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What does it take to lead - and live - when the world won’t sit still?
Hosted by executive advisor and bestselling author Jimmy Allen, Founder’s Mentality: The CEO Sessions is a leadership development podcast that goes beyond the boardroom.
Each episode features a conversation with a prominent CEO—from the likes of Audible, Walmart, and AWS—who reflects on the lessons that reshaped their business and their personal growth. But you won’t just hear from business leaders. Jimmy brings in artists, musicians, comedians, and other unconventional thinkers who explore the same lessons through a completely different lens.
These conversations surface aha moments from some of the world’s most influential leaders and thinkers. Intensely curious and open to new experiences and perspectives, they seek inspiration in unexpected places as they constantly reinvent their businesses and themselves.
In turn, you’ll walk away with a fresh take on how we all grow as individuals, what we are capable of building, and the legacy we leave behind.
So, whether you’re a CEO, a rising executive, or simply passionate about leadership, influence, and business at scale, this podcast will challenge and inspire you—one story at a time.
About the Host:
Jimmy Allen is an Advisory Partner at Bain & Company with over 35 years’ experience advising leading organizations. He’s the author of multiple best-selling books on growth and leadership and the host and founder of Bain’s Global CEO Community Forum. James is a regular speaker at global business events, including the World Economic Forum, and serves on the Botswana Economic Advisory Council. Outside of consulting, James started his own record label (Abubilla Music) in 2008 and supports Singing Wells, a project dedicated to preserving Kenyan village music.
Bain & Company:
Founder’s Mentality: The CEO Sessions is brought to you by Bain & Company, a global consultancy trusted by the world’s most influential business leaders. With decades of experience guiding organizations through growth, transformation, and leadership development, Bain’s executive insights offer what it takes to lead at scale.
Nirav Tolia: When I came back, the stock was down 80% off of the IPO price, so I don't think there were a lot of people who felt like the current path was the right path.
Jimmy Allen: So, taking a company to the next level, it means instability. It's just part of the deal. Whether we're trying to reposition our company strategically, whether we're trying to scale something we're doing, our stakeholders always expect two things from us. We've got to deliver today's business and have got to develop the business of tomorrow, but how do we do that through all this turbulence we're seeing in the world? How do we do it through the complexity that comes from our very success? Well, today we're going to talk about it and maybe it comes from learning a little bit about how to grow a sapling. Maybe it comes from learning about how to run a meeting. Yeah, really today we're going to talk about meetings. No, no, really meetings.
I am Jimmy Allen and this is the Founder's Mentality, the CEO Sessions, and today I'm talking to Nirav Tolia and he wears a lot of hats. He's the co-founder, CEO, president and chairperson of Nextdoor. So, Nextdoor is this essential neighborhood app with over a hundred million verified users who are every day coming into their neighborhoods to connect to their communities. And to be honest, in contrast to a lot of the tech companies today. Nextdoor's model depends upon nurturing communities, not dividing them. And I like this and this is why I wanted to talk to Nirav.
So, Nirav is what we call a returning founder. He co-founded Nextdoor in 2010 and stepped down as CEO in 2018. But then in 2024, he returned to the company again to lead it to the next chapter. So, how do you prepare to return to a company that you yourself founded? Well, let's find out.
Nirav Tolia: Well, in Silicon Valley in particular, this idea of refounding or the founder returning, which is the more common trope, it's something that's actually, it's well-known. In my case, I left my role as CEO, but I continued to serve on the board of directors. And so, I was connected to the company even amidst those five years that I was gone. And as we prepared to make a leadership change that would then pave the way for me to come back, I was obviously aware of it. And so, preparation is probably too formal a term for what I did. Mostly, I started to emotionally ask myself a very important question, which is did I have it in me to come back?
Knowing what it's like to be the CEO of a company, knowing what it's like to be a founder of a company, and more importantly, knowing what it's like to build Nextdoor, the company that I had helped start and then had run for nine years. I knew what I was getting into, I knew how difficult it would be, and I knew how that would impact my personal life because one of the really beautiful things that happened when I left is that I was able to devote more time to what I believe is the most important startup of them all. I could go back to being a founder with my wife, our family, and our three young kids.
And so, to know that I was now going to return to the grind, go back into the salt mines and do it not with that incredible air of optimism and positive expectation that you have in the early days of a company, but to do it as a turnaround. That was something that for me required much more emotional preparation than analytical preparation.
Jimmy Allen: One thing I often do with CEOs is ask, what are the chapters of the company and what chapter are you currently in and what chapter comes next? How would you describe Nextdoor's journey?
Nirav Tolia: The first phase is when we founded the company and I was the CEO, and that was nine years. That was the inception of the concept. That was going out and getting the first user, launching the first neighborhood, creating the product for the first time, telling the story, that was architecting the foundation of what was there when I then came back. When I came back, it was the end of phase two. Phase two began when I left, and it had been a period of great scale over five years. The company had grown to a hundred million verified neighbors in 11 countries. It was public. It was generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. It had many hundreds of people. That was phase two.
Now we were talking about phase three. The founder comes back, we know we have to do things differently, but it's not just about the founder, it's about the entire company. And the entire company needed to be comfortable with the refounding. And then of course, as I was finally moving from the emotional preparation to the business preparation, I found your book.
Jimmy Allen: I'd love to understand a little bit more your decision to make it a phase three and not a return to phase one, because I think sometimes people confuse that about refounding is refounding isn't a return. So, talk a little bit more about that because there's a real insight there.
Nirav Tolia: Well, I think there are two pieces of it from my perspective, there's a strategy piece and there's a human piece. The strategy piece is the world never stands still. And in the world of technology in particular, if you are employing the same tricks that you did a year ago, much less five years ago, or it had been 15 years since we founded the company, if you're employing the same bag of tricks at that point, it's almost certainly the wrong strategy. On the human side, if I had said, we're going back to where we had been, there were hundreds of employees who had not been part of that first phase, and there were hundreds of employees who had ownership of the second phase.
And so, I'm going to tell them, "Hey, everything you've done, forget about that. We're going to go back to the future." I don't think that's possible. I don't think it's possible either strategically or from a human point of view. There's probably another part of it, which is I was in many ways wanting to feel like a founder, not a refounder. And so, it's fair and true for me to say that I refounded Nextdoor. But it's also fair to say that me and the rest of my team were founding phase three of the company.
Jimmy Allen: Nirav was charting a new course for Nextdoor, but it wasn't going to be easy. In a turbulent world, it's critical that we lead with vulnerability. We have to be clear about what we know and what we don't know, but we also have to lead with empathy. We have to help our people understand what's controllable in their world and what's not. Someone who found an ingenious way to do this is Vivek Sankaran, former CEO of Albertsons. Albertsons is a retailer, and Albertsons faced extreme turbulence during the COVID crisis. And to navigate the pandemic, Vivek started listening to his people.
And every couple of months, he would bring together 60 or 70 leaders from across the company and together, they'd spend two or three days rolling up their sleeves and hashing out the real issues they were facing. And the key question that they kept returning to was, in this uncertainty, what is actually stopping me from doing my job? And how can we sort? So, these forums were hugely important for Albertsons team. According to Vivek, it's not a case of telling people what to do. It's a collaborative journey of discovery to help people find the confidence to do their job. It's a conversation, not a broadcast.
For Nirav, that journey of discovery meant challenging his own beliefs at a deeply personal level, developing as a leader who tries to lift others, not just direct them, have a conversation, not a broadcast.
Nirav Tolia: Well, when you are a public company, there is an ongoing and constant report card that makes you ask yourself the recursive question, are we doing the right things? Are we headed in the right direction, et cetera, right? When I came back, the stock was down 80% off of the IPO price, and I think the valuation of the company was, it was 2024 and the valuation of the company was equivalent to what it had been in 2013 or '14, right? So, I don't think there were a lot of people who felt like the current path was the right path. Now, there was a lot of uncertainty about what is the next path, because if we already knew what it was, we wouldn't need leadership change, right?
There was a lot of uncertainty around whatever that new path is. Do I have a place in it, right? And then there was the cultural ramification of, will I enjoy it? Will I buy into it? So, I would say for me, I came in from the very beginning thinking that the first and most important thing is to show perpetual optimism, perpetual optimism at the highest level, which is the potential for the company and perpetual optimism at the lowest or maybe the most personal level, which is I want you all to be a part of this.
Jimmy Allen: And what was the biggest change you made personally coming back as a CEO into phase three?
Nirav Tolia: The biggest change I made is that I embraced this idea that my job as a leader is to lift people up and to make them feel like they can do their best work. Because I realize that with incredibly high expectations of myself and everyone around me and an unyielding desire to succeed, all good things, there were times when those expectations weren't met that I was very difficult to be around and I was not constructive in my feedback. I was someone who may be belittled or someone who would get angry or someone who would browbeat people versus try to lift them up. And that doesn't mean you're easy on people. That doesn't mean you tell them what they want to hear.
That doesn't mean that you don't push them harder than they believe at times is fair to push them. But it does mean that you listen better. It does mean that you are very open-minded about potentially being wrong, which is a hard thing to do when you're the CEO and founder of a company. You always think you're right. And those were things that I had had five years of self-reflection, and I felt like those were qualities that I wanted as a human being, not just as a CEO.
Jimmy Allen: What's interesting is it worked for a while because of course you get elevated as a leader if you make those around you smaller. That's how math works. But ultimately, it's the worst possible condemnation of someone where if it says, I lift others up, that's going to always win.
Nirav Tolia: Well, it's a great point, and I think that the making people smaller may in the short term be effective, but it's never effective in the long term because in many ways, starting a company is like operating a flywheel. There's no momentum and it takes an enormous amount of effort and maybe it's good effort, plus a little bit of bad effort too, and that's that making people feel smaller piece, right? But all that effort, that unbelievable push against a mountain that doesn't seem to move and then just moves an inch and then you push harder and it moves another inch. And then before you know it, you're not even pushing and the thing's moving, right?
As a refounder that needs to transform a company, the flywheel's spinning, but it's not spinning either without friction, or it's not spinning in the right direction. So, you have to figure out a way to slow it down and reorient it or remove the friction. I don't think you can let it stop. This gets to one of the things we're going to talk about, which is to develop and deliver and needing to do both motions, but changing the flywheel when it's going is a very difficult thing to do. And in my opinion...
Jimmy Allen: Let's go right there. So, how are you doing that? And for everybody, deliver is running the business when the customers benefit from flawless execution of known routines. Develop is where you have to change the business that your customers benefit by testing and learning new solutions. The refounder has a huge run business and somehow needs to transform it. So, let's just go in there. How are you doing that?
Nirav Tolia: I think in Silicon Valley, we typically align that word deliver with execution. We think of it as execution, and we typically align the word develop with innovate. And what's interesting is in the beginning of a company, there's nothing to execute on if you don't have that innovation. And so, these two motions develop first and then deliver. They are much more sequential. But then you're a public company and you're on this quarterly rhythm of delivering your results. And so, at that point, it goes from develop, leading to deliver to needing to deliver all the time. But if you're doing a transformation, you also need to develop because clearly innovation is missing. And so, now to get specific, we did two things.
From the very beginning, we said, quarterly results are going to matter to us. We did not go to the street and say, "Hey, look, forget about this company for the next year because we got to rebuild everything." We did go to the street and say we have to rebuild everything. But we said, "While we are doing that, we may not be operating at a 10 out of 10, but we are going to be operating in a way that we rebuild our credibility." Because at that point, one of the reasons the stock had gone down is because we had not achieved any of the expectations that we had set forth when we first went public.
And it turns out that at our stage of company, which is more like a startup or more like an early stage company, what the street really cares about is develop. But what the street maybe doesn't understand is we will develop and we will release our new product this summer, but we've got to also learn and build the muscle on deliver. Because as soon as we deliver that innovation, we got to start executing. And so, this has been one of the core learnings for me as a refounder, develop and deliver simultaneously versus develop and then deliver sequentially.
Jimmy Allen: So, Nirav put it perfectly. Depending on where we are in our journey, the deliver and develop actions look different. On one hand for a founder, innovation is the heart of everything they do. It's all about development. Take John Vincent, the co-founder of LEON. It's a UK-based food chain, and he began the company with a very wacky premise. What if God made fast food? I mean, LEON's team ran with it. They doubled down on developing product, reimagining fast food classics with a healthy lens. And they said, "We're going to disrupt everything about our industry on behalf of fanatics who would love our premise." But in contrast, large incumbents are built for delivery. They've perfected systems that consistently deliver customer promises.
And in fact, a lot of them think development is a distraction. This is the incumbent's curse. They've lost the art of business building. And companies today built only for delivery, in a world of uncertainty, they're going to fail. And with that, I really want to introduce you to a very dear friend of mine, Herman Spruit. Like me, he's an advisory partner at Bain, but he's also a CEO at 361 by FINCA. And Herman is one of the most thoughtful people I know about this contrast between deliver and develop. In fact, he coined the terms and the great thing that's going to come out of this conversation is a Monday morning action for all of us.
Herman Spruit: The first time really it struck me was when I was working in a large retailer. There'd been a fire in a store. And the CEO being, I think he thought of himself as the best storekeeper, the best retailer, the best strategist, the best everything as CEOs so often do, went into a mega tantrum about what they were doing post the fire and how they were going to bring the store back on. About five minutes later, it changed through a big strategic topic about what are we in health and beauty and how are we going to win in this space? And it became a really strategic conversation. And afterwards, he's like, "Oh my God, this was terrible." They are so detailed that they can't have a strategy conversation.
I said, "Well, you did start it with the most detailed question about the store, and then you elevated it to this completely different level." And by mixing that up, they were just not prepared for either of those conversations. And then I started to think about disentangling these, trying to codify it. It's about the pressure that management has to do two things. It has to deliver value today, but it also has to create a valuable future. You've got a delivery agenda that's all about delivering on the promise today. And if you don't, your mandate for creating a valuable future will be withdrawn. You're just going to lose it, but you can't just do that.
You've also got to work on the two or three things that will double the value of the business.
Jimmy Allen: And so, in your world, describe a perfect delivery meeting.
Herman Spruit: A perfect delivery meeting is we've agreed the 10 or 12 things we're delivering against and where we expect it to be and then they report out here I am and are we on track, off track? And if it's off track, is it a timing issue? Is it just we can't get the resources or is it a strategic issue? The customers have not reacted in the way we thought they would, in which case we need to go back to the drawing board. And you run through those, it's fairly toes to the fire.
Jimmy Allen: And then describe to you a perfect development meeting.
Herman Spruit: The key thing in a development meeting is to have defined the issue. So, many people say, oh, it's growth or it's China, but what actually is the specific issue? That's the start of a good development agenda. Otherwise, it's a chapter heading. It's just a label that we throw out there and say, "Well, I didn't really think that was the issue." And then you've got a really misfiring conversation. A good one is where we've agreed the issue and you really go through what you start with, what are the alternatives? It's always what we're currently doing, and there's always another way. And then you start to evaluate those, and it's an open conversation.
If the delivery meeting is a lot about what we know, the development meeting is often about what we don't know and therefore, opens up possibilities. And it's that again, because I'm now in the tech world, it is that divergence and then convergence. You diverge to really think of what's possible, and then you converge and say, right, this is the selective alternative. And then as you and I know, it flips into the delivery agenda.
Jimmy Allen: And then quite specifically, because you've seen it all the time in your career, what goes wrong if you tag a development conversation at the end of a delivery conversation? What about the mindset of the people?
Herman Spruit: Yeah, that's exactly what I was alluding to in that when the store is on fire, you switch to this, I'm being grilled, and it's human nature to come with lots of prepared answers. We've helped people prepare for the CEO or the board dialogue, and you're on your checklist and you don't feel safe to say creative new things that occur to you. In the course of that conversation that you co-create or that are sparked. You're very scripted, it becomes very stilted and you end up the CEO or the team, we are not a very innovative company, but actually you just created an environment where you stultified it and diminished that conversation, just because you made somebody feel defensive or afraid or you're carrying through the wrong behavior.
Jimmy Allen: So, to Herman, it starts with a really simple, but I think important distinction, ask yourself, am I in a delivery meeting where my customers are going to benefit from flawless execution of a known routine, or am I in a developed meeting where I've got to test and learn my way to new solutions? And more importantly, it is the mindset I'm bringing into this meeting fit for purpose. But of course every company's going to be different. So, now let's get back to Nirav and talk about how these two motions are playing out at Nextdoor.
You're one of the most extraordinary leaders that talks about your love of community and that's how you think about the management of Nextdoor, but it's also the product of Nextdoor. Can you describe as you talk about your development agenda, this simultaneous idea that we've got to get the unit of one right, and then we've got to scale that unit to the unit of a billion and just how you toggle back and forth.
Nirav Tolia: I think probably the most profound thing about Nextdoor is that we are not a technology company. Now, we are in Silicon Valley. We have primarily engineers in the company. We build consumer products that are technology products, but we're actually not a technology company. We are a community company. We use technology to build community. In our case, Nextdoor is the essential network for neighborhoods. So, we're building community at a local level. So, in fact, it's not a hundred million users that's important. It's 335,000 neighborhoods that use Nextdoor that's important.
And in fact, I would say that the dirty little secret about community building, whether it's in the real world or the online world, is that to be scalable, you have to do unscalable things.
Jimmy Allen: So, I think what's so fascinating about talking to you is when you talk about development, the take you have is the take of a founder. And just tell me how a founder approaches development versus how you could cartoon what a large company might do. When we try to build
Nirav Tolia: Community, if we use the metaphor of gardening, we very carefully and in a very time-consuming way, look for the most fertile patch of meadow. Once we find it, we lovingly caress the grass and we have a few seeds in our hand, and we drop them one by one in the right places, and we slowly pat the earth and we lovingly say, "I hope this is the right place for you to grow." Then we come along with a pitcher of water, and we very carefully water the earth, and then we go back and go to sleep. We come back the next day, we water it again. We come back the next day and after some series of days, this tiny little sapling sprouts up. And you would think we won the Super Bowl, right?
Someone watching this would say, "Okay, that's a sapling. You spent all this time and all this energy and all this attention, and you've got one little sapling, but they don't understand what's underneath the surface, because the roots are strong because we've done it the right way." On the other hand, what a big company does is they say, "Well, look, we need a billion users very fast. This is not worth our time unless we're generating billions of dollars of revenue, right? There's opportunity costs, so let's go find a giant football field of a meadow because a small meadow is never going to get anywhere.
And once we find that football field of a meadow, let's take our tractors and let's hire a couple of helicopters and let's put a bunch of seeds and a bunch of fertilizer in those helicopters and fly them over the football field and dump them on the ground. Then let's hire fire trucks to come with their fire hoses and hose down the entire football field. And then we're going to stand on the sideline and we're going to say, "Grow, grow, grow." And after a couple of weeks when nothing's grown, we're going to say, "Oh, this wasn't worth our time. We're going to walk away."
Jimmy Allen: Yeah. And I think to us, this is founder's mentality, which is, and you said it so brilliantly, it starts with development and then you move to delivery where the professional manager just says, how do I optimize delivery with no love of the product, no love of the unit of one?
Nirav Tolia: Well, as I was thinking about being a refounder, one of my challenges was I had never been a public company CEO. And as I was searching for the ways that people had done this successfully, I came across the book. And of course, a book with the title, the Founder's Mentality is something that's going to resonate with me immediately because I think of myself as a founder. Even more than a public company CEO, I think of myself as a founder.
And so, I found the book and I was just floored because on one hand, there was this language of founding that was so resonant with my experiences, but there was this other half of the book, which was actually when companies get bigger, there are things that you have to change and there are things that you have to revitalize, reinvigorate, and that's what the Founder's Mentality is all about. And so, it was a rare light bulb moment for me. Then I did a very founder thing, which is I sent you a LinkedIn message and I sent Chris a LinkedIn message, right? And you didn't write back because you were having your 40th wedding anniversary trip. And then I sent you a friend request and you accepted it.
And then I sent you another message on May 13th saying, "Thank you for accepting my friend request. And by the way, let me reiterate what I said in my first note," and you immediately wrote back. And then we've had this wonderful friendship and you have been an unbelievable mentor. And the book is something that I carry with me, not just physically, but I carry it with me in mind. And I've become so convinced that this is the antidote, not just for Nextdoor, but for any company that's struggling with complexity and all successful companies do.
Jimmy Allen: So, look, there's more than one way to get into Founder's Mentality. And on our website, you'll find a lot of content from other founders and CEOs talking about how they lead their organizations. I mean, we've had over 500 meetings at the CEO forum, and that community will give you a lot of content. So, to explore, visit bain.com/founders-mentality, or better yet, let me just put the link into the show notes. And now we're back to Nirav with some rapid fire questions. What is the one thing you learned in business that you've taken home to your three boys?
Nirav Tolia: I tell my kids easy choices, hard life, hard choices, easy life. And the idea behind that is when you're building a business every single day, you're making decisions. So many times, the value comes from doing the hard things.
Jimmy Allen: What brings you energy?
Nirav Tolia: People, always, people, ideas, community. I want to be around others. I've never felt so good as when I'm surrounded by people who are trying to do something amazing.
Jimmy Allen: What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?
Nirav Tolia: The best piece of advice I've received is first, who then what? Most people when they're starting companies, they say, "Well, what am I going to work on? What idea am I going to start?" The first thing I asked is, who am I going to do this with? And that's true, not just of starting companies, that's true of everything in my life.
Jimmy Allen: Amazing. What's the worst piece of advice you ever received?
Nirav Tolia: The worst piece of advice I've received is the data will give you the answer. We have an obsession in Silicon Valley about being data-driven, and I love numbers. Numbers are the language of business, but you have to balance the numbers with intuition, with qualitative insight, with feeling. It's what Steve Jobs talked about, the intersection of technology and liberal arts. That to me is the intersection of data and real human feedback.
Jimmy Allen: Boy, do we need your voice in AI right now? Boy, do we need your voice?
Nirav Tolia: I think AI is ultimately about humanism. You asked the question, what gives me joy? Humanism. Humanism gives me joy celebrating the human. And I think technology is ultimately at the service of that.
Jimmy Allen: Okay, so let's recap some of the key takeaways from the conversation with Nirav.
Nirav Tolia: I came in from the very beginning thinking that the first and most important thing is to show perpetual optimism, perpetual optimism at the highest level, which is the potential for the company, and perpetual optimism at the lowest or maybe the most personal level, which is I want you all to be a part of this.
Jimmy Allen: And look, we live now in a world of terrible uncertainty. And to thrive as leaders, we first need to be vulnerable. We need to be clear on what we know and what we don't know, but we also need to be and help our people define in their jobs what is controllable and what is not. And remember, that's a conversation that's not a broadcast.
Nirav Tolia: So, we're building community at a local level. So, in fact, it's not a hundred million users that's important. It's 335,000 neighborhoods that use Nextdoor that's important.
Jimmy Allen: In uncertainty, we have got to rediscover the art of business building, but Nirav gives us a really good insight here. It's the way the founder toggles between the unit of one. Let's get that sapling right? Let's make it beautiful, let's make sure we believe in it, and then let's scale it and talk about the forest. But we've got to get the unit of one. And so, often we forget that.
Nirav Tolia: And so, this has been one of the core learnings for me as a refounder, develop and deliver simultaneously versus develop and then deliver sequentially.
Jimmy Allen: Final takeaway is let's not forget Nirav's discussion of the two fundamental motions of a company, deliver and develop. And for most of us, we're really good at delivery. Our systems, our processes are built for delivery, but they view business building as a distraction. And that's a problem in a world of turbulence. That's a problem in a world of AI where our customers are going to demand a lot of new solutions. Business building now is a non-negotiable, but I also love Herman's suggestion. Let's keep things simple. Let's focus on one Monday morning action, and that action is in your next meeting, ask yourself, am I in a deliver meeting or am I in a developed meeting?
And is the mindset I bring fit for the purpose of that meeting? I did tell you we talk about meetings. So, in my own journey, I have found that this issue of mastering the two motions of deliver and develop to be incredibly hard for leaders to get really, really right. So, we're going to spend more time on this. Next episode, we're going to talk really in detail about delivery. We'll be joined by the legendary founder of Olam, Sunny Verghese and he's going to talk about the power of repeatability in everything that we do. So, join us next time and stay curious.