Why Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar Took A Big Career Risk

Kara Miller:

Welcome to Instigators of Change, a Khosla Ventures podcast, where we take a look at innovative ideas, the people who come up with them and those who invest in them. I'm Kara Miller and today: a woman who walked away from a high profile job, and a high profile boss, to become a CEO herself and pursue a deep passion.

Sarah Friar:

It's so sustaining, even when you're exhausted, even when you're tired, even when you're frustrated, right? You can somehow bounce out of bed the next day and go straight back after it.

Kara Miller:

Sarah Friar, the CEO of Nextdoor and former CFO of Square, talks about what it takes to build a platform and her advice for leaders.

Sarah Friar:

Some of the kindest steps I can take is to let someone go from my company, and in a horrible statement, people are like, "How can you possibly call firing someone kind?" I'm like, "No, no." If they're not being the best they can be, it's both something they need to work on, but it also means our environment is not doing right by them.

Kara Miller:

That's just ahead on Instigators of Change. In 2018, Sarah Friar told Jack Dorsey she was leaving Square. He wasn't thrilled. He swore, and then he walked over to where she was and hugged her. Friar had been CFO of Square, now known as Block, since 2012 and had joined the company when it was really in toddlerhood. It was co-founded in 2009 by Dorsey. On the day that Friar announced she was leaving to become the CEO of Nextdoor, Square's stock price dropped about 10%. And the thing was, it was hard for her to leave Square.

Sarah Friar:

I really liked where I was, so I also loved the company I was coming from. And something I look for when I'm hiring is always, "Are people running from, or are they running to?" So I actually like trying to hire people who are supremely happy and fulfilled where they are, because you know if you get them, they're really coming bought in. Not just with their head, but with their heart.

Kara Miller:

Friar certainly came to Nextdoor, totally bought in, and she believes it can be a platform that changes our culture.

Sarah Friar:

I think Nextdoor should be, if not one of, the most important company in the world, and I say that without hubris, believe me, I say it because when I look around at the major trends in the world, take out things like climate change, but societal issues ... I think so much of what's happening in the negative is being caused by this breakdown in just our human-to-human local bonds.

Kara Miller:

Studies have shown loneliness has enormous adverse effects on our health. In 2000, Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard, famously described the fracturing of America in his book, Bowling Alone. Friar sees next Nextdoor as a way of disrupting modern life's ability to pull us apart. But, she'll admit, the fracturing that Putnam described has gotten a lot worse during the pandemic. Here's her assessment of what the last few years have done.

Sarah Friar:

They have only accelerated a lot of the negative trends, whether it's our teens, even the youngest of our kids. I just saw a stat that said something like, "The suicide rate in the 11 to 15 age group is up about 15% just over the last couple of years." So whether it's our youngest community members, all the way through to our oldest, in almost every segment, they are seeing this increase in social isolation and loneliness.

Kara Miller:

So how do you use a tech platform to make things better? Friar has worked with scholars, including one, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, who studied the effect of Nextdoor on people.

Sarah Friar:

She did some research on our platform that showed a statistically significant change in people's feelings of social isolation once they knew six or more neighbors. So it's as simple as, "Do I know six people who live around me," there's this power to proximity, "enough to know their name, to know a little bit about them, to stop on the street and have a chat? Maybe if they need me to throw their paper up onto their stoop, I could do that for them. Maybe we live in the same high rise building and I can just help hold the elevator for them," right? If I just know six or more neighbors, that is a moment where there's a breakthrough on how socially isolated we feel. So imagine, we have lots of things when you walk into the doctor's office that says, "Don't smoke," "Eat your greens," "Eat your colors," "Exercise every day." Part of that circle should also say, "And get to know six people that are not your friends and family, but are just people you know around you."

Kara Miller:

Friar says that Nextdoor brings people together in serious situations like, "I need emergency childcare," and in more mundane scenarios like, "My kid outgrew his bike. Does anybody want it?" Her hopes for the way that Nextdoor can stitch together neighborhoods are profound. And in some ways, they tie into her own history. Friar grew up in Northern Ireland in the 70s and 80s during a time called The Troubles, when communities felt like they were pulling apart and people were on the edge.

Sarah Friar:

There was a war going on. There was no other way to talk about it. My local town was the most bombed town of its size in all of Western Europe for multiple decades. What a claim to fame, people! So yes, that was the negative on the downside. When communities become completely polarized, I actually know how bad it can end up. On the other side, I often really look back at those moments of how important the community was also though for survival, for helping. My mom was a local nurse. My dad was a local personnel manager. They were like Nextdoor before Nextdoor existed-

Kara Miller:

Right.

Sarah Friar:

Because they were always the knock on the door. "Nurse, nurse. My mom just fell. Can you come?" Or my dad would often meet people looking for a job or looking for advice. To this day, they still fulfill a lot of that need in the community, so it really was instilled to me, in an early age, the importance of community, how important it was to give back. And if I can now take that and build that into a tech platform that can amplify it with an amazing team around me, that just feels like something I can run through walls for. And that goes back to why it's so important to find your passion. I think a lot of people find their intellectual stimulation, but they haven't found the compounding effect, which is when you can put passion and your intellect together, so both your heart and your mind are taking you to that thing. It's so sustaining. Even when you're exhausted, even when you're tired, even when you're frustrated, right? You can somehow bounce out of bed the next day and go straight back after it.

Kara Miller:

How do you think about divisiveness on Nextdoor? Because there's tribal in a good way and tribal in not a good way.

Sarah Friar:

Exactly.

Kara Miller:

And certainly, there have been times where people go and head to Nextdoor to complain about neighbors or crime or whatever the issue is in their community. How do you think about that, and think about it within the company with the people who work there?

Sarah Friar:

Yeah, we think about it all day, every day. And in fact, kind, that word, is a core part of our purpose: to create a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood to rely on. We chose it as our ticker when we went public. But the definition of kind is important because for a lot of people they hear kind is very kind of sweet, very nice, not one of my favorite words in life, almost a little bit saccharine. What we want to show with kind is that kind is so much more than that. I often say, as an extreme example, as a manager, some of the kindest steps I can take is to let someone go from my company. And in a horrible statement, people are like, "How can you possibly call firing someone kind?" And I'm like, "No, no." If they're not being the best they can be. It's both something they need to work on, but it's also means our environment is not doing right by them. And often when you make people move, maybe it's not out of your company, it might just be to a different job, that's when they fly.

So I want to bring that same kind of grittiness to the definition of kind through Nextdoor, where some of our most contentious conversations can become constructive. I don't want people to come to Nextdoor just to complain or whine or get into that big argument. Rather, how do we bring them to the platform and allow them to really disagree, but to disagree in a constructive way? Northern Ireland's problems would never have been solved if Catholics and Protestants hadn't been able to sit around a table and actually, constructively, work towards peace. Now, that's extreme. I really do not want people to live in that sort of neighborhood, but if we disagree on the homeless shelter that wants to go into our community, or we disagree on putting traffic bumps on the street, those are moments where we're really trying to lead people to say, "Here's how to be constructive."

And we do it within the product, not just by positioning it and how we talk about it and market it and create [inaudible 00:09:47], but actually in the product itself. It's something I'm probably most proud of at Nextdoor is this work we've done to create what we use the term "welcoming platform" for. Examples are "Kindness Reminder." So most social platforms, we really try to talk about ourselves as a community platform, are premised on more and more engagement, right? And so the minute you see things getting heated, that's definitely a way to create engagement. We actually took a tact of slowing people down, so when we see that sort of response being posted, we can tell ... Our algorithm will say, "This probably is going to be moderated as content." We pop up a little interstitial that reminds you that great communities are created with kindness. It actually asks if you'd like to edit your post. And we find that over a third of people take us up on that and actually say, "You're right. I could probably be a little bit more constructive on how I'm responding."

Kara Miller:

And when you say moderated, it's going to be flagged or it's going to be stopped-

Sarah Friar:

Exactly.

Kara Miller:

From being posted, right? Okay.

Sarah Friar:

Yeah. It will not be stopped from getting posted, but it will be reported.

Kara Miller:

Okay.

Sarah Friar:

And then it goes into our moderation system where we work with our community moderators. So we're kind of telling you ahead of time, "Hey, there's probably a better way to do this." Most recently, we launched something called "Constructive Conversations" and that uses ML, where before you even start typing ... Of course, we can look at a lot of machine learning that says, "There's a higher likelihood that this next response will also be a response that will probably get moderated away," and it's because we can tell ... I mean, machines can't really read. Of course, they have some contextual ability these days, but they can tell more things like the speed of reply, lack of punctuation, all caps being used.

Kara Miller:

Yeah. Got it.

Sarah Friar:

These are all indicators that conversations are heating up, and so that's, again, another place we slow you down and we actually remind you that, "Sometimes it's better to take the higher ground. Here's ways you could be constructive." We actually offer some language elements. We sometimes, actually, will kind of cool off and not let you post for 60 seconds. So these are all things, and I would love to say we have thought of these. I have amazing product people, the best in the world. But we have worked with academics like Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt out of Stanford, who's done a lot of work on bias, like Dr. Tracey Meares from the Yale Justice Collaboratory. Both of whom have done a lot of work on either slowing people down or creating more procedural justice in how people view things like moderation. And it's super exciting because I feel like we're just getting going. There's so much we can do in this vein.

Kara Miller:

What do your analytics tell you about how divisive posts affect engagement on the site? Short term, long term, what happens?

Sarah Friar:

Oh, I love this question because this is the business case for the why. So I told you that other social platforms often lean into more heated discussions because it drives engagement, but what we have seen through our own data is that it does in the short run. But in the long run, it has a pretty negative effect on longer term, like six-month type engagement and future.

Kara Miller:

Okay.

Sarah Friar:

And the analogy I use is you move into a new house and you hear an argument down the street. I'd probably grab ... I don't have a dog, but I might grab a kid, make them go for a little walk with me to see what the heck is going on, right? We're humans, kind of interesting. But if that happens every single day, I probably want to move house again. "This is not the neighborhood for me." And so I think with all of these things, where they sound almost like they could be airing into philanthropy or just wanting to be good in the world, you have to create a business case. It's like the case for diversity and so on. When you can show in the numbers why it's good for business as well, that's when it starts to sing because people are bought in for all the right reasons. They're doing it for purpose. They're doing it because it's intellectually interesting. They're creating, literally, the first of, but they're also doing it because it's good for our business, too.

Kara Miller:

What's interesting is that the thinking about companies used to be, if we had gone back a few decades, you don't really want to take a stand, a political stand, as a company because you could only end up alienating a bunch of people, a bunch of potential customers. It seems like things have changed and companies are taking more stands, and in some ways, business is getting more political. I wonder how you think about that. I mean, you probably have to think about it both with customers, but also internally with your own employees and what they expect.

Sarah Friar:

I think the word to start with is trust. So if you look at things like the Edelman Trust Barometer, what you see is that institutions like government, healthcare providers, a lot of technology platforms, trust has really fallen away. Media, journalism, newspapers, and so on. And they used to be the best stands of where people went when they wanted to almost see a moral compass in place. There actually are a couple of groups that have maintained trust. Business, or CEOs, is one group. We haven't necessarily grown it, but we've maintained it for now. I will put a total shout out for your neighbors too, because actually, in the last couple of years probably because of COVID, neighbors have become a community that people trust a lot more.

Kara Miller:

Interesting. Okay.

Sarah Friar:

So it's working people! But on your question, yes. I think, therefore, CEOs have been asked to step forward because there's a view that these other institutions are not stepping forward on issues that historically would've been thought of as, perhaps, more moral issues, more social issues. And we're in the profit business, right? If you buy into Milton Friedman at all, you should be shareholder value only.

Kara Miller:

Right.

Sarah Friar:

But there has been a significant move in the last couple of decades to this idea of more stakeholder value away from shareholder value, and I think that's where I sit on all of this. You can't stand for everything, so you do, as a company, have to say, "What are the things that really matter to our core values?" Our core value number one is earn trust, but the second is invest in community, and so we often will have a point of view where there's a community angle. But I also don't think you can stand for everything, otherwise you become irrelevant on almost every topic.

Kara Miller:

You've now seen this through the lens of Nextdoor, but of course, you've seen this through the lens of Northern Ireland too. People are often drawn, especially physically in terms of where they live, to people who have maybe the same religious background, or, of course, money dictates a lot where you live, what your income is like. But other kinds of backgrounds, too, some cultural background. When you look at it now through the lens of Nextdoor, which probably offers you a lot more data in thinking about those affinities, how do you now think about who we're drawn to and how to disrupt that so that we're not always hanging out with the people who are exactly like us?

Sarah Friar:

Right, yes. I think it is both the potential beauty of neighborhoods ... To me, the neighborhood is actually where you can get maximum diversity. Because if you think about your life, if you start and you go to a certain school, there's probably some sort of motion that's taking you towards that school, probably based on where you live. But then when you decide to go to university, now you're kind of narrowing in. I was an engineer growing up in the UK, or I wanted to study engineering, so immediately I ended up in this grouping that was very much the nerds. We were the nerds. There's no other term for it. You join a company, now you've got even more kind of probably narrowing down of the affinity and the things that you have that make you similar. You join any kind of organization. You're kind of putting your flag up there that, "I'm someone who cares a lot about food insecurity, so I'm going to work with nonprofits in this zone."

What the neighborhood does is, you're right, there are these overlays that often make neighborhoods more homogenous, but there's also all of these other vectors that I would push people when they think about diversity. I mean, age is one, right? Where else do you show up in life and bump into a brand new baby, but also maybe an octogenarian, right? You definitely don't do that in the workplace. You don't do that when you go to your university or whatever. So there's a lot of diversity there. There also tends to be more where people live previously. Think about some of the first questions you asked someone when you meet them, like, "Oh, how long have you lived here?" "Oh, wow. You grew up in South Carolina. That's so interesting." You find these other ways of creating connection.

But what supersedes it all is this power of proximity. The thing you all have in common, whether you like it or not, and respect their political beliefs or not. If a disaster is the extreme, but if a flood happens, or I live in earthquake country or wildfire country ... I always say in that moment where Hurricane Harvey happened in Houston, it was a moment when Nextdoor really came into its own. The whole 911 went down. No one could contact emergency services and, frankly, they were overwhelmed. The mayor of Houston actually got on TV and radio and however he could get his message out and said, "Get on that Nextdoor app. Your neighbors will be there for you." Love that person.

And that was just a moment where I always say in that ... Where the waters are rising, you're stuck on your roof, someone comes in a boat and puts out a hand to get you off your roof and take you to safety. You don't start inquiring how they vote or what other societal issue do they care about. You're like, "Thank you for showing up," and I think we need to come back to that more frequently, of finding those moments of commonality. Because what they do, and it actually goes all the way back to Dr. Putnam's work, is they fill the bucket of social capital, which was this phrase he coined, so that later when I do have to have a contentious conversation with you, I don't just walk away in disgust.

I'm like, "Okay, I really fundamentally disagree. But I know that this person is a good person. They have helped me out in times of need. We've shared other common interests. Maybe at least I can hear them and listen." They're probably not going to change my mind, but they start to give issues way more color and context and texture, rather than where I fear we've gone, which is super binary thinking about everything. "If you're not with me, you are against me" is such a mode that I think a lot of the world is acting in, I think, particularly here in the US.

Kara Miller:

And, "If you're not with me, you're a terrible person too." I think that's another place we've gone to.

Sarah Friar:

Yeah.

Kara Miller:

I'm going to pivot a bit. If you're a founder, or in a smaller company right now, or you're an investor, it feels, of course, like a kind of uncertain market. And I know you've got a lot of experience, not just at Nextdoor, but in prior lives in working in finance. Can you sort of contextualize the moment in which we find ourselves? What do you feel like is going for us? What do you feel like the headwinds are?

Sarah Friar:

Yeah. I mean, it definitely feels like choppy waters that we're all heading into on a global basis, right? I think your question is twofold. As a leader, I always come back to these two words of transparency and empathy. And I think in all leadership, they should always be front of mind, but the minute you start hitting crisis moments, transparency and empathy. If you've not been a good communicator up till then, I won't say all is lost, but try not to make your communication just start when things are really bad. I try to make sure ... At Nextdoor, for example, we share our board materials with the company before they go to the board. It's kind of an ultimate act of trust that you're not going to send them outside of the company. But I'm really saying, "Hey, I'm treating you like an owner, the ultimate owner," so that's an example.

I write a weekly email to my team, whatever has been top of mind for me for the week, but it's a way to constantly be communicating. Because I think when you start communicating in tough times, that's almost like a signal that these are tough times. "Hey, you should get worried, because I don't normally talk to you and now I'm talking to you," so you don't want to start that spiral. So transparency, and then I think the second point of empathy. For me, where that comes through is really walking in the shoes of your customers, really trying to put yourself out there to spend time with them, right? Pre-COVID, I had gone around the world. Nextdoor is in 11 countries. I had visited every country. Every time I'm in a country, we do neighbor roundtables. I mean, it's not super scalable. We have right millions and millions and millions of people on Nextdoor. I'm not going to be able to meet them all. So people would say, "Well, why bother meeting with five or 10 of them?" I'm like, "No."

Because when I go to Sydney or when I'm in Barcelona or when I go to London, there's just this different vibe you get from different sets of neighbors that really then help with product ideation and so on. In COVID, I couldn't do that, so I actually started doing them virtually. And the first couple were, frankly, a little awkward. It's hard to get on Zoom with five to 10 people you've never met before and actually manage the conversation because you'll always get someone who's super chatty and someone else that doesn't speak. But it is, again, an empathetic moment, right? This is what community activists go through all the time. They have to get out there in their communities, grab people, usually because they want to make something happen.

They want people to come together and decide, "We should have a children's play park," or, "We should create a community garden because we live in a food desert." They have to just get over all of their shyness and they have to make asks. And so just doing that consistently every month, it's a good flossing moment. It's something you should do. And I think generally, leaders, I often find, get abstracted away from the thing that they originally got passionate about because now they're a leader and everything's very proper. And when they show up, everything's very almost-synthetic and created for them. I think that is a very dangerous position to get into as a leader when you get very far away from your customers and, frankly, when you get very far away from your employees. So turning back on the empathy gene to be empathetic. You have to walk in their shoes. Those two words are the two things I would say to everyone listening.

Kara Miller:

A few more questions about being a leader right now, because I think leaders are hungry for advice. You talked about these choppy waters, if they are strange waters for employment, because you've got a very tight labor market still, even now, but you also see some layoffs going on. So it's this very odd thing where people are in short supply, but on the other hand, people are also worried about getting laid off. What kind of advice do you have for companies when you think about the question of layoffs, because I think some leaders are starting to think along those lines.

Sarah Friar:

Yeah. I mean, again, I'm not happy that I've lived through many downturns, but I kind of started the real guts of my career in 2000 when the tech bubble burst and I was out here in Silicon Valley, so we felt it very strongly. It's almost like living in two worlds in the United States. And even back east, people are like, "What are you talking about?" And if you're on the West Coast, nobody had a job. It was crazy.

Kara Miller:

Huh.

Sarah Friar:

'08, '09 really hit broad swaths of the country. As a leader, it comes back to transparency and empathy. I think you have to be very clear with your employee population of what's happening and help them recognize that they might talk to you one week and you're sounding confident, maybe a little concerned, and by the next week, you're actively anxious and they're like, "Well were you hiding stuff from me?" You're like, "No." It's literally the speed of the way the world turns. The speed of information today is so rapid that I think saying that out loud to people, "This is what I believe today. This is the actions we're taking today, but know that this could change rapidly," it's always good to tell people well in advance.

If the world continues to move on this more negative direction, I think broadly speaking, you're going to see a lot more layoffs happen. Now, when I come back to a place like Nextdoor, I'm always re-reminding people, "Hey, this is why it's good to be in a growth environment. This is why it's good to be in a fully capitalized company." So you have to play off the backdrop to also remind people what's good about your environment, right? Purpose. You don't make shoes for a living. We're living through a global pandemic. We're living through, now, maybe a global recession. I want to work on the things that are actually going to help the maximum number of people do better through this, so I can come back to the purpose of Nextdoor.

Being pragmatically optimistic is a phrase I've been using these last few weeks because I think we have to be pragmatic about our business and what our business needs to survive and thrive. But as a leader, I think you have to also bring your energy and your optimism because that's what a lot of people are going to draw on to get them through tougher times.

Kara Miller:

Clearly, I've seen it in the data, raising money is trickier now than it was a couple of years ago. When you think about options for founders besides traditional VC rounds, are there other things that you think people should be thinking about to a sort of broader landscape?

Sarah Friar:

Yeah. Tactic one is definitely just figure out your burn rate and get that under control or figure out what it looks like. Lengthening the runway, always step one before you even go look for financing. But I think where you're going, I mean, it depends on your type of company. At a young stage, there's your own capital, there's friends and family. Even then, I always tell people, "Go look into the angel community." Even in tougher times, if you can find someone that's really passionate about the thing that you're doing, sometimes that's all you need. In some ways, it's not an investment in the same way that a VC might look at it because they're doing it, also, for something that's tugging on their heartstrings.

I was just talking to someone recently that was doing something in the keto diet world as it pertains to mental health. She was having a very hard time getting financing and saying there are a lot of people out there that have a lot of money that they want to put to work in the area of mental health, often because they have experienced it. They have a family member or child that's experienced it. Maybe that's the right community to be going to. There's always strategic investors too, right? Who's your natural ally? Where is there a one plus one equals three, and is there a way for them to help fund something? Maybe it's not on your product roadmap, but maybe you could pivot somewhat because it brings in that strategic investor.

There's always the debt side of the equation too. I think a lot of people, very early, don't think of things. Like here in the United States, going to the SBA. Again, it depends on your type of business, but it's not usually an avenue people think to pursue. Right now, I actually think for a lot of entrepreneurs that are really just starting out, there's still money available through a lot of, I think they're called, 7(a) funds. Go put money on your balance sheet because right now, it's not that expensive from a debt perspective. Debt's probably only getting more expensive, and better to financing and be able to make it through a tough time. In the end, we'll come out of recession. You'll end up back in an environment that is more healthy, so better that you can make it than getting kind of too caught up in your own head right now about what type of financing you want. I would raise the money that you can today.

Kara Miller:

Right, right. Two final big picture questions for you. In some ways, every moment in tech is transformative. That would've been true a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. But a lot of leaders in tech. You've sort of been around the environment for a while. When you think about the trends in front of you, what feels like the biggest tech shift that we're living through? That even if we can't see it now, that when we look back in five or 10 years, we'll be like, "Oh yeah, that was the thing in 2022 we should have been paying attention to."

Sarah Friar:

Yeah. I think on that sort of horizon, I'd have to go to Web3. Shorter term, I'd go to something like social commerce, which is very front of mind in terms of how people want to buy, how they want to be influenced. Commerce is always all around us, and so people are shifting how that's happening and it's very important for Nextdoor. But if I'm going way out, Web3. We're clearly Web1, the ability to write to the web, very simplistically birth companies like Yahoo. Web2, you got this ability to both read things, but also to write to them. Very techy terms, but the fact that I could use my phone to call an Uber, the fact I could start my small business on Square, these were all moments that were kind of the Web2 generation.

There's this huge move around Web3. It often gets conflated back to crypto and crypto only, but it is the idea of kind of vast distributed computing no longer residing in the hands of maybe three, four, really big, large tech companies. It is actually an age of community, like what I see today in neighborhoods, but could that age of community be really brought to the four? I joined the board of a company called Consensus because I wanted to learn more. Consensus owns MetaMask, which is the largest, permissionless wallet in the world. If you're a kid in South Korea playing a game and you want to buy the armor for the game that you're living within-

Kara Miller:

Got it.

Sarah Friar:

You'll do that with Ethe, and you'll probably do it through a MetaMask wallet.

Kara Miller:

Okay.

Sarah Friar:

They also are the infrastructure to build on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Now, I don't know which blockchain wins. Will there just be one? Will it be multiple? But I do think that there is a huge opportunity right now in Web3 to think about just a different way to build technology, to build ... I don't want to use the word apps, but to build what we think of apps today that will be the read of Web1, the write part of Web2, but then also the transact part, where you don't need lots of middlemen, middle people, taking a piece of every single transaction. It will just happen within the blockchain itself.

Kara Miller:

And then finally, I know Jack Dorsey, who you've talked about, who you worked with at Square, told you, I think, to be unafraid to fail. That's right, right?

Sarah Friar:

Yeah. That's exactly right.

Kara Miller:

Now that feels, in some ways, counterintuitive, because almost everybody hates to fail. You probably do. I do. And often, the only thing worse than failing is doing it on a big stage, so everybody knows about it.

Sarah Friar:

Oh, yeah.

Kara Miller:

So how do you think about that advice, which is interesting advice?

Sarah Friar:

I felt it was very personal advice. It's one of those things you could throw out in the world and maybe it's appropriate to everyone. But in that, I felt a very personal bit of advice from Jack, who was not just my colleague at Square, but was my friend. People often ask that question, "If you went back and talked to your 16-year-old self, what's the advice you would give them?" Mine would definitely be around this perfectionism piece, and I think it's very deep, particularly in young women and then as women grow in their careers. I know I'm being very gender stereotypical. I think it's both our blessing because it's makes us hard drivers, makes us really want to do everything to the nth degree and get it "right," but I think it's also the thing that holds us back most because it does also inject, when you're a perfectionist, this incredible fear of failure.

It can also mean that you're trying to do almost too much instead of seeing the most important things and putting your time to the most important instead of trying to make everything important. So I felt it was personal advice that can be broad-reaching too. Jack was definitely trying to do two things because he also ... I think I put it up on Twitter, but he wanted it to go out in the world. But for me it was this very personal thing of not allowing. Even making the decision to go be the CEO of Nextdoor, right?

Kara Miller:

Yeah.

Sarah Friar:

It's easy to say, "Well, will I be the best at that?" Or, "Can I be perfect at that? I'm really good right here, right now in this role at Square."

Kara Miller:

Right.

Sarah Friar:

But it was kind of this tipping point of like, "Okay, I want to go do this because community matters. I really buy into the purpose. It's a great business model." So the best way to have impact in the world is to combine it with something that's going to throw off a lot of cash flow over time. And you can't be what you can't see. I really wanted women, particularly young women, to see more female CEOs. There's still not enough of us in the world, and so I think Jack's advice was that kind of push finally to not think through the negative, but to really kind of see the positive and unleash myself.

Kara Miller:

Sarah Friar is the CEO of Nextdoor. Sarah, thank you so much for being here.

Sarah Friar:

Thank you. Really appreciate it.

Kara Miller:

And thanks so much to you for joining us for another episode of Instigators of Change. We've got lots more in our podcast feed from CEOs and from the folks who advise them. In July, we featured Ben Horowitz, co-founder of the venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, talking about how to create the right company culture, and he recalls CEOs that he's seen doing the right stuff and some other stuff. We will be back next week. Instigators of Change is produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Kara Miller. Talk to you soon.