Nextdoor Cofounder Nirav Tolia to Return as Chief Executive Officer and Chairman
- The Indian American who stepped down in 2019, will rejoin the company in the second quarter.
Nirav Tolia, co-founder of Nextdoor will return as chief executive officer and chairman in the second quarter, the company which operates a neighborhood-network platform announced last week. The Indian American who was first named CEO in 2018 will succeed Sarah Friar.
Tolia stepped down as Nextdoor CEO in December 2019 —while retaining a seat on the board—to spend more time with his wife and three sons, ages 3, 5 and 7. As CEO, he led the company from its inception in 2010 to the end of 2018. “Over that time period, Nextdoor launched in the U.S., UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, and Australia, and was adopted by over 220k neighborhoods worldwide, including 90% of American neighborhoods,” per his profile on Stanford University website. “As CEO, he raised over $275 million of venture capital for Nextdoor and grew its value to over $1.5 billion,” the profile added.
According to Investing magazine, the leadership change comes at a time when preliminary unaudited financial results released by the company for the fourth quarter of 2023 show an increase in users. The data reveals “a 5% year-over-year increase in weekly active users to 41.8 million and a 3% increase from the previous quarter. The company’s revenue for the quarter was $56 million, surpassing the guidance range of $50 million to $52 million.” In addition to the leadership transition, the company also “approved a $150 million increase to the company’s share repurchase authorization, bringing the total to $250 million, with approximately $77 million already executed,” the Investing report added. The share repurchase program has been extended until March 31, 2026.
Before his tenure at Nextdoor, Tolia was an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firms. Before Benchmark, he was COO of Shopping.com, a company he helped create through the merger of Dealtime and Epinions, where he was CEO and co-founder. Shopping.com went public on Nasdaq and was later acquired by eBay for $620M. He began his entrepreneurial pursuits as an early employee at Yahoo!.
The son of immigrant physicians from India, he grew up in Odessa, Texas, where he attended Odessa Permian High School. Per a report in Odessa American, his mother is a gynecologist, and his father, an ophthalmologist He joined Stanford to study medicine, but eventually got a B.A. in English. “I found a gap between what I perceived the practice of medicine to be and what I saw at Stanford,” he told the Los Angeles Times in an April 15, 2017 interview. “My head was telling me to be a doctor, but my heart was a little uncertain. Whenever I followed my heart and bolstered it with my head, it worked out pretty well.”
He told Silicon Valley magazine that when he moved from his hometown to California, he missed the tight-knit community he was used to. “In Texas, there’s a strong sense of community,” he told the magazine. “People lean on each other. They have this neighborly sentiment that I felt was missing from San Francisco. When I was younger and single, it didn’t matter as much. When I was married with children, I missed that. That’s what inspired the creation of Nextdoor.”
He is married to Megha Tolia, president and COO of Shondaland, the television production company founded by renowned Hollywood showrunner and storyteller Shonda Rhimes. The couple has three children.