um, to come with best intentions. Um, I was actually talking to a very senior ceo in the tech industry who manages a really big company and I was explaining kindness reminder and he actually said, wow, I think we should drop that into emails right now just within the company. That's an interesting thoughts and you know, there's no pride of ownership here. Um, I would love to see this sort of technology be open source because again, it's about just making humanity all it can be, um, and utilizing really good social science alongside kind of deep machine learning ai, which I think it was kind of the hard science with the soft science. And to me that's the future of how do we use technology ultimately for good. So speaking of the future, we only have a couple of minutes left. I would be remiss if I didn't ask about the business model of next door, how you're doing and what's next for you. Yeah, absolutely. We are for profit business. Um, while we have big aspirations to do good, we also are here to make sure we create the fly oil that allows us to continue to invest today. We make a large portion of our revenue through advertising, but we really have to be thoughtful about getting endemic add into the news feed itself. So think about things that work very well in the local context. So often it can be online to offline things like supermarkets. Walmart has done really well on next door. We've worked with a lot of branches this year about purpose. So folks like H. And R. Block just at a campaign with us, I'll make every block better. And they went out solicited the best blocks out there in the U. S. And they have gone in and pick 10 and actually made those neighborhoods better. We also have a revenue stream around local businesses. So think about the mom and pop who want to get in front of their best customers, their neighbors. And then finally we do work with public agencies. So everyone from fema during hurricanes, the U. S. Census, to all of the governors who have been trying to get the right covid messaging out. And then big utilities like say PG and E. Here in California. And those folks want to put more about P. S. A. Into our news feed. It's not really an ad, it's a really useful piece of content. They're engaging for our neighbors. Um but that's also a place that we monetize. So yes, we want to create the fly oil um but also create a company that we think is making a difference in the world. So we've talked about profit. We've talked about purpose. We've talked about kindness, loneliness, isolation and transformation. Um I want to end on a leadership question. We are living in a world that is need to align to purpose to address some of the big issues that we have to think about stakeholders in a new way. And that requires leaders to bring it in a new way to stand up for things they may not have been comfortable doing before. You mentioned northern Ireland and I know that you grew up in what we colloquially called the troubles and it seems to have um, an authentic tethered to you to thinking about neighbors in a particular way. What's your best advice for someone who may not have that story to tap into? Their own authentic? Need to be a leader at this time? Yeah, that's a wonderful question. And I think the word authenticity are authentic is so important. Um I do think that ceos and leaders generally are expected to go far beyond shareholder value and I think that the issue can run into is that, you know, if you stand for everything, you stand for nothing. So I think it is important to decide and really defined clear life. What other issues are you going to stand for with your company and when they align to your corporate purpose? I think it's a lot easier. Um, rather than it being a pet project and that goes back to them. There's an authenticity on why, why is next door talking about something. Oh, it's because they think this makes communities unsafe or makes communities less diverse. And so that's the reason why we cared a lot on the center racism issue. And then I think as an individual, it is trying to find like why in your heart does it matter to you? Right? I do have this story of growing up in the troubles and I grew up in a strange village that was actually a mixed religion village. Normally different religions lived in a very segregated way. And it made so much difference later in life to how I think about how you have to get everyone around the table if you ultimately want to solve a problem in this case, create peace in a country. Um, so I think it does give an authenticity when I speak. Everyone has some story there. You just need to go find it. Um, and then, you know, be willing to be vulnerable as you talk about it. That is the perfect place to end. As always, Sarah, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you. Thank you, appreciate you too.