Nirav Tolia

Nirav Tolia is co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor, the neighborhood platform connecting 88M+ verified users across 330,000+ neighborhoods in 11 countries. Launched in 2010 and public in 2021, Nextdoor focuses on local connection, expanding deliberately. Tolia returned as CEO in 2024 after previously leading the company from founding until 2018.

Born in Odessa, Texas, Tolia was one of few Indian American kids in a small West Texas town—an experience that shaped his vision. He studied English at Stanford and began his career at Yahoo before leaving stock options to pursue entrepreneurship. Before Nextdoor, he co-founded Epinions.com, served as COO of Shopping.com, and was an EIR at Benchmark Capital. These ventures taught him hard lessons that reshaped his leadership.

Tolia's motivation for founding Nextdoor came from recognizing that people no longer knew their neighbors—a problem he aimed to solve through technology. He has steered Nextdoor with a "slow and steady wins the race" philosophy, defying Silicon Valley's growth-at-all-costs mentality. The platform now dominates U.S. neighborhoods globally while tackling platform integrity.

Beyond Nextdoor, Tolia chairs Hedosophia investment firm, co-founded the William S. Spears Institute at SMU's Cox School of Business, and appeared as a guest shark on ABC's Shark Tank. He and his wife Megha Tolia, president and COO of Shondaland, relocated to Dallas in 2021 and become prominent Texas business leaders.