S14E1: Nirav Tolia, Nextdoor CEO, on Building Community Platforms, Product-Market Fit, and the Future of AI in Local Networks

A vitamin is something that's nice.

“Did you take your vitamins this morning?”

Yes, I did. No, no, I forgot to. That's okay, I'll take them tomorrow. But what are people going to do for painkillers? I mean, they're going to slither on their belly to get to the painkiller

with their last ounce of energy, because they need the painkiller. And so if you can build a painkiller, something that people, if it were turned off, they would scream. You kind of know you're on to something. Welcome back to the room podcast season 14.

Hi, Mads. Hi, Claude. So excited to be here. So excited to be talking about everything that's going on in 2026 and tech. There's so much to discuss each season.

As you all know, we sit down with some of the most thoughtful and sightful people building on the cutting edge of the startup ecosystem and talk about what it takes for them to build and scale and during companies. The season we're diving into the ideas and flexion points and experiences that have shaped some of today's most impactful companies and the people behind them.

From next door to the ring founder, we are diving into sweets of innovation from early product decisions to navigating rapid moments of growth, to acquisitions, IPO exits and truly the conversations that offer a window into how great companies are built. And if you enjoy the conversations, which I think you will, make sure to subscribe

so you never miss an episode.

“And of course, if you want to stay connected, we would love to have you at our community”

events like our annual Inside Summit. And you can subscribe to our newsletter to learn more at the roompodcast.com. Thank you so much for being a part of the community and welcome to season 14 of the room podcast. Most people don't start companies because they love running payroll or dealing with HR

compliance. But somewhere between hiring your first employee and raising your next round, you suddenly find yourself buried in the admin work. And I was building my startup private, this was something I ran into constantly. Instead of focusing on product and growth, you went up spending hours figuring out payroll,

onboarding paperwork and setting up tools for new hires. That is, until we switch to Ripling. Ripling is a unified platform that lets startups run HR, payroll, IT and finance in one system from day one. The Ripling startup stack replaces disconnected tools that don't sink with a fully connected

platform. The other tools work flows like onboarding a new hire, setting up payroll, provisioning apps, and shipping a laptop can take days and eat up your focus when you need it most. With Ripling, they have an automatically in one place. Whenever I had a new hire, the laptop provisioning piece saved my life.

And don't even get me started on how helpful running commission payroll was for my sales team. Over 15,000 startups, including cursor, clay, seira, and more, trust Ripling to scale fast without adding additional opts in HR headcount. So founders can keep building.

Right now, venture back startups can get six months of Ripling startup stock for free. Just head to Ripling.com/theroom and sign up today. That's rippling.ng.com/t-h-e-r-o-o-m. Focus on what you're building. Leave the rest to Ripling.

Perkins Kui supports the most innovative entrepreneurs and investors in fast moving in high growth sectors, addressing their marryat of legal needs. But the firm doesn't just provide end to end legal and business counseling to its startup clients.

“It also facilitates introductions to key advisors and sources of capital.”

Perkins Kui's interactive website startup percolator offers access to programs, resources, and rich dynamic content. Designed to assist entrepreneurs on their startup journey. To learn more, go to startuppercolator.com and Perkins Kui C-O-I-E.com. Welcome back to the room podcast.

I'm Claudia Laurie, and today we're kicking off season 14 with Narav Tolia, the co-founder and CEO of Next Door, the neighborhood network designed to help people connect with communities around them. Next door now spans hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods globally in millions of verified neighbors.

The mission sounds simple. Help people feel more connected to where they live. But as Narav shares in this conversation, building a product around community turns to be one of the hardest problems in technology. In this episode, we talk about Narav's journey growing up in Odessa, Texas, as the child

of Indian immigrant physicians, and how those early experiences shaped the way he thinks about the longing. We also dive into the winding path that led him to entrepreneurship, from circling academically

at Stanford, becoming one of the first hundred employees at Yahoo.

Narav's career didn't follow a straight line. One of the ideas I love the most from this conversation is how Narav thinks about product market fit. He talks about the difference between building a vitamin versus building a paint killer. For next door, that moment came when neighbors began relying on information in the platform

for real-world needs, lost pets, safety alerts, and local recommendations, and emergency

We also discussed the hard realities of building platforms for real communities, as next

“door scaled, the company had to confront issues like bias and harmful behavior, and rethink”

how the product itself could encourage more constructive interactions. The biggest takeaway from this conversation is that community isn't a self-to-problem in technology. It's one of the hardest, and Narav has spent more than a decade building a product designed to mirror the complexity of real neighborhoods.

So with that, let's open the door. This is the room podcast with Narav Tullia of Next Door. Thank you so much for joining us today here in the room. I'm so thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me, and a big fan, and excited about the conversation.

So are we, and we already thought started a bit here, but we liked to start at the beginning with our guests. So you were born in Texas. Could you tell us a little bit more about where you grew up and how that shaped your view of the world?

Yeah, absolutely.

“And technically, I was not born in Texas, even though I don't tell anyone in Texas that.”

I was born in Philadelphia, my parents are Indian immigrants, and so they'd settled in Philadelphia. But we moved to Odessa, Texas, which is a small city in West Texas, when I was very young, and so I tell people that I'm from Texas, because I am, but I was not technically born there.

And it did shape a lot of not just my childhood, because I was in Texas until I came to Stanford for college. It has shaped really almost everything I've done professionally, and I'll give you the reason why. So I was one of the only Indian Americans in a town of 100,000 people, kind of in the

middle of nowhere. Odessa is 300 miles west of Dallas. It's about 250 miles east of El Paso, so it really is quite far from the big city. And because my parents had immigrated, I'd say reasonably early in the cycle. They come to America in the early 70s.

I was one of the first children of immigrants in that area. My parents were actually the second and third Indian physician that had moved to Odessa, Texas, because there was a great opportunity there to be a doctor, and it was booming because of oil. It's an oil town, but it was a little bit challenging for me, because I was different.

I had a different name near of is not a West Texas name or even an American name. My parents were Indian. They were vegetarian, I don't think I could survive in Texas if I didn't eat meat, but they were vegetarian. And so growing up, I did feel at many points lonely.

And I felt like I was different, and children never really want to feel different.

You know, that's the one thing that's very, very difficult to get over because you're always thrust into these situations without their children. You want to feel like you're like everyone else. And I just wasn't. I look like everyone else.

My name wasn't like I did for going else by parents didn't sound like other people.

“And I think that awakened in me, a genuine desire to be part of a group, to feel like I”

belonged. And that ultimately led to a real passion for and really a need in many ways to seek community. And community is the through line in my life, both personally and professionally. The thing that gives me the most joy outside of work. And it's the thing inside of work that I've worked on over multiple decades for multiple

companies. And it's a thing that I believe in very deeply as a core value. Absolutely. And that is a great tip off for what is to come with the next door story community being of course, a key pillar of next door.

And thank you for sharing a little bit about how that unique growing up experience, which has felt by many and really kind of shaped that inner compass for you, it speaks very much to the heart of our podcast, which is inspired by Alexander Hamilton, the room where it happened. Many of us want to be in the room, but perhaps are not for different reasons. Or finding ourselves tiptoeing into the room and asking what's going on.

And so I'm curious in that vein of early identity and upbringing, did you always think you were going to become a founder? Well, I want a great, great question.

No, I never thought that not for a single minute or second.

I didn't even know what a founder was. And you bring up this really interesting concept in terms of wanting to be in the room, because if you grow up in a place like Odessa, Texas, particularly pre-internet, there are none of those rooms in Odessa. They just aren't even there, right?

So the room may be in New York City, it may be in San Francisco, it may be in Los Angeles, it may be in D.C., it's in these places that you hear about. And when I grew up, you're getting all your information from television. If you live in Odessa, those aren't rooms that you're a part of. And so interestingly, while I did not ever think that I would be a founder, and I'll give

you a little bit more context on that, the reason that I ultimately felt like the internet

online are open to anyone, regardless of where they are physically. And so you could be on an internet connection, and you could feel like you were on Wall Street, or you could feel like you were in Hollywood, or you were in D.C., in the middle of politics.

“And so these rooms you're talking about that I think we all aspire to be part of.”

The accessibility of those rooms pre-internet was largely determined not by socioeconomic class. They were determined by where you lived and what you were exposed to. And the reason that I am such a lover of technology and in particular the internet set of technologies is, I believe the internet is really democratized, our access to those

rooms. You asked me about being a founder, both my parents are physicians, as I mentioned. And so as a good, beautiful son of Indian immigrants, I really had no choice but to be a physician myself. And I wanted to be a physician.

And so I grew up thinking, I'm going to be the third generation of Dr. Tollias because

my grandparents, both of my grandfather's were doctors as well, right? And so that was the only room that I knew existed, and that was the room that I thought I would be part of. But getting out of a desk and going to Stanford really kind of changed everything for me. So from aspiring third generation physician to English major at Stanford, I have a few

questions about connecting those dots and ultimately joining Yahoo as one of the first 100 employees. Can you pave that road for us a bit more? Yes, I'll tell you a bunch of funny stories, but my wonderful mother who is one of the most inspirational people in my life and in infosition herself. And so I'll just speak about my parents for a second, first of all, from my mom to be a working woman in her generation

was extremely unique. In addition, my parents met in medical school and they fell in love and they were of a generation in India and of a culture where one's parents determined who you married. It's arranged marriages. That was actually the norm back then.

And so they had what's called cutely a love marriage. They fell in love. And even though they were very similar in terms of their cast, their religion, their vocation, they were both going to be doctors, both of their parents were not quite in favor of them marrying each other.

And so when they'd got married, and ultimately my mom moved into my father's family's

“home because that's how it was back then.”

It became pretty clear that she wouldn't be able to really pursue her dream of practicing medicine in the same way because she was expected to be a housewife. And so the reason that my parents immigrated to America is because my mom said, "Hey, look, it's not like we need a job, so we're not going to America because it's opportunity when you're jobs.

We're going to America because we want to create our own vibe, our own culture. I want to work, and we want to be equal partners in this experience, right? And India, at that point, was a very patriarchal society. And so my mom is a very inspirational person in my life for all of those reasons and many more.

But when I told my parents, I was going to be an English major, of course my parents' responses. Don't you know English? Do you need to study the language, right? And I would explain to them, look, I'm going to take all the pre-med courses. So yes, I could be a biology major, but I enjoy reading literature.

And so this is actually English literature. And I met someone my freshman year at Stanford, who's a dear friend of mine today. And he was an English major. And I found that freshman year that when we had discussions about classes on any given day, what he talked about was way more interesting than the organic chemistry and biology

that I was learning. And so I decided to go and pursue English. But it was really about literature. And at the time, I still believe that I would be a physician. It turned out that I wasn't nearly as good at the pre-med stuff, as I wanted to be.

And you know, you show up at Stanford, and again, to use your metaphor of the room. I went to a public high school, there were no AP classes at all.

“I think I was the first person to ever apply to Stanford.”

Many people at my school thought that Stanford was a junior college in East Texas, even after I was accepted.

And so when I finally showed up at Stanford, I probably did feel like I had finally made it

into one of these rooms, right? And yet you get there and you realize pretty quickly, there are a lot of smart people here. In fact, most of them are smarter, and they are better prepared than I am. And so to get there and to start to fail, that was a blow for sure. And I still wanted to be a doctor, but I wasn't excelling the way that I wanted to.

And it was only through my extracurricular activities. One in particular, I hate to admit this, but I'm proud of it, but I don't like to admit

One of those singing groups, you know, kind of like the movie "Pitch Perfect" to, I was in the Stanford Fleet Street Singers, which is an all-male Akkapella group, and I was the business manager in the group one year, not knowing anything about business, literally not knowing anything about business, but I found that it came naturally to me. And so to transition from being a premed to business, to technology was extremely, extremely

unpredictable, relative to what I had wanted my entire life. And it was just almost random, but if I looked back on it, it wasn't random because I was seeking success, and I wasn't successful as a premed. I found some success even serendipitously as a business person, and then I discovered technology because I had an ethernet jack.

In my dorm room, it's Stanford, and that unlocked going online. And when I went online, because my experience growing up was so marked by geography, not being bound by where I lived, and being able to experience virtual spaces, that resonated with me so strongly, immediately, that I got it, even though I couldn't maybe articulate it as a business opportunity, I immediately understood my gosh, there are so many people

like me, and when they come online, they're going to realize that where they live doesn't matter, because they can go online and experience everything they want to experience.

And so I ultimately begged my parents before going to medical school, which was my path,

can I please go and work at this company called Yahoo, which was not the behemoth that it became, and so I was one of the first hundred employees there. At the time, there was a chocolate milk company called Yahoo. They may still exist. Yahoo, chocolate milk.

And so yes, there was a moment where my poor mom went from thinking, why is he studying English when he knows how to speak the language?

“Number one, and number two, is he going to deliver chocolate milk to people, right?”

So I definitely put my parents through the ringer, but it was like winning a lottery ticket that I was able to join a company like Yahoo at that stage, and that's really the thing that launched everything that came afterwards.

Well, first of all, what an incredible inner compass to know, hey, this is not clicking

in the way that I wanted to, and I actually have these other strengths. Let me go petition my parents to actually get out there and try this. Of course, you couldn't have picked a better first internet company to join at the time. I guess maybe there was like one better one that you could have joined, but other than not. No, there weren't any better ones, and you know what the funny thing is, and your listeners

know this, in retrospect, it looks clean, and it looks really strategic, and it looks like I had some inner compass, right? At the time, it was all about anxiety, and it was all about struggle, and it was all about being incredibly insecure, and it was all about surviving, frankly. And so I could say, oh, yeah, I had this master plan, and it was exactly the opposite.

It was failure, leading to learning, which led to serendipity, which led to opportunity.

“And once that opportunity existed, boy, I think that I took that little scene that I had,”

and I ripped it open into a giant gash that I could walk through, right? But no, it was not planned, and when I think back on it, I'm such a planned person today. I'm really

surprised that this happened. I mean, I feel like it's an incredible blessing, and I said,

it was like, I won the lottery, right? I wouldn't chalk this up to skill or hard work, which I think a lot of success does come from skill and hard work. I would chalk this one up to luck. And I'm not above saying that I think luck is more powerful than skill and hard work. Okay, I think we can debate that, but I want to get into the, because that sounds like you've

a lot of skills under the hood here and you're being modest, but as it relates to that experience at Yahoo, and then of course, you're self being inspired to join this thing entrepreneurship, call it being a founder with opinions, your first company with an E. We can talk about what happened there and how it merged into shopping.com and acquired. Everybody like, all of that is good, but I'm worried we're not even getting into next door. There's

“so much talk about. I just, I think I want to orient our listeners to like the entrepreneurial”

ecosystem in the Bay Area of that time. Kind of, how is your journey and what was then, and okay, yesterday I known as the early.com era, kind of coming about and what drew into that founder moment. I think I'd probably go back to community, but just to give the listeners a sense of what it was like back then, the internet was just emerging. There was no mainstream trillion dollar internet companies that had gone public, right? Even Yahoo, I mean, think about the fact

that Yahoo had the name Yahoo. There was a company called Yahoo. Today, that's completely mainstream. The wackiest name is completely fine, right? But back then, it was hard for people to be taken

and then everyone was watching CNBC and they were day trading and this and that. And so people started to move to the Bay Area in droves. And instead of going and joining banks and joining consulting firms, the brightest people, not just engineers, but business people were coming to the Bay Area because at that time as well, there was mass centralization of these companies in the Bay Area. There was Amazon and Microsoft in the Pacific Northwest, and there was maybe a few in New York and a few

dotted across the landscape in other places, but it was largely happening in Palo Alto, not even San Francisco, frankly. And so being at Yahoo was incredible, and it was definitely like winning a lottery. There was only one issue, which is, you know, every day I worked at Yahoo and I was there for three years. And I was one of the first hundred by the time I left there were 10,000 people. When I joined the market cap was less than a billion, when I left, it was over a hundred billion.

“I think there were probably 10 million users of the product when I joined and by the time I left,”

there were dozens of products and probably a billion users, right? So imagine living through that, which was just an unbelievable privilege to go to work every single day and the numbers go up.

I've never been able to replicate that. And I don't know many people who have, but

there was this truth that dawned on me the longer I stayed. And this is what kind of open my mind to being a founder, which is being at Yahoo is an unbelievable privilege. But I knew that if I happened to not look both sides of the street before I crossed and I was run over by truck, I don't know that anyone would even notice that I was gone. None of the success that Yahoo experienced, you know, all those metrics that I talked about, none of them were being driven by me.

And I felt that I really wanted to be one of the people that was creating the value. And that is definitely what a founder is. And so on the side, really nights and weekends, I got together with four other aspiring entrepreneurs. And this time again, to set the landscape, no one would leave Yahoo. I mean, the stock was doubling every three months, right? I mean, it was crazy that someone would consider leaving my co-founder of next door. Someone that is like a

sister to me, Sarah Lerish, she has this great expression. Don't leave a good time looking for a good time. I left a good time looking for a good time because I wanted to be a founder. So me and four other folks started this nonprofit called Round Zero. Round Zero was a name kind of a geeky name that refers to prior to seeking round one financing. There's Round Zero. And that's when you're

“thinking about, do I have the right idea? Do I have the right co-founders? Do I have a need of co-founder?”

How am I going to make a market entry? How am I going to raise money? How am I going to talk about this idea? Who are the competitors? What are they up to? And you realize pretty quickly that you can't answer those questions by yourself. You need community around you. And it's so much better when you're talking to people who are trying to do similar things. And so we put together this group

that would meet once a month. And that was really my first startup. I was the president of this

thing, Round Zero. And we would bring people together. And that was also where from a networking standpoint read Hoffman and Elon Musk and Larry Page. And many of the giants of today would attend Round Zero. And that gave me the courage to then go and start opinions, the company that you're referring to in 1999. So I joined Yahoo 96. I started opinions in 1999. That company was one of the hottest at the beginning. And then was one of the near busts. I think a couple of weeks from going

out of business ultimately emerged with another private company. There were lawsuits. I had to leave the company and ended up going public. It was successful. It was sold to eBay. Lots of learnings, lots of highs and lows. And then I took a little bit of time off and lived in my favorite city in the world, New York, which I know Claudia, you're originally from. And then I came back to the Bay Area. It became an entrepreneur and residents at benchmark capital. They had fun to

do opinions the first company. And that ultimately led to next door. Well, I'm excited to dig deep into

the next door story. So let's orient ourselves. You are in the Bay Area. It's, you know, almost nine years later, your previous startup. And you're co-founding next door with your co-founders, Sarah, Prakosh, and David, aiming to build a hyperlocal social network grounded in real identities. Tell us what was the aha moment? What sparked the idea? Well, the first funny thing to tell you is next door is even a kind of Phoenix rising from the ashes story, right? And so when I went back to

be any IR at benchmark, it was me and Sarah Larry, the person who I've worked with most closely

“for the last 25 years. And again, some of that I consider as sister. One of the most important”

people in my life. And we started a company first out of benchmark as EIRs entrepreneurs and residents called Fanbase, which was about community, but about sports community. And that company after two

not going to be one of those startups that succeeded. And we knew how hard it is to build a successful

“company. It's equally hard to build an unsuccessful company. And so that's something you don't want”

to do. You know, that's the the corollary to don't leave a good time looking for a good time is if you're having a bad time, get the heck out, right? And so we were getting the heck out. We were going to give the money back and build early. Another really influential person in my career, one of the most influential said, hey, look, we believe in the team. And at that point, the team was also percussion. You mentioned David Weeson and a number of others out of Ginsburg Madison Bell,

Gary Gonzalez, seven of us as a matter of fact. And we spent the summer of 2010 coming up with new ideas and one of those was next door. Now to answer your question, how did we come up with the idea,

right? Well, first of all, there was a fair amount of desperation because we were coming off of a

failed thing. And we had told the employees of Fanbase, hey, look, we know Fanbase isn't working. So we're sunsending this thing that you've joined, like you're here because you've joined because you want to build this thing, Fanbase is not working. And we admit that. And so we're going to take a summer and try to come up with a new idea. And if we do, we're going to pursue that idea with the funds that we've raised. If we don't, we're going to return all the money to our investors,

and we're not going to take any severance or anything. If you don't want to do that, which is you didn't join this company to be a founder, but you're about to be a founder of something new. If you don't want to do that, we'll give you severance now so that you can feel

“like, you know, you got something. And I think we had maybe a dozen people and five of the people”

took the severance packages. And then we were left with seven. And I joke with people. It's not

like you can put on your Google Calendar 10 AM come up with a billion dollar idea. Like it's just

not the way it works, right? I mean, founders tend to either have spent years thinking of ideas they want to pursue. And then they finally have the courage to do so, right? Or they do something that's a little bit more rigorous. They worked in a particular company and they saw an opportunity at that company that the company wasn't pursuing. So they went off to do it themselves, right? Rarely is a company founded because the original idea that you're passionate about is not working.

Right? That's a tough pivot. I mean, that's a true pivot and it's a tough pivot. And yet, we had the desperation. We knew we wanted to work on community because that was something that we were passionate about that we felt like we were good at. And we ran across this article in the New York

Times about the decline of community in America and how almost a third of Americans could not

name a single neighbor by name. And that was not the way that we grew up. I mean, going back to a death of Texas, you know, I talked about how it may not have the influential rooms. But what it does have is a really strong sense of community. People really care about each other. They look out for each other. The neighborhoods are wonderful places to grow up. And I really took that for granted because if I fast forward to the summer of 2010, I'm living in Pacific Heights in San Francisco,

the center of the tech universe. And there's no sense of community in my neighborhood. I don't know any of my neighbors, right? And so we felt that viscerally what the article was talking about. And then we found a book called Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, who'd been the chair of the Sociology Department at Harvard and the sub title of Bowling Alone is the decline of community in America. And that's when we started to do a little bit of research around

what's happened in neighborhoods. And by the way, technology, not just internet technologies, but televisions, have played a pretty big role in this decline. And we started to think, can we use the benefits and beauty of technology to recreate a sense of community online and help bolster the real sense of community offline? And that led to things like verification of identity and neighborhood boundaries. And all of the things that have become true innovations relative to

“what next door is and what I think it can become. Thank you so much for telling the story”

of how, you know, the first idea wasn't the one that worked out. And you made the heart decision to you know, switch gears, pivot. I think, you know, a lot of the founders that we talk to you. And I'm sure a lot of folks in our audience often have a hard time balancing the tension between being tenacious and continuing to try to figure out how to make things work versus knowing when something's structurally not going to work. And their opportunity cost is too high and they should

be doing something else. So it's just incredibly helpful to hear that narrative. Well, look, I think it's worth spending a minute on that because today I am lucky enough to work with lots of different entrepreneurs and founders. And that dilemma you're talking about, which is you're working really hard on something. There's a little bit of daylight, but not as much as you

you always think as a founder, it's right around the corner. If I just do this one other thing,

“if I just sign this one customer, if I just release this one feature, if I just hire this one person,”

if I just make this one part of the app better, right? And I don't know the magical answer of when you say enough, let's move on to something else. Or when you say it really is around the corner, I don't know the answer. What I can tell you is the reason that we ultimately put fan base to rest is because we didn't have the energy every day when we woke up to work on that problem. And so I don't think we ever really know when's the right time to keep going,

versus when's the right time to quit? Unless we run out of money, right? But even then, you can work without money, right? But what we do know, and it's almost like a metaphysical thing, we do know when we wake up in the morning, are we getting more energy out of working on that problem? Or we giving more energy out of working on that problem? And we had felt after two years, we can't spend

“more time on fan base. Most people don't start companies because they love running payroll or”

dealing with HR compliance. But somewhere between hiring your first employee and raising your next

round, you suddenly find yourself buried in the admin work. When I was building my startup pride, this was something I ran into constantly. Instead of focusing on product and growth, you end up spending hours figuring out payroll, onboarding paperwork, and setting up tools for new hires. That is until we switch to rippling. Rippling is a unified platform that let's start up run HR payroll, IT and finance in one system from day one. The rippling startup stack replaces

disconnected tools that don't sync with a fully connected platform. With other tools, work flows like onboarding a new hire, setting up payroll, provisioning apps, and shipping a laptop can take days and eat up your focus when you need it most. With rippling, they have an automatically in one place. Whenever I had a new hire, the laptop provisioning piece saved my life, and don't even get me started on how helpful running commission payroll was for my sales team. Over 15,000

startups, including cursor, clay, cira, and more, trust rippling to scale fast without adding additional ops and HR headcount. So founders can keep building. Right now, venture back startups can get six months of rippling startup stack for free. Just head to rippling.com/theroom and sign up today. That's riplng.com/thru. Focus on what you're building. Leave the rest to rippling. That's such a helpful framework. As you're saying, definitely part art, part science, but

oftentimes your gut instinct is pretty accurate, and I'd love to partlay that. And just sort of the energy you were getting out of building the platform officially launched in the U.S. in October of 2011. Tell us what were the early reactions from users? What did you learn during that launch phase? And how did you know you had signs of product market? Those are all great questions. You know,

I'll start with with the first, which is how did we know we were on to something? And you know,

I'll contextualize it the way that I have, which is we had it even higher bar for whether we were onto something or not, because it's not like we did fan base thinking that we weren't onto something. In the early days of fan base, we thought we were onto something as well, and clearly we weren't, right? So the last thing the world we wanted to do was waste two more years before we found out that that thing we were working on was not going to happen, right? And so the first thing I'll

say is, whenever we described the concept of next door, and this includes literally hand drawing wire frames and showing them to people in neighborhoods, right, before writing a single line of code, whenever we describe the idea, the idea is very simple, which is technology has done a lot of great things, but it's also in some ways isolated us. It's also made us more likely to sit at home and scroll through feeds than to go outside and meet people in the real world, right? We know

more about Taylor Swift than we know about the person who lives across the street, you know, that kind of thing, right? And that's well known. However, we spend the majority of our time in our money in a collet five mile radius around where we live. That's just a fact. And so why isn't technology doing a better job of strengthening the connections in that very small radius? And if it could, through a social media interface, is that something you would enjoy using? People are like,

“oh, yeah, I do want to know my neighbors. I do want to know the best thing to do this weekend. I do”

want to know the best place to get fish tacos and the best place to go to get a teeth cleaning done. And you know, the person who can actually put my Christmas lights up in the right way. I mean,

There was Yahoo, but it doesn't exist on Yahoo, it doesn't exist on Google. Today, it doesn't

“exist on chat GPT. So I do want that. I do want the collective intelligence of my neighborhood”

very accessible. And I want to get to know those people who have the collective intelligence. So the first signal was there was a, there was a movement bigger than us that wanted to bring back a sense of community to the neighborhood. We didn't meet that many Bachumbug people who said,

oh, I hate my neighbors. I never want to talk to them. There are people like that, obviously,

but the vast majority of people said, you know, I do actually want to contribute and be part of my local community. There are so many ways our neighbors can help us. I just don't know how to interact. Like, I can't break the ice. I don't know these people. And so that was the first side. We would then take the discussions to wireframes and we'd show them wireframes. And it was very clear that that was something they would use. It was a utility centric thing from the beginning,

meaning it wasn't so much about entertainment and enjoyment. It was about solving problems. My dog is lost. I need a recommendation for a dentist and anyone here that loud noise. And then when we started building a very crude product that was called next door, it was called Lora line neighbors. It was in the Menlo Park neighborhood of Lora line. It was just called Lora line neighbors. We were doing site maintenance one day. And so the site was down.

And we started getting all these emails for people who lived in the neighborhood. What happened to my neighbor's website? Well, what's going on here? Did you all take it away? And you know at that point, the power of a pain killer versus a vitamin. So a vitamin is something that's nice. Did you take your vitamins this morning? Yes, I did. Oh, no, I forgot to. That's okay. I'll take them tomorrow. But what are people going to do for pain killers? I mean, they're going to slither on their belly

to get to the pain killer with their last ounce of energy because they need the pain killer. Right. And so if you can build a pain killer, like something that people, if it were turned off,

“they would scream. Right. You kind of know you're on to something. And that's what we were”

getting in the early days. And honestly, I would say from the summer of 2010 until gosh, even when I left the company at the end of 2018, that was a pretty consistent arc. By the time I came back in 2024, I'm sorry to say that even though we had over 100 million verified users, many of those users were telling me, oh, I used to use next door. It just wasn't that great. So I don't use it anymore. Right. But in those early days, the signal was, it was, it was very, very clear.

And the product market fit piece was clear as well. What I don't think we did in those early

days is the potential of the idea was always here. And the product was always trailing it by

pretty significant margin. And the best companies are built because you have massive potential. And then you have these incredible products that match that potential. And then that creates magic. Well, I'd love to take a little bit into one of those sort of like pain killer features, slash personas that jumped off the page in the early days. You know, from the start, next worse, crime and safety features took off even sparking public safety collaboration. Certainly

resonant, you know, here in San Francisco. But the platform also had to grapple with the challenge of being a product that had many different types of users and different types of communities. How did your team navigate those complications while remaining true to your mission? That's such a great question. And the idea of using technology and neighborhood centric communication to create a safer place for everyone, that's not something next door invented.

The idea of neighborhood watch is something that existed long before next door. Right. We just created a digitization of the neighborhood watch. And so when you from the very beginning that it's a lot more efficient. If you see something that you think other neighbors should know about because it doesn't look safe, it's way more efficient to just put it out on a platform versus go neighbor by neighbor or call a phone tree or all the ways that we did it in the past, right?

But I think what you're referring to is I remember I was actually taping a segment on

“I think Dr. Phil, if you remember that TV show about this amazing story that had happened on”

next door when neighbors were helping each other and an article came out that said that next door was a place where racial profiling was happening. And I remember seeing the article thinking,

wait a second, I'm brown. Like I am not, I'm not white. I am a person of color in what

universe would I have created a product that would racially profile people, right? And that was a real wake up call. And I think many, many, many entrepreneurs need to think about this and have

amazingly powerful things that have unintended consequences. And if you don't try to anticipate

some of those consequences upfront, it's very difficult to then refactor the product after it's already been built, particularly if the product is about user generated content in online community

“because you're essentially just building a container. And then your users fill the container up, right?”

And so in lots of cases, I would say less than 1% of total content, but we would say internally even one case is too many, even if it's less than 1%. But in those cases, someone would see someone who looked on familiar in a neighborhood either because of their skin color or the way they dressed, right, or some of their style choices. And in cases, it wasn't a criminal. It wasn't someone that was trying to do bad things. It was just someone who looked different. And we all know,

I mean, diversity is the spice of life. I mean, it's totally okay if people look different. And they do look different. That doesn't mean that they're bad people, right? And it was

particularly, I would say powerful for me because I grew up in a place where I looked different

than everyone. And it would have been easy for people to racially profile me growing up in my neighborhood, you know, desolate Texas, right? And so that led to this realization that we are responsible, even for unintended consequences. And the idea of racial profiling, it's actually about unconscious bias, which is a very difficult thing. Unconscious bias means I don't even know that I'm stereotyping yet I am. And so if people don't even know they're doing something,

“how do you teach them to do the right thing, right? But I think we have to be, we have to be”

challenged to come up with ways that we can help people be the best versions of themselves online and offline. And so this led to a lot of sleepless nights, honestly. I mean, no company wants to want to wake up in the morning and say, I'm going to go work on something that's going to racially profile people, right? Even if it's less than 1% of the content, right? And you're attacked. And that becomes the story because as you know, you know, in the press, if it bleeds,

it leads, right? So like it's the controversial stuff that gets amplified. But it inspired us or really created a desperation for us around ensuring that we were doing everything we could to ensure that neighbors using our platform were responsible. And they weren't racially profiling. And there was a lot of great learnings in that face. Thank you for bringing us into the room around creating a digital third space that has unintended messy, complicated side effects,

which is just probably true about building community in general, right? Because at the end of the day, when you're putting a group of people there, who might not all come from the same background, there are going to be these emotions that come up and fierce that ultimately create challenges. And of course, for you, challenges that are at scale, given the way that next door has exploded and being the platform of choice for these local community-led moments and movements. And you know,

thinking about how you got to that, it was really a classic tale of Silicon Valley's sort. You mentioned benchmark being one of your earliest supporters through being both an EIR there.

But next door has gone on to raise over 450 million in private capital from places like benchmark,

gray lock, tiger go well, global coastal ventures. I mean, these are tier one incredible investors. And ultimately, this led to your IPO via SPAC in 2021. So could you draw us in a little bit more to those early conversations and ultimately scale the exit for your company? I certainly would not

“call an IPO and exit. I think I think the notion of exit, like most entrepreneurs, I think”

their hope and dream is that they're working on that problem forever because there's an infinite horizon for the opportunity to get bigger and bigger. I haven't seen that many. They're obviously lots of successes in terms of acquisitions, like true exits, right? But I would urge entrepreneurs to be thinking about a limitless horizon and to pick ideas that the better the better they produce a product, the more opportunity there will be and the more passion they will have to work towards

that. But yes, in many ways, you know, I joke and say, if you looked up Silicon Valley entrepreneur in the dictionary, I'm pretty stereotypical and Indian guy who went to Stanford who started, you know, companies funded by those people that you mentioned, you know, where two of the companies went public. And so we have been very, very, very fortunate. But what people don't ever see and all the founders who are listening know this, this goes for the most successful founders.

I'm sure Elon Musk feels this way. Success as an entrepreneur tends to be 999 failures leading

moments, but you also think about the fact that next door was founded out of the failed company and that we had to deal with the racial profiling and that, you know, there were many times where we were trying to hire a person where we were trying to raise money, we were trying to do a business deal and the answer was no, because that is the daily life of building one of these things. But ultimately our conviction in the potential of the idea compelled us to keep going. And the world's

desire to have something like this gave us the opportunity to generate that amount of business success. The other side of it is speaking very candidly post IPO, we lost a lot of the mojo that had enabled the IPO to begin with. We didn't improve the product the way that we should have. We didn't address the shortcomings that had already existed even prior to the IPO. And this is it just when I wasn't CEO. I mean, I made thousands of mistakes as CEO, right? And you ultimately

have to address those. Or they're going to come, they're going to come home to roost. And when you become a larger platform, whether it's because you're public or because in next source case,

you have over 100 million verified neighbors, 99% of neighborhoods in America, 10 other countries,

right? That's a big scale. And so when there's a leak in the dam somewhere, right? The size of the dam at that point is pretty massive. And so the leak can actually blow things up, right? Which is, unfortunately, what began happening post COVID, because during COVID, obviously, people leaned on next door more than they ever had, because there was no way to interact with people in real physical space. And so coming out of COVID, like many internet companies, we realize that

we read an artificially high point. And then the question is, okay, when you fall, do you do the short term things that help you kind of maintain that artificially high point?

“Or do you acknowledge the fact that you have some plumbing that you need to fix,”

and you're going to fix the plumbing? And in the midst of fixing that plumbing, your results may not look that great. As a private company, that's hard. As a public company, it's near impossible. It is near impossible. And that happened. That happened us. And you've stepped back in to lead this company in the public arena. You're calling out the fact that COVID really was a moment of opportunity, and a moment of challenge

for your platform. Speaking as a next-door user, my favorite next-door experience during COVID was that I got a free table. And I spent a tire Sunday standing it and restating it to become my own dining table, shout out my friends who helped me with that project. But it really was a community moment, right? We were all stuck at home, and therefore had time to do different of how is your experience stepping into that moment from the transition

of Sarah having been seeing things hitting the fan for the world in an ultimately for you

“returning back into this role as leading the home for next-door?”

Yeah, well, first of all, you have Sarah Lara credit because not only did she navigate the company through an IPO, she had to navigate the company through COVID, and then on the other side of COVID, the whole idea of hybrid work. Those were things operating as a public company,

operating during COVID, and operating in hybrid environment, I'd never done. So stepping back into

the company, I immediately had three pretty steep learning curves that I had to get under control, right? Not to say that I had them under control even today, right? But the company was very different. When I came back, not only was a stock down 80%, but the way to operate the company had changed because public companies are different to private companies, and COVID did change a lot of the ways that we think about community and the way that we seek community, right? And finally,

because a lot of people moved out of the urban centers during COVID, we had a bunch of employees who weren't in San Francisco, which had been the headquarters of the company, right? And so there were just a lot of challenges outside of the main challenge, which is the product wasn't delivering enough

value. And that ultimately for a technology company, you can't really thrive if your product isn't

creating enough value, because it either means that users don't want it, or it means that someone out there is providing more value than you. Users are getting it somewhere else, right? And so there were a lot of challenges facing the company, even kind of post-COVID and all the changes

“that COVID brought. If anything, I believe that the COVID moment made us crave community even more.”

I feel like the opportunity for next door post-COVID is honestly even bigger, but we have to do our part, and we just hadn't, and we still have it. We still need to make the product better. Well, I just jumping out on the community point. I think you're

you mentioned, 99% penetration of neighborhoods across America, which is just frankly unheard of. And then at the same time, we're hearing today about these platforms that are be to see that are getting to millions or hundreds of millions of users overnight. Those growth curves compared to when you first got started. How are you thinking about continued sustained growth and retention in next door? In this time, admits this rapid ability to obtain new users

given where the internet penetration is today? Yes, really, really, a true statement that we should

have more than a hundred million. I mean, when the other platforms have billions, like why don't we,

“right? And I think it speaks to the opportunity for the product to improve.”

I don't think so much about those rapidly growing networks as something that we should emulate, because next door while it may seem like one big platform. And if it's one big platform, network effects, and increasing returns to scale, and all of the things that these companies do to grow really rapidly, those can be taken advantage of. Next door is over 300,000 unique neighborhoods. And if your neighborhood in the Marina is doing a great job, that doesn't actually

benefit my neighborhood in Highland Park in Texas. So there's no network effect, right, which is the thing that really enables that rapid growth. Now, I think we should ask ourselves the question. We should hold ourselves accountable. Why don't we have every person in the Marina using next door? Why don't we have every person in the Highland Park? Why isn't there a mini network effect? So we need to create 300,000 individual network effects, right? But one of the reasons

why Facebook tried something called Facebook neighborhoods and then put it to rest and many other big companies have tried efforts like this, but they haven't worked is because they tend to think

of them as how quickly can we get to 100 million users plus. And that's solving through quantity.

I believe we have to solve through quality. And that's something that won't change for nearly days and it won't change now. You've spoken about the unique positioning of next door and our local communities coming out of the pandemic. But five years later, we're in another equally interesting. You've put more interesting time with the AI boom, especially in the Bay Area,

“we're seeing AI transform search, social and discovery. And I think it's really important to keep”

in mind kind of that quality piece as well in the lens of AI. How do you see AI reshaping the way people interact with local communities and information over the next five to 10 years? And how are you thinking about embedding AI into next doors? Boy, five to 10 years is a really long time horizon. I mean, you'll get a lot of arguments about whether AGI, which is like real, sentient beings using AI will even exist, right? I'll try to move it more towards the three to five

of your time frame, right? So I'm hugely bullish on AI. I think of all the technology revolutions that I've seen AI is without a doubt the biggest. And that's internet or sort of nothing to internet, internet to worldwide worldwide, worldwide, web to cloud, mobile, whatever you want to call it. Now AI, I think is the biggest of all of that. I really do. I think we'll get unprecedented

leverage as human beings from AI tools. That said, I always think about AI as an advisor, not as a

principle. And what I mean by that is humans are still the drivers. AI is whispering in your ear. It's kind of like that little advisor you have on your shoulder that's helping you go faster or drive safer or get to your destination in a faster, more economical way. I do not think AI is actually the driver, right? Now even with Waymo, right? Waymo starts with real humans in the car, driving around. And then at some point, the humans will pass off to the Waymo that's actually doing

the work, right? So I don't believe that AI will replace humans in any way, shape or fashion.

“I think it will make us way more efficient. And in much the same way that internet spaces”

democratized access, I feel the same way about AI. Think about having a tutor, you know, I think about my children, I have a 13 year old, a 12 year old, a 10 year old. And they come home now from school. And responsible use of AI gives them an unlimited resource to help them learn more quickly, more comprehensively in a personalized way. Almost as if they're going to school with someone who knows everything about them and is teaching directly to them. And it's $200 a month or whatever

chat GPT cost, right? I mean, that's kind of unprecedented. So that's just one example. So I'm hugely bullish on AI. I do believe that when it comes to social media, we will need to be very careful

You've probably seen those amazing companies that can take videos that are created about real

people that could take, make a video of the three of us having this discussion when we never had the

discussion, right? I mean, it's amazing technology, but it's a little scary because you don't want

“to be in a position where you say what's real and what's not. So I believe some of the kind of”

founding principles of next door around verification of identity and authenticity and the fact that you're talking to your real neighbors. I believe that's a great set of ingredients for creating really valuable AI because there should be a good neighbor AI in every single neighborhood on next door that you can ask questions to. Some people don't want to post publicly. Some people think the questions already been asked 100 times. Some people just want to know what's happened in the past,

right? They can feel like it might be annoying to ask their neighbors. Those questions. So there should be a good neighbor AI, but that good neighbor AI in our case is going to be completely built off of what real neighbors have set, not crawling the web and looking at different things and then bunging them together, right? So I would say responsible AI is I think one of the greatest forces for good that will occur in my lifetime. I believe that not just for next door, although I believe

it deeply for next door. I believe it generally, but irresponsible use of AI is like any other

really powerful technology. It can lead to a lot of unintended consequences that will make it

more difficult for us to constrain some of these problems because technology is an amplifier. Yeah, if you think about that great advisor, what does that advisor do? It helps you be the best version of yourself. It amplifies you so that you can actually be more effective, more powerful, right? But if it takes the parts of you that are not great, it can amplify those as well, right? I mean, think about anonymity online. Do people treat each other well if they can be anonymous?

Not nearly as well as if they have to actually be tied to their identities. And so we have to think about these things before we unleash the AI on the world. But I'm certainly not of the camp that we should regulate any of those things. I think we just need to be thinking as much about

responsible AI as we think about powerful AI. And I think we'll get to the right outcomes.

I love that intersection of the core principles of next door. Really tackling an existential challenge that is arriving for any end user that is interacting daily in the AI ecosystem.

“In Claudia, when you have to draw up, please feel free to. I'll close this out here.”

But just maybe a final question and kind of thinking about scope and scale for next door in this next. I love that you bring up both like the word social media and community. And there hasn't really been like a breakout social media platform yet in AI native. I don't think chat really qualifies even though it's a breakout consumer product. How are you thinking about this next decade of? And I say decades I feel like as you saw first hand, there was, you know,

the social media of the 20, 2000s. Then there was the mobile social media and video first social media. And now I'm kind of like sitting here wondering how the integrates next and where community trust is coming. For the next door roadmap, how are you thinking about like leaning and leaning out on like traditional social media and potentially how AI integrates to that to that experience? It's a great question. We call next door as social network because the architecture of

next door is the whole thing is built on a social graph, which is actually a neighborhood graph, which is we know you, we know where you live, we know where your neighbors live and we connect you.

“And so that's why we call ourselves social media. In reality, what we're trying to build on what”

we have built is a lot more like Reddit than it is like Instagram. And Reddit, if you think about each subreddit as a kind of neighborhood, right? Reddit is about community. And so I think maybe a better lens that we can view next door through is what happens to Reddit in a world of rampant AI, right? Well, I think we know that we're going to trust more the content on Reddit that's coming from real people, right? And so that's going to be the case with next door. But at the same time,

we know that reading an entire subreddit takes a lot of time and effort. And so if AI can summarize and get you more quickly to the right answer, you embrace that. And so I believe that ultimately for next door, AI can be a very powerful force in taking authentic neighbor conversation and making it more powerful because it can package it, it can summarize it, it can leverage it in a way that is way better than just the question answer format. When we talk about agentic AI

interfaces, well, we're really talking about his conversations. And most social media is not a

up to a subreddit, they post something and say, what do you think or they ask a question, right? And the responses are almost more important than the original question next door is the same way. It's neighbors asking their neighbors questions or neighbors posting information that they want their neighbors to respond to. So we call ourselves social media because we do have a social graph, we have a graph system. But in fact, the building of community is a lot more

like subreddits. And within the subreddits, whether they're on Reddit itself or on, you know, the way we think about our neighborhoods on next door, authenticity is really important. But you don't want authenticity without leverage. And so the authenticity comes from the real verified identity, the leverage comes from AI. And so that intersection, as you talked about, it's almost like intersecting community and social media, social media or a social graph is a

“powerful piece of technology because it tells us what can be relevant for you. And that's what AI”

can do as well. But community communities human. And frankly, even at next door, we would rather you get off the app and go into the real world and meet your neighbors in real life. We think if we introduce you to one new neighbor who you become really good friends with, you'll be passionate about next door for the rest of your life, right? We don't want you to do them scroll forever. That's not, that's not actually our intention. This relationship between URL and IRL

is definitely one that's constantly evolving is only getting harder to manage personally.

But made powerful when there are platforms that allow us to get offline at alongside our local

communities. So I'm really excited about the ways in which you and this role as CEO are leading next door into this next generation of user experiences and connection. And we're curious to hear, you know, you've been 18 months in this seat, a public company CEO after having founded the company, what's next for you and what's next for the company? Again, you know, speaking is a founder, we live in the moment so much that that I find when you start thinking too much about

what's next, you can't keep your eye on, you know, what's right in front of you? We're trying really hard to make 2026 the year when the next door product feels and operate and performs in a transformatively better way. And that is my kind of unyielding priority and focus. It's a privilege to be back in next door. You know, one of the reasons it's a privilege is I've been able to reunite with my great friend and an almost sister and partner of 25 years, Sarah

Larry, who I think the world up and so to be able to work on this problem with her, she's one of

the original founders as well. What a blessing. What an incredible privilege and to be back with

many of the employees I worked with before and a whole new set of employees that I'm delighted to be with. Right? So I'm very much enjoying myself. I mean, my dad used to tell me all the time that journeys

“the reward. I think that's true. I mean, you have to remember that you got to smell the roses along”

the way, but if you've gone through what I went through, which is you're the CEO and then you're not the CEO and then you come back, you realize how fragile these situations are and you want to make the most of them. So I'm not really thinking about what's next. I'm thinking about earning the right to think about what's next by making right now great. Incredible way to reframe what is oftentimes too tempting to think about what's coming down with undervaluing what you can do today. So thank you

for reframing our own question and giving us a bit of inspiration as we're recording this just into the new and we'll be releasing it in 2026 to really look for it with an exciting momentum from

today. We have a here question that touches on some of the many amazing themes you've already mentioned

in terms of people who've had an influence on Europe. But that question is who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career? I mean there are so many in the truth. There's a woman who has had the most profound impact starting with my mom who I talked about moving to my wife who is my best friend and you know the inspiration of all the good things that exist in my life today, including my children, right? But professionally I would say Sarah

Larry who I've mentioned several times. I mean she is someone who has made it possible for so many of my dreams to come true professionally and she's a person who makes all the highs so much higher and makes the lows not as low. And ultimately when you're seeking partnership, friendship,

“you know mentorship, anything and she does all of those things. She makes me a better person, right?”

You want someone who amplifies the good stuff and can put the not so good stuff into perspective, right? And you know Sarah used to say to me, I think you're a good egg even though I know you're

But loves you in spite of them. That gives you incredible power because you can be authentic.

“You don't have to put up a kind of mask or a shield where you're a perfect version of yourself, right?”

You can just be authentically who you are and you know that person is going to support you through success and failure. Sarah's done that, you know, in addition, she's probably the most successful person that I've worked with, not just as we've worked together, but in every part of her professional life. She's someone who I really look up to and I learn from and she's just fun, you know? So I often say, you want trust, respect, and like. You want trust, the person's high

integrity, the person has your back. Respect, the person can teach you things and make you a better

version. And finally, like, you want a person who's fun. Sarah is all three of those things

in a way that no one I've ever worked with professionally has been and it's a privilege to work

“with her. What a trifecta for partnership and as you're saying, I'm reminded of my own partnership”

with Claire and the ways that after half a decade, we have some of those abilities to have the hard conversations alongside writing the wave together and exciting momentum. So thank you for providing that model of leadership and partnership. That is building community both inside of next door and, of course, outside of next door, broader ecosystem in which you live. But no, this was absolutely a delightful conversation. Thank you so much for making time with us

and sharing your story today on the. I'm so delighted to have been here with you and I'm so inspired by what you and Claudia have done and I wish you all the best into all your listeners. Keep tuning in. This is a good one. This is a good one. Thank you so much for joining us at the room podcast. If you want more from the room every week, subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com/newsletter. While we back next week with a new episode and inspirational guest Tuesday, 10am Eastern 7am Pacific.

See you in the room. Most people don't start companies because they love running payroll or

dealing with HR compliance. But somewhere between hiring your first employee and raising your next

round, you suddenly find yourself buried in the admin work. When I was building my startup private, this was something I ran into constantly. Instead of focusing on product and growth, you wind up spending hours figuring out payroll, onboarding paperwork and setting up tools for new hires that is until we switch to Ripling. Ripling is a unified platform that let's start up to run HR payroll, IT and finance in one system from day one. The Ripling startup stack replaces disconnected

tools that don't sink with a fully connected platform. With other tools, workflows like onboarding a new hire, setting up payroll, provisioning apps, and shipping a laptop can take days and eat up your focus when you need it most. With Ripling, they have an automatically in one place. Whenever I had a new hire, the laptop provisioning piece saved my life, and don't even get me started on how helpful running commission payroll was for my sales team. Over 15,000

startups, including cursor, clay, seira, and more, trust Ripling to scale fast without adding additional ops in HR headcount. So founders can keep building. Right now, venture back startups can get six months of Ripling startup stock for free. Just head to Ripling.com/theroom, and sign up today. That's RIPP-L-I-N-G.com/T-H-E-R-O-O-M. Focus on what you're building. Leave the rest to Ripling. Perkins QA supports the most innovative entrepreneurs and investors

in fast moving in high growth sectors, addressing their maryat of legal needs. But the firm doesn't just provide end to end legal and business counseling to its startup clients. It also facilitates

“introductions to key advisors and sources of capital. Perkins QA's interactive website”

startup percolator offers access to programs, resources, and rich dynamic content. Design to assist entrepreneurs on their startup journey. To learn more, go to startuppercolator.com and Perkins Kooey C-O-I-E.com.