Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar joined Yahoo Finance's Jen Rogers, Myles Udland, Melody Hahm, and Dan Roberts to discuss how users are coming together on the app to help each other during the coronavirus crisis.

Video Transcript

JEN ROGERS: --this time of social distancing, we are also being drawn closer together. And one company that is really seeing that is Nextdoor. Nextdoor was built to bring neighbors together. And I want to bring in CEO Sarah Friar. So Sarah, can you just tell us what you've been seeing at Nextdoor since the coronavirus outbreak really started to take hold in this country?

SARAH FRIAR: Sure. Thanks, Jen. Thank you for having me.

It's been a wild time out next door. In a way, this is what we were built for. So for anyone who doesn't know us, we are the neighborhood hub. Nextdoor is all trusted connections-- so real neighbors at real addresses. And man oh man, do people really need their neighbors right now.

On top of those trusted connections, we're a platform all about utility. Now, in good times that help me find a plumber, help me find a great restaurant, help me you know what to do this weekend in my neighborhood. But right now, it's about neighbors coming together to be that front line of support.

So if I'm elderly, it might be help me find someone to go to the grocery store for me or go to the pharmacy for me. I see people reaching out right now asking for tech help. Help me figure out how to work from home. We see parents coming together giving great ideas on how to homeschool.

So all around us right now, we see incredible engagement on the platform. It's up almost 80% just on a month-over-month basis.

MELODY HAHM: Hey, Sarah. When you think about the two new product offerings that you launched kind of in light of this, I don't know if those were already in the works. But of course, COVID-19 probably expedited it. When you think about the maps feature, which is basically like any young able-bodied person raising their hands saying I can help out, are you seeing a certain use case in particular that is the most in demand, perhaps, from those elderly folks who are living alone?

SARAH FRIAR: Yeah. So thanks for mentioning those two features. They were definitely on the roadmap. But at times like this, you've got to go for it. I'm super proud that the team is just working 24/7 right now. So Help Map and then Groups-- and I'll talk about both, because they solve slightly different use cases.

So the Help Map is really all about this power of proximity. So you can drop a pin on that map and effectively put your hand up to say, I'm here to help. Now, what happens is then someone on the other side who might be a little more vulnerable can now directly message you through that pin to say, I'd love to take you up on that offer.

And so what we see a lot happening right now is food and food deliveries. As we know, seniors are being asked to really self-isolate and really make sure they're staying home. So even though supermarkets are opening, for example, early to allow the elderly to come in, many do want to leave their home. So we see people picking up groceries. But even just cooking a homemade meal and setting it on the doorstep.

It is amazing in my local area, so on the group side, we have a help group around COVID-19. There are now almost 500 people in the group. And just the matching that has gone on person to person is just incredibly inspiring.

And it comes back to something we say a lot on Nextdoor, that in the tough times we definitely need our public agencies, right? The folks like the fire department, or in this case the hospital. But when it really comes down to it, it's your neighbors who save you. It's literally the people who live nearby. And I think that's what people are discovering on Nextdoor right now.

MELODY HAHM: Well, it's so interesting you say that, because you have also partnered with Governor Newsom here in California in creating new awareness campaigns, right? So when you think about the leadership from not only the federal level, but the state level, how would you assess some of these people's performance as you're working closely with them?

SARAH FRIAR: Yeah, so we have a pretty long history of working with public agencies. Nextdoor kind of came into its own, frankly, during Hurricane Harvey. And that was a time when we were working very closely with the mayor of Houston. And so we find many mayors' offices, governors' offices, Health and Human Services, and so on.

Right now, our number one thing is to get the most accurate, real-time information in front of neighbors. So we really are leaning on the CDC and the WHO for that, and also all of the local Health and Human Services departments.

But you mentioned Governor Newsom. And I felt really proud to be a Californian last week when he announced what the state was going to do. We know that self-isolation is key right now to flatten the curve, or at least to give our emergency services a chance to prepare and hopefully manage what's coming at them.

He launched a partnership with Nextdoor, particularly around this idea of neighbors being the front line of support. And you know, it's all sorts of things. There's tremendous food insecurity, we know, across the United States. For many kids, without going to school, they don't have access to that school lunch program, for example. And so we see that as being another place where Governor Newsom, along with his whole administration, is doing things like, how do we make sure children, for example, are getting the food that they need day to day?

These are just the little things that I think many of us don't think about in daily life when we're just hard at it. But now that people are having to shelter at home, we're being forced to kind of think about the vulnerable in our society.

DAN ROBERTS: Sarah, Dan Roberts here. Good to have you on. You know, we've been talking about Nextdoor, obviously. But I'm glad you mentioned California the state. While we have you, I'd love to hear what you are hearing from other CEOs in tech, because we hear a lot-- I mean, we already were hearing long before coronavirus about various issues in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

But now, amid coronavirus, you hear a lot about the way it's hitting tech and small startups' ability to raise VC money right now. What are you hearing from your fellow peers, fellow tech CEOs and leaders?

SARAH FRIAR: Sure. I mean, I think first off, everyone is just trying to make sure we do the right thing-- keep our employees safe, keep our customers safe and our partners, and think about all those supply chains. And it's interesting to see. There's definitely tech platforms that are coming into their own on that front.

SARAH FRIAR: Aside from Nextdoor, Slack is another company near and dear to me. And being able to see what Slack can do from a work-from-home perspective has been incredible in terms of helping people keep business flowing.

I'm actually fine that the conversation is way more focused around SMBs. So forget about tech for a moment. The businesses that are really hurting are those small mom-and-pop local businesses. They employ about half of all the employees in the US. And so I think many of us are rallying around, how do we help those local businesses?

At Nextdoor, you'll see us roll out in the next couple of days really three things, and something I think everyone listening should think about. The first is gift cards. Like, how do you help bridge cash flow for businesses that just can't even open at the moment, like a hair salon for example?

Second is delivery. If you're in the food area, many of those mom-and-pop shops are now switching gears to, how do I do a pickup or how to drive to a delivery, but how do I get the message out that I'm actually still open for some business?

And then I think the third thing we're going to do is partner with GoFundMe, which is a good example of a tech platform in action right now, because in many cases neighbors will actually fund a local business. Because on the other side of this, we want them to survive. A big part of a strong community is thriving local businesses.

MELODY HAHM: Sarah, one of the arguments that's being made in light of these small- and medium-sized businesses suffering, one of the real winners here perhaps are those big box stores, whether it's the Walmarts, Costco's, of the world, and of course Amazon.com.

I know you're on the board of Walmart. And they've been really at the forefront of a lot of these initiatives-- hiring 150,000 workers, raising base pay, and even that one hour dedicated to senior citizens on every Tuesday until the end of April.

Just thinking about those initiatives, are you planning to incorporate job listings, these sorts of offerings in light of a lot of layoffs and furloughed workers, to your point, that perhaps even a gift card or a GoFundMe won't save that business?

SARAH FRIAR: Yeah. I mean, it's a great point. And you asked me earlier about the sorts of actions I see neighbors taking.

The other thing I'm seeing a lot just personally in my feed-- and we see it across the platform-- is those hourly workers putting up their hands and saying, I lost my job. Does anyone know where there's jobs available? And I think that's where you can steer them to someone like Walmart that obviously is out there hiring at the moment.

Walmart's number-one focus has been the health and safety of their employees. They don't have the privilege that we all have to sit in self-isolation but still do our job. So that's rule number one. And then the second is to keep the supply chain humming, because so many millions of Americans depend on them for getting essentials like groceries.

But I think in a local way, we can really help those hourly workers by making sure that we're thinking of during this crisis-- so orienting them to the places that are hiring, but remembering them as we come out of this crisis. There's a lot of stuff that happens around your home that all the time people get matched on the platform from neighbor-for-hire things like a dog walking service or a babysitting service all the way through to those totally favored local businesses like the local plumber.

And I think just remembering the shop local, act local-- think about that, bringing that to the forefront is a huge part of what the Nextdoor platform can do.

MELODY HAHM: And I know you don't disclose full usership. But I know you mentioned that daily active users have gone up. You're in 260,000 neighborhoods across 11 countries. Can you share whether you're opening and launching in new markets as we speak? I'm sure there's a lot of inbound interest given this is a good way to galvanize the community.

SARAH FRIAR: Yeah. I think in some ways it's the hardest thing, because you want to do more and more. So as you point out, we're in 11 countries. Right now, we're really trying to go deep in the countries we're in. So Italy, for example, is one of our younger countries-- clearly a country that's needed as much neighborliness neighbor-to-neighbor help as anywhere else in the world, in a way.

In the UK, we've been leaning into the public agencies that we talked about earlier-- so folks like the National Health Service, and making sure that they can get their accurate real time information out. So while we're not launching a new country per se at the moment, we absolutely see this need globally. And to your point, I've heard so many inbounds from countries all over the world of people saying, how do we get Nextdoor going here?

So we know that we have more to do. And it's great to see the demand. But I think at times like this, we're just trying to go faster and harder on the things in the countries that we're in, like a Help Map, like a Help Group, and some of the stuff that you'll see coming for local businesses over the next couple of days.

JEN ROGERS: Sarah Friar, the CEO of Nextdoor. Melody Hahm in California. Hey, both of you guys are in California.