nextdoor

[Inspired, in part by Biased by Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt and Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.]

When I think about govtech startups, I don’t necessarily consider Nextdoor, what is essentially a digital neighborhood posting board/town crier, to be one. And I still don’t. But I may have unduly devalued the influence community-building platforms can have on governance. There are two particular points of interest here—Nextdoor reckoning with the realities of bias in society and how it can amplify governance—which I think exemplify the unintended aid social media networks and companies at large can provide society and bureaucracy. I had the pleasure of sitting in on a lunch with Sarah Leary—the co-founder of Nextdoor and an HBS alum—after she spoke as a guest in my HBS course (Scaling Tech Ventures) and here is what I learned.

As described in much more detail in Dr. Eberhardt’s book, Nextdoor faced challenges associated with unconscious (and, unfortunately, flagrantly conscious) bias—individuals from marginalized groups, in too common instances, were subject to undue suspicion (via posts on the platform) while going about their daily lives in their own neighborhoods. The very next day, sitting in that same HBS class, we heard from a black executive—a guest visiting for a completely unrelated case—who had felt uncomfortable jogging at night in his wealthy, predominantly white neighborhood because of images of him disseminated on his neighborhood Nextdoor page.

In this way, Nextdoor inadvertently exposed, on a national basis, the underlying ugliness of the American caste system (see Caste by Isabel Wilkerson) that we all too often would like to absolve ourselves of. While this is certainly not a problem created by or unique to these specific individuals, it did become Nextdoor’s problem to help amend once the realities of society moved onto its platform. Instead of dodging the responsibility of this “unintended consequence,” the company worked with Dr. Eberhardt and others to create interventions in the posting workflow. Users were asked to pause before posting about suspicious activity and evaluate whether or not this notice could have been borne of unconscious bias. Is it a perfect solution? By all means, no. But by introducing these points of friction, Nextdoor was able to work with a field expert to meaningfully reduce incidents of discriminatory posts, which is miles better than nothing. Read more here.

Nextdoor served as an instrumental notification feature for residents of Houston during the tragedy of Hurricane Harvey. As Sarah explained to me, certain levies in the region were to be let out due to stress on the infrastructure, which would have greatly affected some down-river/low-elevation neighborhoods, but not others. Residents in afflicted neighborhoods were notified, through Nextdoor, of the movement of local officials every 15 or so minutes in the hours leading up to the event. Nextdoor, due to its stratification of civilians into disparate neighborhoods/regions, was able to provide an incredibly targeted method of communication for officials attempting to disseminate information in the throes of a natural disaster.

It is, I think, an embarrassment and a shame that local governments have not quite cracked the code on shipping their own modes of hyper-localized communication, but Nextdoor did the job at a time when the residents of Houston needed it most. For that, we owe them at least some debt and recognition—the private sector accomplishing something the government could not.

Both examples, executed well by leaders in the company and given appropriate credence insofar as I can tell, exemplify a sort of social impact that I, admittedly, spend little time thinking about—the positive externalities of for-profit companies on society may not necessarily be a business priority, but its very real impact should at a minimum not be dismissed or attract financial penalties and at best be actively encouraged. Money makes the world go round and the economy will never be primarily driven by idealistic notions of social impact, but perhaps I have been too pessimistic about the extent to which this does not necessarily beget exploitative growth.