A View from the Top with Sarah Friar, the CEO using ‘tech for good’
By bringing communities together and empowering women to take the lead, Sarah Friar is paving the way for future female leaders in the tech industry
Sarah Friar is passionate about community and the impact it has on our lives. Often described as “one of the most powerful women in the Silicon Valley tech scene”, she became the CEO of neighbourhood-based social networking service Nextdoor last year.
The platform, which launched in 2011 in the US, now claims to have more than 236,000 neighbourhoods across 10 countries. It has most recently established a presence in Denmark and Sweden and is now also active in Germany and in the UK, where it covers 16,000 neighbourhoods or 90 per cent of the population.
After a $123m (£97m) funding round, the company is now valued at $2bn. Ms Friar’s ambition is now to make it a “global powerhouse” that will bring communities together. “What I don’t like about technology is how much it is driving social isolation, loneliness and polarisation,” she tells The Independent. “A lot of that is because we are all stuck behind our screens way too much and we end up being in an echo chamber of people like us, which only reinforces the feeling that our opinion is the right one.
“But in fact you can live next to people who have very different views. What we want to maintain with Nextdoor is that I might drive your kids to the football game over the weekend and we’ll cheer for the same football team of 11-year-olds, but we might have very different political opinions. As a result, I’m opening a conversation in the interest of building a community.”
Bringing people together in these divisive political times both in the US and the UK is not a small task, but by her own admission Ms Friar has always been a very driven individual who constantly seeks out challenges. She grew up in Sion Mills, a small village in Northern Ireland, during the height of The Troubles and a world apart from the Silicon Valley. The first in her family to go to university, she studied engineering at Oxford.
According to Ms Friar, her roots have made her the leader she is today – even though her family still doesn’t fully understand what she does for a living. “It’s easy to rewrite history with the benefit of hindsight,” she says. “I’ve always been deeply community-orientated because that’s who my mum and dad were. As a local nurse and local mill manager, they taught me the power of making communities stronger. I’ve always wanted to do something that would allow me to give back. My brother is a doctor and that’s definitely the path that my parents would have liked for me.”
Ms Friar might not be a doctor but her career path is nonetheless impressive. After graduating, she did an internship at Ashanti Goldfields, which sent her to a gold mine in Ghana. “The work experience was amazing but it wasn’t a very inviting environment for a woman. There were no female role models for me to look up to. That question stuck with for me my whole career – ‘How do I make environments friendlier for women generally?’”
She settled in Silicon Valley after moving to the US in 1998 to do an MBA at Stanford. “What I love about Silicon Valley is that no one thinks something can’t be done, they just haven’t figured it out yet,” she says. She landed a software analyst job at Goldman Sachs where she stayed for 10 years before decamping to salesforce.com. A year later, in 2012, she moved to payment company Square, run by Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey. Square’s mission of economic empowerment for small businesses is what made her want to be a part of the firm.
“He had this vision of disrupting the whole finance sector. It was my first very strong sense of how technology can be used to do good, and how it could make a difference in people’s lives,” she says.
Ms Friar became known as “Dorsey’s right-hand woman” and eventually helped steer the company through its initial public offering in late 2015, growing to five times its initial value in the next three years. Following the news of Ms Friar’s departure in October last year, its stock fell 9 per cent in trading. So why did she decide to leave Square for a company that is still trying to grow its business and expand internationally? Part of the decision was prompted by her ambition to be a leader and pave the way for other women to do the same.
Among her many other roles (she also sits on the board of Walmart and business communication platform Slack), in 2013 Ms Friar cofounded Ladies Who Launch, one of the first new media companies which has been providing female entrepreneurs with the tools and encouragement they need to start businesses or grow their existing ventures.
“This project is a good example of when you think you’re giving back but you’re actually getting much more out of it yourself. We can’t be what we can’t see. I thought, I tell all these women all the time that they have to lead. This made me realise that I needed to show up as well and take that CEO role at Nextdoor.” The other appeal of the job was the exciting new prospects and challenges it offered.
“The public offering was an amazing thing to live through at Square. It was the most demanding thing I’ve done physically, mentally and professionally. People didn’t really fully believe in Square’s story and they didn’t see the vision of what we could become. And it’s similar to what Nextdoor is going through now, people think too small about what it could be. And I am kind of excited when I think of the next seven years in my career and how I will unfold that story.”
Her goal for Nextdoor is to become the essential local app by bringing back face-to-face meetings and creating physical connections. “We want the app to make you feel welcome in your own neighbourhood. Like, if you were moving into a new home and people would bring you cookies or a bottle of wine. But with Nextdoor, they wouldn’t just bring you any bottle, but the one that you really like together with your favourite cookies.”
Unlike most messages posted on Facebook or via Twitter, which run the gamut from international news to cat videos, the main thing driving interactions on community-based sites is mobilisation. Nextdoor can be used to find a local plumber or a missing pet, but it can also be a way to find volunteer opportunities in your area, according to Ms Friar. “The app is meant to rally the input and action of neighbours, who are essentially the people with the most interest in making the community safe and thriving.”
In addition to being the chief executive of a company that’s more than a billion dollars in valuation, Ms Friar is a mother of two, and says prioritising ruthlessly is how she makes it work. “I knew I wanted to have a family, it was never a major decision to have kids because I just knew it was going to happen. At the beginning of the school calendar we sit down with my children and I make them choose the events they absolutely want me to come to. I am very blatant with my work calendar that this will be family time, no matter what happens.
“It’s both a way for me to make sure I don’t miss these events but it’s actually also a way to send a signal to everyone else in the company that it’s completely appropriate to have that sort of balance and you should have priorities because if you don’t no one will do it for you. Work is very good at asking more and more of you but where your kids are younger, in particular, they don’t know how to ask, so you have to do that for them.”
After spending most of her career in male-dominated industries, whether it was banking or tech, Ms Friar managed to come out on top. Now her goal is to empower the next generation of women to take the lead, particular in Stem industries.
The one advice she would give to young female entrepreneurs out there? “Know your numbers”. “Women somehow always feel they’re failing, while everyone around us is widely successful. Men are just better at projecting confidence,” she says.
“You have to be able to stand in front of an investor and explain how your business works and how it’s going to work in the future. Even if you’re in the bathroom for 10 minutes before the meeting memorising them, just make sure you know your numbers and wow them with that and a bit of inspiration.”
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