Find Out Who Your Next Door Neighbor Is
By Alia Almuhanna
If you were to ask a room of people if they know who their next door neighbors are, a majority of them would not raise their hand — Nextdoor is changing that.
Simply put, Nextdoor is a social networking service for neighborhoods.
Prakash Janakiraman, co-founder of Nextdoor joined our summer cohort at Draper University to not only talk about the platform itself, but his journey as a co-founder building the company from the ground up.
Prakash began by telling a story of when the founding team knew they had more than a social networking platform, but instead a service that was going to be much bigger. This realization came during Hurricane Harvey when a woman was stuck on her roof and unable to seek rescue because of the shortage of responders and the high volume of people in need. Without knowing what else to do, the woman posted on NextDoor and in minutes a neighbor with a canoe came to her rescue. NextDoor knew they had something big and put all of their efforts into the crises making sure they were providing as much help during this period as possible. They were onto something.
NextDoor began to focus a lot on the role of culture in companies and how each decision they made had to come from the six pillars of value. These are the single most important ingredients in building any company; if you are ambitious enough to build a company, you must build it on the six pillars of value.
The number one priority for Nextdoor is their members which is the engine that drives all the values. The main mission as a company is to be the essential local path for neighbors to connect with one another, to find out what is going on in their communities and to help one another solve whatever they need.
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