He Took A Chance On A Young Leader.
He Was Also Coaching Steve Jobs.
He Never Made Nirav Feel Like a Second-Class CEO.

The Nirav Tolia Story

The Person Who Believed In Me  ·  Hosted by David Begnaud

"Nirav Tolia grew up as one of the only Indian kids in Odessa, Texas - oil country, Friday Night Lights, the middle of nowhere. He went to Stanford, hated his pre-med curriculum, joined an a cappella group, found the internet, and built Nextdoor into a neighborhood platform reaching hundreds of millions of people. But the story behind all of it belongs to a football coach from Pennsylvania named Bill Campbell - who called him 'boy,' threw out his slide deck on day one, and whose voice still shows up in every boardroom."

- David Begnaud

The Coach Who Called Him Boy. The CEO Who Didn't Know He Needed One.

Nirav was 28 years old, running a startup called Epinions - devoted to user-generated reviews and online community - when his lead investor, Bill Gurley at Benchmark Capital, called with news. There was a legend in Silicon Valley named Bill Campbell, former CEO of Intuit, who had stepped down to chairman and decided he wanted to mentor young CEOs. Bill had asked Benchmark for two of their best. One was Ben Horowitz, who would go on to found Andreessen Horowitz. The other, by luck alone, was Nirav. "I did not know Bill. My company was promising, but it was not a slam dunk to be successful." His investors, he suspects, figured a 28-year-old CEO could use the help.

Bill showed up at the office. Looked around. "Boy, let's go to a conference room." From the first words out of his mouth: informal, direct, no posturing. Nirav pulled up his standard slide deck - the opening slide had a quote on it, as was the custom. Bill looked at it and said: I don't want to read a quote. Tell me about the company. Skip the framing. Skip the narrative. Get to the point. "I will never forget that from that first meeting, he put me on my back foot a little bit."

What Bill was teaching in that moment - and would keep teaching for years - is that real leadership is not a performance. It's not a narrative construct or a reality distortion field. "This job is about being real, being authentic, and being direct." From that first meeting, Nirav understood: this man already knows I'm a 28-year-old who has no idea what he's doing. And he's here anyway. "I was not trained to be a CEO. I had no experience in being a CEO. I was making it up as I went along." But Bill was there. And he was ready to help.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Nirav describes the first time Bill Campbell walked in the door - ~6:55

One of the Only Indian Kids in West Texas Oil Country. The Outsider Who Learned Everything About Community.

Nirav's parents are both Indian immigrants who moved to Odessa, Texas when Nirav was about two years old. When they arrived, there were a handful of Indian physicians in town - a very small handful. "I was a stranger in a strange land." Growing up, it was painfully obvious that there weren't many people who looked like him. He was looking for community. And his community - of fellow Indian immigrants, of people who understood where his family had come from - simply wasn't there.

Odessa: population 100,000, equidistant between El Paso and Dallas but 300 miles from each, in the middle of West Texas nowhere. Famous for oil and gas, famous for Friday Night Lights, famous for not being on the way to anywhere. "Not a place that you go to and think about dreaming of being a Silicon Valley CEO." But it was, as Nirav puts it, "Americana with a humility and a modesty that is more about simple living, but with great values." And one of those values was community. Even though his family was different - among the very first different people to come to Odessa - they felt like they were part of the community there. So did Nirav.

That became the lesson he carried all the way to Silicon Valley. No matter how different you are. No matter how alone you feel. You can still find community - because what makes us human is the wanting to be together. "In Odessa, while it was not a particularly beautiful place physically, it wasn't near an ocean or in the mountains... it was a place where people were genuinely happy. And they were happy because they had each other." Nextdoor wasn't born in a dorm room or a garage. It was born in a West Texas oil town where a little Indian kid was looking for people to belong to.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Nirav on growing up as one of the only Indians in Odessa, Texas - ~10:07

He Abandoned Pre-Med And Joined An A Cappella Group Instead. An Ethernet Cable in His Dorm Room Changed His Life.

Nirav arrived at Stanford with one plan: be a doctor. His father was an ophthalmologist and eye surgeon. His mother was a physician. "I grew up thinking: I'm gonna be a doctor, I'm gonna be a surgeon, I'm gonna follow in my parents' footsteps." He got to Stanford and had the same experience that would later define his first meeting with Bill Campbell: immediate reset. Everyone smarter, more athletic, more articulate, better prepared. "Imagine going to a place and realizing very quickly, everyone's smarter than you." That first year, he loved being there and struggled deeply. Pre-med wasn't going the way he'd planned.

What saved him was an a cappella group - the Stanford Fleet Street Singers, an all-male collegiate group that he self-describes as "one of those dorky little groups you see in the movie Pitch Perfect." He'd sung in choir back in Odessa. Fleet Street drew him in. But Fleet Street was entirely student-run, and no one wanted to be business manager. Nirav stepped up. That became the first window. "That more than anything else was the entree for me into the world of business - and as an alternative to being a physician."

Then came the internet. Sophomore year, Nirav had an Ethernet connection in his dorm room - pre-World Wide Web. What did he use it for? Dallas Cowboys fan communities. He couldn't talk Cowboys at Stanford without starting a fight. Online, he found his people. And then the insight landed: back in Odessa, he'd wanted to read the Wall Street Journal but the town was too small to subscribe. Online, a kid in the middle of nowhere could access the same things as a kid in New York City. "The internet was an incredible miracle. A kid in Odessa could have the same experience as a kid in New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco." That realization became the foundation for every company he would build.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The Fleet Street Singers and how Nirav found the internet - ~17:36

Three Weeks From Shutting Off the Lights. His Coach Said: One Foot in Front of the Other.

During the dot-com boom, raising money felt effortless. "You could snap your fingers and someone would write a check." Then the boom turned into a bust. Ninety percent of companies couldn't raise money. Nirav's first company - Epinions, built in 1999 around user-generated reviews and community - was one of them. He went through a hundred no's. Bill started preparing him for what might be coming: "How are you gonna tell your company that they're all out of their jobs and it's over?" Bill was hardening him. But with one ear doing that, the other ear said: let's keep going. Let's find the investor who says yes.

Christmas 2001. Three weeks of cash left in the account. "This is not a conversation you have with the entire company. You don't even have the conversation with the management team. It's very lonely to be the CEO of a company that you know is going to go out of business." Nirav met with Bill. How are you feeling? Terrible. Not sleeping. Don't know what to do. Bill's answer: "One foot in front of the other. Keep driving as hard as you can. Control the things you can control. Someone's going to say yes." With three weeks of cash left, someone said yes.

And then Bill did something unexpected. He didn't celebrate. He was sober. "You're one of the lucky ones. Because I have a lot of good people that I'm working with right now and they can't raise money. So be sober about this. Be modest. Be humble. This doesn't mean that you're successful and they're unsuccessful. This means you got another chance. But you have a long way to go." The yes came with a condition - a large layoff to cut costs. The relief of survival was immediately followed by what Nirav called "beyond any doubt, the hardest thing I have ever had to do."

▶ Watch on YouTube: The dot-com bust and three weeks from shutting down - ~29:38

He Built Nextdoor. Then He Left as a Shell of a Man. The Sabbatical That Rebuilt Him.

Nirav co-founded Nextdoor in 2010, built around the conviction that technology had done almost nothing to strengthen actual neighborhoods. It grew into a platform reaching hundreds of millions of people. But by the end of 2018, after decades as a CEO across multiple companies, something had broken. "The shell was a person who was devoting so much time thinking about making Nextdoor successful that he couldn't be the best father and the best husband." Three boys who meant the world to him. A wife who was the most important person in his world. And he was spending more time thinking about Nextdoor than thinking about them.

He left. His entire identity had been being the CEO of Nextdoor. Without it: "Who was I? Was I worthwhile professionally?" He could hear Bill's voice - Bill had died in 2016 - asking the questions he always asked: are you the best husband you can be? Are you the best father? He and his wife made a decision that felt crazy to almost everyone who heard it. A sabbatical in a different country. They moved to Italy. Then COVID hit. They stayed longer than planned. What he gained there was something he hadn't had in years: the space to think instead of operate.

He came back different. He taught a class for Stanford in Florence. He became an investor and saw companies through a new lens. He spent real time with his kids. When Nextdoor asked him to return - "we needed to refound Nextdoor, we needed it to be more successful than it had been" - he took time to ask himself honest questions: do I have what it takes? Do I even want to go back, knowing the sacrifices it requires? And then it came back to purpose. "I believe so deeply in the mission of Nextdoor that if I could have an opportunity to be part of making that purpose real, there's no way I could say no."

▶ Watch on YouTube: Nirav on leaving Nextdoor as a shell of a man and the Italy sabbatical - ~43:15

Bill's Voice Still Shows Up in the Boardroom. The Question Nirav Still Asks Himself: Have You Become a Bill?

Recently, Nirav held a Nextdoor board meeting in Dallas - the first time in the company's history, since Nextdoor was primarily based in San Francisco. Before it, he found himself thinking about everything Bill had taught him about board meetings: talk the least. Let everyone else put their opinions in. Use the board for great advice but don't drag them into the weeds. "I was literally thinking: if Bill were sitting in the boardroom, how would he want this conversation to go?" And then a second feeling came - how proud would Bill be that we're in Dallas? Because Bill always pushed on one thing: "You're this big-time Silicon Valley CEO, but have you forgotten your roots? Do you still go back to Odessa? Do you remember the lessons you learned there?" A loud voice helping him run a better meeting. A softer voice saying: you haven't forgotten.

We asked Nirav the question: have you become a Bill to anyone? And Nirav's answer was one of the most honest things said all hour. After spending time with Bill, he came to realize: even if he became the best CEO he could possibly be, "I will never be the CEO that he was. And I knew that. He was just magical. He was special in so many ways." What he's tried to do instead is have positive impact on people - to help them believe in themselves the way Bill helped him. Not to be Bill. To carry what Bill ignited.

"Bill was so low ego that I think Bill would be embarrassed and horrified that there was a book about him called Trillion Dollar Coach. He never wanted the spotlight. And he didn't want anyone to feel that someone's success was because of him." At the end of the episode, David played a voicemail Bill had left Nirav for his 30th birthday. Just his voice, more than 20 years old. "Happy thirtieth birthday." In the room, you could feel exactly what that man had meant. "There was only one Bill Campbell, and there will always only be one." But the thing Bill activated in everyone he touched - the feeling of wanting to be not just a better CEO but a better person - that keeps going.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Bill's voice in the boardroom - and "Have you become a Bill?" - ~57:27

"I'm Nirav Tolia, and the person who believed in me was Bill Campbell."