Nextdoor co-founder Nirav Tolia discusses how Epinions survived the 2000 dot-com crash through severe downsizing and departures.
Disclosure
Shopping.com forced Nirav Tolia to resign before IPO due to past controversies
“When you are a company that wants to go public, you want to be as unencumbered by controversy as possible, right? And the best thing for me to do at that point was to step away. Now, did I have a choice? No, not really. I mean, they kind of Asked me nicely to …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Nirav Tolia predicts AI action platforms will completely replace multi-link search
“Particularly in a world of AI, where most consumers are going to go to one place, ask a question, and everything's going to be taken care of behind the scenes. It's not going to be, You go to Google, you get 15 links, you click on all of them, you hit back, yo…”
Opinion
Nirav Tolia claims Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon have failed at local
“I also think no one has won local. Google hasn't. Meta hasn't. Apple hasn't. Amazon hasn't, right?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jerry Yang told Nirav Tolia he was less intelligent than he thought
“And he looked at me right in the eyes, and he said, you're a lot less intelligent than I thought you were. Do you have any idea how hard it is to build something like Yahoo? Well, you're about to find out.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tolia: Co-founder merger litigation permanently fractured friendships
“It took friendships, and it fractured them, and they've never been repaired.”
Assertion Contradicted
Tolia: NYC had zero billion-dollar consumer internet companies in the mid-2000s
“How many billion dollar
Consumer internet companies are there in New York?
And at the time the answer was zero.”