---
title: "Why AI Won't Close Your Biggest Deals"
episode: 88
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Michael Kiernan"
guest_title: "Chief Revenue Officer, Nextdoor"
date_published: 2026-07-03
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:45:33
word_count: 7813
topics: ["ai-in-gtm", "gtm-strategy", "sales-leadership", "revenue-operations", "enterprise-sales", "pricing-packaging"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/michael-kiernan-nextdoor-ai-wont-close-deals/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# Why AI Won't Close Your Biggest Deals — Full Transcript

> Episode 88 of The LeanScale Podcast, with Michael Kiernan.
> Published July 3, 2026 · 00:45:33 · 7,813 words.
> Machine-transcribed and **not diarized** — speaker attribution is inferred, so verify
> attribution against the audio before quoting a specific person.
> Structured breakdown: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/michael-kiernan-nextdoor-ai-wont-close-deals/

## 00:00 — Cold open + intro

**[0:00]** Today, I'm joined by Michael Kiernan, Chief Revenue Officer at Nextdoor, the essential neighborhood network for over 110 million verified neighbors across 350,000 neighborhoods. Kiernan is a rare breed of CRO. He openly calls himself an operator first and a sales leader second, with a background spanning sales engineering, sales ops, and biz ops at X, Turn, Yahoo, and Brightroll before joining Nextdoor in 2018 and being elevated to CRO last year. He's two months into a nine-month plan he's named Human + Agentic GTM, a deliberate rejection of the idea that the future of revenue is just botifying your sellers.

**[0:49]** He's also helping Nextdoor CEO build entirely new monetization systems beyond advertising, all while delivering quarter in, quarter out as a public company exec. In this conversation, we get into the framework he uses to split his attention, where his nine-month plan is already getting replanned, and what most CROs are getting wrong about agents in the GTM motion. Kiernan, you named the project Human + Agentic GTM deliberately, not just Agentic GTM. What were you reacting against when you chose that framing, and what does the plus actually mean in practice? Sure. Thank you for having me, by the way.

**[1:33]** I was reacting to probably two things, and I should say this is a group effort. One, this is sales. This is relationship-based media selling. We are a platform. I work for a platform that connects human beings in the neighborhood to so quickly try and remove human from what we're doing as a business, and what we're doing as an organization just doesn't feel right. In fact, I think anyone trying to force us to go down that path is actually not thinking about it correctly. Two, look, every company out there seemingly, we've got to transform. As a business, we've got to go from maybe being agentic first to agentic enabled to agentic native.

## 02:16 — 'The plus is the point': rejecting the bodified sales team

**[2:18]** That means we've got to bring people through that and to position it like we're going to automate and modify the organization. I actually don't think that's the right way to get the team on board with that transformation. Yeah, and when I think about it, I feel like there's some components that can be identified of the sales process, and then some that feel like they have to be done by humans. The one thing that comes to mind is it's very difficult to put the accountability onto AI, onto an agent, especially if you're closing a bigger deal. That trust, I want to know that someone's on the hook for that deal when I'm working with them.

**[3:09]** I completely agree. I'd be willing to bet over the past six months to a year, you have gotten a ton of inbound to you as a potential buyer. That inbound, it's super low quality, the volume's 10x for me. As someone on the other side of that, and in particular for me, I'm getting inbound for sales tools, training programs, things to help improve the sales team. It's not that great, it's turning me off to this entire experience, and I agree. We're holding the team accountable to driving revenue and closing deals, and while I would love for automation to play a part in the productivity, in our ability to not just increase

**[3:53]** efficiency but at its core, we're doing more with less over time, I do not think trying to automate the interaction with the customer is the right place to start. For us, one way we've thought about this, next door services, three distinct segments of customers. We have our super large enterprise advertisers, we have direct to consumer brands, performance agencies, we tend to view that as our mid market segmentation. Those are three different segments with three different customer service needs, and the way we're thinking about bringing a Gentic into that, when you think about enterprise,

## 03:54 — Accountability, inbound spam, and the three-segment model

**[4:35]** pretty risky to have too much interaction between the system and a CEO at an agency or a chief strategy officer for a brand. For us, we think of it as, a Gentic is powering the sales experience, and so where does a Gentic come into play for our enterprise approach? It's doing things like research before meetings, the meeting prep, proposal drafts, making RFP responses and decks more consistent. It is not owning the relationship or the room or the clothes, the agents there to make the rep look good, to make the rep sharper, it's not to make the rep redundant, then when you

**[5:17]** think about that mid market segment, that's one where we got to start thinking about scale. Not every customer needs a full sales process, or sometimes they don't necessarily want to deal with one of our client partners, which is what we call our reps, and so there, it's a little bit more of a transactional business, there's still solution selling, we still need to get on the phone with our partners and identify the best way to help them leverage next door, and yes, the prep work that goes into that process from an Egentic standpoint can help speed up how our reps prepare for calls, think about putting the right solution

## 05:30 — Enterprise vs. mid-market vs. SMB: where agentic fits

**[5:59]** in front of that particular customer, but that's still really an AI enabled human last type of approach, where the rep is still getting in the final word. Now Egentic, how is that different than enterprise, follow up gets lickety split quick because you're doing this at higher volume with customers, getting their accounts onboarded and started, we can start to do things there with a little bit more automation, but that's still like sales in my mind, and then when you move to SMB, that's where you really do get more comfortable allowing the agent to take over the outreach, the lead routing, the follow up prompts for

**[6:40]** renewal, and really what the human is doing in that case is they're the ones reviewing the final output from our agent or from our AI process, and then they're kind of hitting submit or send or approve, and so we still are keeping a human being involved in ensuring the customer experience is strong, but it's down the tail is when you can really take advantage of the skill of AI without completely removing people as part of that process. So it feels like there's a spectrum as you work more upmarket, there's an inverse relationship to how much AI you're putting into the customer facing portion of the process.

**[7:22]** To make this maybe more tangible for somebody listening and thinking, hey, how much AI should I have in each of the motions that I have? What are some mental models or frameworks you use? Is it an average ACV threshold? Is it certain components of the deal that are occurring that unlock needing more human handholding? What's the framework in your mind that you're using to determine how much AI you put in the motion? So I think it's a combination of ACV, right, account value, and it depends on which product surface the customer is touching. For us, our core business today, it is an advertising model.

**[8:04]** We've got a platform that drives so much of that ad revenue through Nextdoor. It's a model we've been working on for eight years, maybe longer now that I think about it. It's something we understand well. It's a well understood industry mechanism. That's an area where I think we should be more comfortable pushing it in terms of building AI into the workflow as you move down to lower ACV customers. For newer product experiences, and I'm sure we'll be touching on that at some point throughout this conversation, we need to be more careful there, right? You're putting a new product in market. You need to learn from that.

**[8:41]** The fastest way to learn from customers experiencing a new product is to talk to them and to get their feedback and to engage with them. That's something while there's always a way, again, to automate what's happening behind the scenes to save people time. We need to be thoughtful in particular our new monetization efforts that we're not moving too fast on the AI side and getting out in front of getting the process and the system out in front of the actual real work, which is refining product market fit, finding our moment where we feel like we've earned the right to start to maybe bend the curve and grow out a new line of business.

## 08:45 — The framework: ACV + product surface

**[9:17]** It makes a ton of sense, and I think it's tough to get that feedback in a gentrified way, especially when you're searching for nuance and giving a customer space to open up and share information that it'd be difficult to get in a survey or some type of automated form like that. I think that's a huge nugget for people thinking, "Okay, how much human in the loop do I need?" If it's a new product, you're probably going to want those humans listening and getting as much feedback as they can. That's right, and so much of what I am focused on right now is in exploring new revenue ideas,

**[10:03]** new concepts, new initiatives, trying to keep a good balance between not defocusing what we're doing, but also keeping the aperture open, keeping our mindset open, and that whole area just seems really risky to run too fast on a gentic for the sake of AI transformation when, again, you might actually hurt yourself in the long run if you move too fast there. Couldn't agree more. One question I have about this, and I was at the RevOps AF event. It was in London. It's hosted by RevOps Co-op, really, really good event. AI obviously was a hot topic there. One of the questions that was coming up, and I'm curious how you are doing this, is whether

## 10:49 — Why new products need more human, not less

**[10:52]** to centralize or decentralize your AI efforts. A lot of companies, I think, went with, "Hey, let's just get Claude code into the hands of every single person in the company, and let's go see what happens," and now it feels like there's a shift. What's been your thought process of who's leading these AI initiatives? Who's actually implementing them, and then how are you building these at scale and enterprise-wide so you can maintain those standards across the type of team you have at Nextdoor? Great question. It's funny you just brought this up. This has been an internal conversation for a little while.

**[11:27]** Let me give you kind of a quick oral history, because I think it'll maybe set the table correctly. About a year and a half ago, we created an internal group called Neighbor with AI in there instead of EI, and that was our internal cross-functional team to begin to focus on how are we making AI more built into everything we do at the company. I would say that did start as centralized. It was a group of maybe about 10 people cross-functionally trying to identify the different tools to bring into the company to integrate, to get leverage, and continue to make the company run more effectively.

**[12:05]** We made a conscious decision to actually say, "Hey, let's let individual departments put together their own game plan," and Nextdoor's got maybe 470, 480 people today to go to market org, my org is 110, so a little less than a quarter of that. So what did I do? We got with our sales and operational leadership team, and we put together a game plan on what does that mean for us across back-end processes, what are we maybe going to consider building into the product, how do we rethink our roles, and every other department started to do that. And then around that same time, Claude gets hot.

## 12:19 — Centralize vs. decentralize: the 'Neighbor' AI group

**[12:47]** There was some moment where Claude went from, I think, in my mind, being competitive to chat GPT and Gemini to it was the only thing I use, and I don't exactly know when that happened personally, but it was maybe six months ago. And so all these teams started doing different things, and so that has caused the neighbor group to come back and rethink how do we have some guardrails around AI tool utilization around the company. But again, we don't want to kill the curiosity, the drive different individuals or teams have to just improve that process. And so Pendulum started kind of way out to the left, then it's one way out to the right,

**[13:29]** and now it feels like it's starting to settle a little bit more in the middle where it belongs, which is some kind of cost and tools-based guardrails, but still allowing the individual teams and process owners to have that kind of final say and redesigning really the processes that make their team successful. Yeah, and then structurally, and I think that makes a ton of sense because it was like Wild West, everybody can use it, and then you don't want to lock it down so much to where you're not getting ideas from the field and things happening that can really drive an impact.

**[14:03]** And then there's also a lot of just personal everyday reasons that you need your own setup to structurally in the company and/or just maybe guidance for other companies, it kind of feels like there's some needs on engineering and product, there's some needs on go-to-market. Do you feel like this can all live under one house and serve it well, or do you need two operation leaders leading that AI efforts for each part of the house? I think it totally depends on the company, so I'll start there. I think some companies are functionally structured. Next door is mostly functionally structured.

## 14:39 — The $20K bill and the guardrail pendulum

**[14:42]** We've got president of products, he oversees engineering, product management, data, obviously oversee revenue. We have one of our co-founders overseas marketing, and that I do think kind of lends itself down this path of we'll let the functions own their processes. I think some companies are structured around lines of business or they're in a GM structure where you can probably allow their structures to own their processes. I also think what we're starting to see, and there are roles out there already, are a new department, a new function whose job is to bring the transformation in or at least maybe

**[15:22]** bring some of the outside thinking and outside perspective and then facilitate some of that. I think it depends on the company. I think any company probably needs to go through several iterations to find their way. I think a lot of it also really depends on the strength of the underlying data, and that's something I think we've learned the hard way through our sales force integration that we had a lot of tough ground we had to crawl to get our CRM in a really great spot. Now that I feel like it is, we're realizing that the way Salesforce and Databricks talk to our different AI tools have made the process really easy for people like me, not a data

**[16:08]** scientist, state university. I am my own data scientist, and I'm pretty successful at it because the underlying foundation actually was in a pretty healthy spot. I would say if that's not true, then I do think a company needs to consider this centralized group of people, they go and focus on solving that problem for them. I think for us, again, we feel like we're far enough along there that we don't need to centralize someone to build the foundation. We actually think the foundation's in a pretty good spot. Yeah, I like it, and I like the different models depending on how your company's structured. When human plus agentic GTM is a success. Sure.

## 16:11 — One house or two? Structure and the data foundation

**[16:50]** I'm assuming the project's never going to be done and it's going to be iterative after, but I was just going to say that, like never done. Job's not done, but when it gets to the milestone to say like, "Hey, yeah, we did this in a meaningful way," how are you gauging that it was a successful initiative? Are there some NBO-style things? Are you going to see it in your GTM performance metrics? What will make you say you did a good job? So these aren't necessarily in order, but I'll rattle off kind of what we've talked about and what I think we're looking for, especially between now and the end of the year. One, it's speed to market.

**[17:31]** Are we just moving faster? For our field sales account teams, are they getting more meetings because they're able to reply quicker and turn information around through email exchanges and client interactions? So like speed to market, I think we'll see that and you'll see that in a bunch of places. You see that in things like meeting volume, you'll start to see that in conversion rates between pipeline stages. We'll see it in our outbound for sure. We don't have an SDR model. We don't love the handoff and I actually think most advertising models are more like that. And so we'll see it in some of our really senior season strategic reps, you'll see them

**[18:18]** start to move faster on the prospecting side of things when historically, I think the older you get, the less you like to do that kind of work. And we're already starting to see some of that. There's also, you'll see it in response times from clients. We'll see it in some of the solutions or without maybe knowing how much you understand our business model, our core offering is advertising, which means we're constantly helping marketers make changes in our system to maximize the budgets that they're spending to maximize their ROI. And so the job, yeah, there's sales in like finding the new customer, getting them educated

**[18:57]** on next door, getting them over the line, signing the deal and getting them started. But then there's the ongoing sale of like, here's a better way to use our product or you should try this next month or you've got a temple event coming up for your brand. We're going to help you put together a strategy to do that. So the selling never ends. It's very, it's very much unlike maybe SaaS where once, once the rep gets a contract or a license over the line, they tend to hand it to a customer success or an account management team. That's not our business model. And so we see a speed to market, not just in like deals closing, but in clients taking

## 18:58 — Measuring agentic GTM: speed to market and the P&L

**[19:33]** our recommendations and putting them on the field and putting them in the platform. We'll see it, you know, the financial metrics, we'll see it in our, like our revenue per head will go up or, you know, our number of campaigns or accounts owned or managed by any one group should increase. It should lead to better ARPU, like all the, all the efficiency metrics you look for, you know, and, you know, when you're evaluating a public company's cost utilization, you should start to see it soon. In fact, we already are, you know, it's something we're really proud of even just through last

**[20:10]** year and into this year, we're like night and day in a better place from like, not just a company profitability standpoint, but on the P&L itself for us, like we already, already seen a lot of that efficiency. There's a lot of people running these initiatives and running up bigger API bills than they had on their headcount. So I think, I think the people that are taking a prudent approach are saying exactly what you're saying. Hey, it should show up in the P&L, it should show up in the funnel efficiency metrics. And if you're not seeing those numbers move in the right direction, then you should probably reevaluate where you're applying AI and why.

**[20:49]** That's right. And yeah, I mean, I'm, don't get me wrong, I'm so paranoid around, you know, our company or people, especially on my team, you spending too much on the tools, but we're, it's not as bad as we thought it was going to be. We just, the trick there is to avoid the big mistakes is the way I kind of do it. Yeah. Someone's trying to catalog the entire internet in a few prompts. I think, I think this comes out in the way you're answering a lot of these questions. And you said it during our prep session for this, that, Hey, you're an operator before you're a salesperson.

**[21:30]** And I'm just curious how you, cause there's a lot of paths to get to that zero title. I'm curious a bit about your background and, and what, what gave you the foundation to approach the role in this way. And what you think makes it unique compared to a typical sales for Sierra. Sure. Um, that's funny. And sales team would tell you I'm not good at sales and the ops team would tell you, I think I'm good at ops. I'm not good at that either. Have you heard the term hybrid athlete? Sure. Of course. I would shoot sports, man. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I've been called that and it just means I'm kind of good at a couple things. I agree.

**[22:10]** I'm like, all right, I can't tell if it's underhand compliment or not, but sure, I'll, I'll take it. I like compliments. Um, maybe like quick career progression. Cause I think maybe that kind of helps tell the story and I'll get into the mindset. Um, I started working. My first job was for a public accounting firm, very quantitative. They taught you how to grind out 80 hour weeks. I didn't necessarily like the environment or the industry, but it, that was a great place to learn how to find some grit and how to just like get your head down and get good work done. And there was pressure because at the end of the day, those are charge hours.

**[22:47]** Like you've got to account for every minute. And so I would say that was like the beginning of kind of thinking operationally, which is like this mix of quantitative and needing to kind of track your time really, really well. And obviously prove that you're using your time well. Um, I didn't love the industry. I wanted to work for a startup at the time I was living in San Francisco. Ad tech was hot. Video advertising was hot. I found a really hot startup called bright roll, um, got in early and I joined the media team. So my first role there was effectively as a campaign manager, um, at an ad network focused on video.

**[23:23]** But through that, that is, you know, an ad tech, that's a very quantitative, you know, it's a very quantitative. You run the company through numbers. Like they're talking about billions of ad requests and impressions and data points flowing through a platform every day. You have to be good at being quantitative. What happens at a company like bright roll, they grow, they have new needs. Um, I was always, I suppose, sort of there to raise my hand to jump on the next new project. And usually when you're starting something new, you got to operationalize it. Like you got to take it from like zero, which is like, there's nothing to it to how are

## 23:35 — Operator-first: from public accounting to CRO

**[23:57]** we going to, you know, where's the spreadsheet that's going to track this thing? How do we get like general, um, you know, communication cadence in line? What do we need to do to get people organized? Like what's the Gantt chart look like? And so my first several years early in my career at a startup, we're doing that kind of work. Only it wasn't an ops job. It was, it was a customer facing job where that just was the need, um, ended up pivoting that into a sales engineering role. So that's where, um, in fact, I led that group there. And so that was, um, that's where you start to like sink your teeth and how to behave

**[24:31]** well in meetings, how to be smart about listening and being a little bit of an empath, the client needs and starting to really put the right solution in front of them from there ended up going to a company turn, which was a DSP at the time they were, they were in the middle of a turnaround. And so I joined, um, a long time mentor, Bruce Falk to help him kind of reorth the company. Like they were, they were bleeding money. They needed to get to profitability. They needed some help, like really rethinking internal operations. And so I went from a job where it had to be operational to know a job where the job was to fix operations at the company.

**[25:12]** Um, I loved it. I thought I was like fairly natural at it was, you know, be the way I described it, um, partly that into, um, ultimately a role at next door, doing the same thing, um, for, um, a long time friend who I'd worked with at turn Lauren Nemeth and kept it going. And at next door, I mean, I've, I've been in the next door eight years. It feels like I've had a hundred roles here. Um, I don't want to like go into all the nitty gritty there, but I would say like at the core is always focusing on what needs to go from zero to one and trying to take it there. And I think that always starts with trying to be organized, looking at the data, um,

**[25:55]** focusing on the communication cadence. And so when I say I'm an operational leader, that's what I mean. I do think you can win, um, by finding the right rhythm, keeping the trains running on the tracks the right way and continuing to pull the right levers and continue to like look for the edge, you know, you're always kind of trying to find a seam or, or where to maybe pull the sticker back. Um, and, and that's what I mean by that. I love clients. I love actually interacting with the team. I know saying I'm not a sales leader sounds like I don't like people, but like I get my energy from the plan winning more.

**[26:29]** So then I get it from, you know, having a great meeting or dazzling someone out in the real world. Yeah. I think that winning edge is the secret ingredient for any really good CRO. And I know a lot of rev ops professionals listen to this podcast, they, they follow what we're doing here at lean scale. And most of them, if you were to ask them where they see their future, especially in a C-suite position, they would say CRO. I know a lot of them have kind of come up through pure operational roles. Is there anything that you think someone sitting in a rev ops role should have as an experience

**[27:12]** that would help prepare them for a CRO type of role or a path they should follow? Yes. Oh man. That's so much of my career and I feel like my, my answers probably changed over time. I think one of the most important things you get out of an operational role is you do get the ability to kind of see the whole elephant. And so for anyone in rev ops, especially at a larger company, like I would be absolutely pin seeking any opportunity you can to work on a new line of business, work on international expansion, work on, you know, sometimes they're painful, but like work on a re-ork and, and

**[27:53]** all of that I actually think is that's seeing the whole elephant I think is incredibly important. I think it helps in decision-making. I think it helps you understand company strategy, maybe in other corners or departments of the company that you otherwise wouldn't engage with or won't be exposed to. And I think all that is what ladders up to, you know, being able to maybe capitalize on the opportunity to step into a bigger leadership role. I think maybe the answer some people seek is, hey, you got to pick your spot where you like own a number, like carry a bag or you got like a number, you know, you got a goal hanging over your head.

**[28:30]** I do think that matters. I think, you know, it, I've since that turn job, I have always had 30% or more of my compensation tied to revenue outcomes. And so I feel like I have always felt the pressure of contributing to, you know, effectively like the top line. And we all know that feeds into the bottom line. And so I don't think owning a number so that you can say you own the number is the point. I think you have to go through a period somehow in some way where you feel the pressure because I actually think that's the thing when people say you got to carry a bag that you actually

**[29:10]** have to, that's a life experience or the career experience that you have to go collect, kind of wrap this thought. I think the more I meet other executives and leaders in our industry, the more I realize they're not just sales leaders, they're incredibly operational. Some of them have like management consulting backgrounds. And, you know, I think probably, you know, my path was more of an ops guy that got comfortable in sales and started to better understand, you know, that world. And I think you go the other way too. You know, I think some people need help like learning the ops side.

## 29:14 — The RevOps-to-CRO path

**[29:47]** And so I would say to anyone in like RevOps, like, don't run from RevOps. Don't like tell yourself, okay, this is like, you know, not something that's going to like serve me well in the future. I think it will. I just think it all comes down to getting exposure to new lines of business, something like international expansion. And if you do have an opportunity to like more fully own a number, jump on it. But I don't know that you have to seek it if that makes any sense. It does make sense. I think a lot of people would be sitting in the role thinking, oh, I need to jump out

**[30:19]** and do an AE position or something to have the sales chops to get the respect as a CRO. And I think what you're saying is it's one path potentially, but it's more about did you own something strategic? See it through when the definition of whatever it is. And then I think if you're doing something like international expansion or reorging, and if you're really involved as a RevOps leader, you tend to get involved in the enablement side, which would put you in front of some customers or reviewing calls and seeing how things are going and then using that to create better process. And that might be the exposure you need to get that customer facing side.

**[31:03]** You actually just hit on something I skipped over. I'm glad you brought that up, which is whether you're the one interacting with the customer or not, pay attention to what customers are saying. That is incredibly important, even if it's sort of like not your job because the customer feedback goes into the product team and the product team builds it back into the product. And then the product marketing team builds it back into the story and the sales team tells the story. Allow yourself to get disconnected from customer stories and what customers actually want.

**[31:33]** That's actually how you don't get a CRO job or any senior leadership position on the business side. And so that's something I'd say, seek it out. Whether you guys, whether we use Gong, that's our kind of primary listening tool for most client meetings. I think everyone in my organization needs to be digging into what's going on in Gong because I think there's some real gold in there. And I actually think that's what, if we understand that well and we act on that well, and we make the right executive decisions on that well, that's what actually drives business forward.

**[32:05]** Yeah, because no matter what role you're in, you're there to optimize the customer experience, the value the company is offering, and then you're organizing your go to market resources to maximize that impact too. So having that feedback, whether you're in finance, giving feedback on a comp plan or in RevOps, carving out territories, and figuring out where enterprises versus SMB, really, really understanding the customer is going to give you the context to make really good decisions, I think. Yeah. Well, that was for the RevOps leaders. I think this next part might be a little bit more for the CROs because I'm always interested.

**[32:45]** Everybody has limited time and nobody gets more than 24 hours and I also like to sleep, so maybe I have less than others, and I'm always, always curious how people are spending their time splitting up their day, what their seasons and rhythms look like. Especially you, you're leading the core revenue motion, you're launching new monetization strategies, you're going through GTM redesigns while implementing agentic methods of go to market. There's a lot on your plate. How do you approach having the maximum impact you can in the limited time everybody has? I don't think I've ever nailed this, and I actually think you got to be comfortable with

## 32:59 — Stay close to the customer (and mine your call data)

**[33:25]** that in that we're all busy and the trick is to do your best to prioritize and max out your time, but to also not be so particular that you miss opportunities to burn a little bit of time to go learn something or maybe it informs your thinking elsewhere. With Nirov, Nirov Tolia is our CEO at Nextdoor. Beginning of the year, we really, as an executive team, we started to really rethink this idea of priorities. Like we have OKRs as a company, we obviously have a strategy, we have goals, but sometimes in the pursuit of executing, especially given where we are as a public company, it's like two voluminous, there's like too much going on.

**[34:11]** All that stuff gets like a little too short sighted because we're all hungry and we're trying to be world class athletes and we want to go win. He led a conversation with us, a series of conversations where we really focused on longer term priorities and that was for a couple of reasons. One, it was just a healthy thing to do, like you can't go too long before you're sitting down and reevaluating and refreshing long term priorities. Two, when he came back, he was our original co-founder, CEO, he left in 2018, he came back in 2024 and when he came back, he started rebuilding the company, rebuilding the management

**[34:52]** team, transforming the product and there was a lot of people change there. Part of this exercise to focus on long term priorities, we didn't totally get it at the time because he's playing chess like that, but it was for us across the management team to understand where there was either a shared priority with someone else on the team or whether there is, oh crap, there's this moment where, well Kiernan wants to identify his team, great, but he can't do that without buying from Craig who runs our product organization and he actually oversees data and systems.

**[35:32]** As an example, Craig and I have a shared priority around a Gentic transformation and so coming out of that, I came out of there with three priorities, first one was core revenue, got a deliver on the number, all of last year I spent almost all my time on that because I felt like I had to and so coming into this year, it was clear that I had an opportunity to bring in more senior talent to help oversee sales, we hired a new VP of North America, Anthony Demucchio to come in and really take the team to the next level. He's been here like barely three months, it feels like he's been here a year already but

## 35:35 — The four-priority, color-coded calendar

**[36:13]** just all the change he's made, it was a good moment for me to like remember like you can actually hire people better than you even if they're in your org and they take things so much further and so for me, we're focusing on core revenue which is our ads business was like nearly all of my time last year, right now this year, I'm trying to make that be maybe about a quarter of my time and so that kind of represents one of my three core pillars and it doesn't mean I don't go to client meetings, you know, we just did an amazing dinner with one of our huge TOCO clients last week, we had a top to top with another

**[36:45]** client earlier in the week, like I'm still going to customer meetings, I'm still meeting with customers but my time spent on the day-to-day part of sales and core revenue, it has gone down a little bit and that's because I hired a complimentary skill set that's way better than me at that part of what we need to do as a company and what does that enable? It's enabled for me to start to really focus on what are we doing next in monetization and that right now, it feels like a little bit like a science fair experiment to be candid like there's way more ideas on the table than we can deliver in, pretty broad range of both

**[37:26]** upside and like super upside of are they going to be easy or impossible? Are they like totally on brand or they like a little bit out there even if they're good business ideas, maybe they don't make sense for next door and so I am spending, you know, again 10-15 hours a week thinking through that, working with Claude on some of that stuff, talking to the team, meeting with partners that, you know, a year or two ago we would have never even fought to meet with and all that is in service of trying to find the next new line of business or the next maybe scaled acquisition strategy when you start to think about some of the

**[38:08]** models out there. The third pillar, we opened our conversation talking about that but that's this idea to combine the human team and what we can what can we do with a Gentec to just take our company further and then the other thing I'll say, I know I said three priorities and then I was like 25%, 25%, 25%. The last 25%, it's for your team, it's a little bit for everything else but it's intentional to focus on, you know, one-to-ones with, you know, people who report directly to you, critical skip levels and cross-functional partners and I color cut my calendar this way to be clear, like I literally stare at it and you

**[38:51]** eyeball it but you try and you want it to be roughly speaking like a quarter blue, a quarter red, a quarter green, a quarter yellow. Those are the four colors I use because I like basic colors and that is a mechanism to kind of keep you on track and you can use it as like a little bit of a self-audit when, you know, maybe you've had a couple weeks where you felt like you haven't interacted with a customer or you can't remember what someone on your team has like said to you and you got to like double back and remember that, you know, there's the relationship side of how you work with your employees is actually just as important.

**[39:24]** Yeah, I think it's really important to intentionally carve that out like you have. Otherwise, you can get lost in all of these things and grow distant from your team, grow distant from just kind of get out of touch if you get lost down these rabbit holes. You brought up new monetization strategies as a classic advertising model. Whatever you can share. I'd love to hear what's in your mind. What's the future of monetization and next door and just understand maybe what's opening up those new opportunities as well. Our core model is advertising. That's not going to change to be clear. So I'm not suggesting

**[40:12]** we're going to pivot. What I'm seeking is additive. We have, you know, we have a platform with 110 million people. Yes, that's an audience for advertising. Yes. In the same way, investing in agentic is going to be a forever project, improving our advertising offering and improving what we give to marketers and agencies. That's a forever experience too. But there are other things that happen on next door that are transactions or potentially commercial in nature that aren't necessarily ad models. Like we have people every day posting saying like, Hey, I need a plumber. Does anyone have a good recommendation? And then you have a neighbor that comes in

**[40:51]** and it's like, talk to this guy. He's great. And then you have another person come in and say, Hey, I actually am a plumber and I'd love to work with you. And so we're thinking through using that as an example of organic activity that's just happening on next door naturally. We're thinking about different ways to help the neighbor find their plumber faster to help the plumber in the neighborhood, find a new customer faster. And so that's like an example of something we're exploring where there's probably a revenue driving mechanism there. In fact, I know there is in there that we're excited to invest in. It's a little

**[41:25]** bit outside of advertising, you know, where there's this whole other area that we're starting to think through, which is what do you do with like peer to peer commerce? For example, there are people who have an amazing chocolate chip cookie recipe and those same people make cookies for their family. And sometimes they make a ton and then they post on a platform like next door, like, Hey, like I've got a hundred dozen cookies available through the weekend, $10 a dozen stop on by. And so like, when you think about the gig economy, when you think about peer to peer transactions, I think it's the early, early innings for

**[42:04]** us to really think through a smarter way to put a business model behind that. Yes, that's promotional in nature in some cases. So like advertising is a part of that, but it's not just pure lower funnel performance advertising that's going to help like build that out. You know, we're also thinking about what do we do with, you know, what do you do with data? We've got, again, we know a lot about our neighbors on next door. We know where they live. We know what they're interested in. We know what their community is like. We know who they engage with. We, we work with partners who can also tell us that, you

## 42:29 — What's next: plumbers, cookies, and the data graph

**[42:39]** know, Mike Kiernan at X one one six Pacific street, uh, lives in a brownstone and it definitely doesn't have a pool. So let's not send Kiernan, uh, any sort of marketing related to pool cleaning or, uh, a pool basketball hoop. I'm a huge basketball fan. And so like, when you think about data as this, like, this, this, uh, this nexus of something that, that we feel very well positioned in and it's a big moat for us. There's a lot of interesting business models out there to go evaluate, um, from a revenue standpoint. We need to be thoughtful. We need to be strategic. Like we can't just give or sell our data. That's

**[43:16]** not what we're doing, but we are thinking about different ways where our neighborhood graph, um, becomes a monetization asset on platform or off platform too. I love it. The more just value you're building into the product just opens up all these other potential doors. And absolutely you're sitting on a gold mine oil, well diamond mined of data that I'm sure would be really interesting for all kinds of people. And I also hope, uh, so my sister who also happens to be a go to market architect here at lean scale, she lives in New York. So she, uh, became a Knicks fan right at the right time. She just

**[43:56]** moved there a year ago. I was like, yeah, I was like, do you get to be a fan? You've been there, you know, just bandwagon in on year one, but, um, she survived the, the festivities after two. What a great experience for the city. I, I'm a Warriors fan, but I was pulling for the next because I don't know how you don't in that case, crazy weekend, amazing team. What a run that was fun. Thank you so much for bringing all the insight to the podcast. I love the story. I love the operator trajectory that you've gone on. I think it's really inspiring for a lot of people who are in a rev op seat, go to market operation seat, and just seeing

**[44:38]** what that path could be to get to chief revenue officer role. And I also think you're doing an incredible job with having some real sober approach, how you're going to bring agents into the go to market motions. I think that framework of where it would fit along your go to market life cycle is really, really helpful for those listening. And I am so excited to see what next door is doing next with all of the things that are on your mind and how you can bring more value to advertisers, customers, and help neighbors just get the most out of their experience and networking together. So Kiernan, thank you for being on the show

**[45:19]** and can't wait to follow all you do. Awesome. I had such a blast today. Thank you, Anthony. Thanks for being a great host. And thanks for giving me a chance to catch up with you on this. Thank you.