In Search Of Excellence - Sarah Friar: Extreme Preparation, Mental Health, and Finding a Mentor | E29

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

Sarah Friar learned about the power of community from an early age. Growing up in Northern Ireland during a time of tremendous violence showed her the importance of finding common ground and taught her how to create resilience from within, both of which are lessons that she continues to live by today. Even in moments of fear and despair, Sarah was able to find her resilience and take risks throughout her career.After checking all the boxes that she thought would lead her to become a partner at Goldman Sachs, Sarah received the news that she wouldn’t be getting the promotion she had been striving for. She could have stayed at Goldman, but her husband said something to her that she couldn’t shake — losing the promotion has set her free.From there, Sarah considered what she’s good at, what she’s passionate about, and what the world needs, which ultimately led her to her current role. As the CEO of Nextdoor, a hyperlocal social networking service for neighborhoods, Sarah is now working to strengthen the power of community — a reflection of her lessons learned early on.In this episode, Randall and Sarah discuss how curiosity and resilience are the keys to finding your path; how finding common ground can unlock social capital that allows you to get things done in the world; advice to women today who are working in a sexist environment; what to do when you aren’t passionate about your work but are making good money; why searching for an emotional connection helps to build stronger companies; why you should be taking risks in your career frequently; the role politics has in the workspace; how to use moments of failure to help you rise; and more… Topics include: -The power of community-Why it’s necessary to do the nitty-gritty work-Why it is important to learn both inside and outside of the classroom-The importance of finding purpose at work-How to use your fears to spur you into action-Whether or not you should have a plan B-Why extreme preparation matters -Prioritizing mental health-Why job hopping is a red flag-How to strike the right work-life balance-The secret side of philanthropy-Why having a diversity of experience is advantageousPrior to Nextdoor, Sarah served as the chief financial officer at Square. Under Sarah’s leadership, the company launched its initial public offering in 2015 and added $30 billion in market capitalization.Sarah grew up in Northern Ireland and earned her MEng in Metallurgy, Economics, and Management from the University of Oxford and her MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where she graduated as an Arjay Miller scholar.Resources mentioned:NextdoorBooks mentioned: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World,  by David EpsteinSponsors:Sandee | Bliss: BeachesWant to Connect? Reach out to us online!Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

You're listening to part two of my incredible conversation with Sarah Fryer, the CEO of Nextdoor. If you haven't yet listened to part one, be sure to check that one out first. Without further ado, here's part two with the amazing Sarah Fryer. So you're at Square at what you said at the time was the best job in the world. And then you get a call from another recruiter who's a friend, which was the only reason you picked up the phone. And your friend told you that he had an opportunity for you that he said was probably the most exciting thing going on in the consumer internet at the time. The company was called Nextdoor and had

been founded in 2011 by a guy named Nirav Tolia, whose goal was to create a local version of Facebook. It was intended for neighbors to share local news, organize and chronicle events, rate local businesses, and exchange goods and services. You joined in December 2018 when the company had 200 employees and a billion-dollar private company valuation. You liked the fact that the company verified everybody's identity and that people could trust that the person they were talking to was actually a neighbor. You were also impressed by the amazing statistic

from a nonpartisan fact-thinking named the Pew Institute that 28% of Americans didn't know a single neighbor, which was very different than how you grew up. There are other reasons as well. You wanted to do things that were really purposeful in life and that you felt would make a difference, and you wanted to cultivate a kinder world where everybody has a neighbor to rely on, which was and remains Nextdoor's mission. We have a lot more to cover today and could be all day talking about how awesome Nextdoor is, but I want to focus on our mental health.

In February of last year, there was a new study by the School of Education at Harvard, which suggested that 36% of all people who live in the United States, including 61% of young adults and 51% of mothers with young children, feel serious loneliness, something that not surprisingly has increased substantially during the outbreak of the global pandemic. And according to a recent CDC survey, over half of these people suffer from anxiety or depression. You've done internal studies and found that knowing six more neighbors dramatically decreases the sense of social isolation and anxiety and can even positively influence financial outcomes for people. What should we be doing to improve our mental health? And what are some of the great things you're doing at Nextdoor on this front? Yeah, there's so much in there. And the research goes on and on and on. We've definitely shifted

something terribly in our society. In the same way, I think we worry about global warming, climate change, what we've shifted in the ecosystem of the world. I think just socially, we've done something bad to shift how we are all connected to one another. So what can you do? I could say tritely join Nextdoor. Please do that regardless. But it's really about how do you start rebuilding connections back into your community? I think people often feel a little overwhelmed by that thought. They're like, well, what would I do? And I think this is where you get this really nice balance at Nextdoor between utility and community. So often it can be as simple as on the utility front, throwing a newspaper off of the street right up onto someone's stoop, like just something kind

in the moment. Maybe it's pulling in their trash cans or their bins, as we talk about in the UK. It can be just saying hello to someone, right? You're walking along, you see them out walking their dog. Maybe you stop for a minute and just have a few words of back and forth. And it can ladder up to much higher utility things, which can go the whole way towards things like maybe savings. We have police officers who have literally saved people next door because they saw smoke coming from a house. We've had people be willing to share a kidney because they found each other next door. Now, I'm not advocating for that sort of extreme, but how amazing that you could really end up doing something with that degree of utility behind it. That building of social capital in these small

incremental ways is what then allows community to start forming. So suddenly those people that you have been striking up a conversation with, maybe you find a reason to walk your dogs together. Maybe you find a group, a tribe that starts to come together. Or you talked about the young mom's problem. These multiple times in our lives when we tend to feel a lot of loneliness. Number one, if we do go, the first time we leave home, often for people, that's the first time of going to university. Second is actually when we have children. So for those of us who become the caregiver, I felt this very much myself. I felt so cut off from kind of the life I'd created for those first couple of months with

my young babies. Third is divorce, which sadly, if you go through a really traumatic period of time. And the fourth is elderly. It's often the loss of a spouse or a long-term partner. And if you think about in all those moments, this power of proximity can really come to bear, right? For the new mom, finding the mom's group or the parent's group, right, can really make a big difference because you're finding people who have something in common

with you, right? Of what I said in the beginning about belonging, how do you find those moments of commonality? For the elderly person, sometimes it's not just finding people who are like you, that are at the same stage of life. One of the beautiful things I often see on Nextdoor is this diversity of neighborhoods where it's the grandpa in the community who's now at the play park and kind of helping watch maybe some of the younger kids and kind of getting that chance to reconnect

across vast kind of age differences. And again, this can only happen in real life. It doesn't happen in the metaverse. It doesn't happen in kind of a synthetic virtual environment. It happens because of the serendipity of local. And of course, it goes beyond just your neighbors. There's small businesses, there's schools, there's churches, there's all sorts of kind of institutions in our community that we can become a part of.

So that would be my call to action is how do you go from maybe online, building up some social capital as an easy way to edge into a relationship to doing something offline. I was just back in the UK recently. We did a whole series of getting neighbors out, breaking bread with one another. Happened to be around something called

the Big Jubilee Lunch. So Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee. But it was really around this idea of a big lunch. We did it with an organization called Eden Project. And we got 15 million people in the UK to do something around kind of breaking bread with their neighbor. Could be grabbing a cup of tea. It could have been a whole like spread. But so many people, I went to, I mean, you can only go to so many events, but I probably went to three or four different events. And I saw so much diversity of community as well. There was one I showed up at, we're in this kind of, imagine this council estate with these houses that all back onto a piece of land. I couldn't

even call it a garden. It was like scrub land. And he said, this group of houses, there's maybe 40 houses, there's 23 different nationalities. So I met women from Yemen. I met men from Somalia. I met people from Pakistan. I met people from Poland. I met people who'd grown up their whole life in England. But just seeing them come together on this scrub land with a bouncy castle, a barbecue, and the kids all playing games, you could really see this power of community

because you know they will look out for each other. Right now, there's a heat wave going on in Europe. You know they're gonna knock on the door of that elderly person just to say, hey, have you drunk some water? Are you overheating? Haven't seen you around for a day? And that can be where neighborhood then really rises to be literally something that can change

the course of life or death. And so these are just the small actions I think we can take. And what we're trying to do at Nextdoor is to aggregate those into an even bigger purpose, right? A place where there's a kinder world where we all have a neighborhood to rely on. Historically, there's been this general thought that it's not a good idea to discuss politics at work. In 2020, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, whom you sort of mentored, announced that the company would prohibit its employees from discussing political issues that were irrelevant to the company's mission, which is, quote, to increase the economic freedom in the world, end quote. And as part of his announcement, he offered severance packages

to employees who disagreed with him. The company had 1,249 employees at the time, and 60 people took him up on his offer. But in today's climate, many employees, in particular Gen Z employees, don't want to work at companies that are silent on important political issues and issues like racism. On June 22nd of this year, more than 200 CEOs representing employees in all 50 states sent a joint letter to the Senate demanding bold and urgent action to address gun violence in the wake of the killing of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. You are one of the 200, which is awesome. But it's not just Gen Z employees who want to know where companies stand on things. Customers

and other stakeholders also want to know your point of view. Can you tell us about the automatic prompts that Nextdoor used in the wake of Black Lives Matter movement? And if we're working at or running smaller companies that don't have these constituencies. Do you think discussing politics at work is a good idea? So I think when it comes to any social issue, right, political or not, you have to have some sort of framework of deciding when as a company you're going to wade in and when you're not. I totally buy into the, you know, if you stand for everything, you stand for nothing. So it can't be everything. And so I think, number one, you need to think about the issue in the context of your purpose and your mission as a company. How close is it or far away? Brian Chesky at Airbnb often talks about, they use the word belonging a lot as well. And so when the issue of immigration came up,

they felt that was an important issue to go after. In Nextdoor's case, with things like gun control, safety is a big part of belonging in a neighborhood context. So that's why we feel it's important to stand behind more gun control issues. We're not saying no guns ever, but we would just like to see a much more tightening up of the regulation about who can carry guns and when and so on. I think the second thing that you have to contemplate is what's all your stakeholders' point of view as well, right? It's not just the people in the building. On a relative basis, Nexer is not a big company. We're 700 people, but we serve 70 million plus neighbors. So I think about us less about the when we want to create change or when we react to a social issue

what are the 74 million people think not just the 700 and they won't all think the same absolutely they will not which is why you want to be principled on the why it matters why you're getting involved and then I think the third thing is can you actually really change anything like are you going to be like a little kind of squeaking mouse here? Or do you actually have some girth and some scale to help change the issue? If you can't do it by yourself, is there a group that you can aggregate around yourself? So it's about, does it fit with your mission and purpose? What's your stakeholders? What are your stakeholders broadly described? Thinking, feeling, saying, how will it impact them? And then third, can you actually

have an impact? Because I don't know if it's worth getting a whole bunch of energy going if in the end you can't really have a lot of impact. I do think we've moved to a point where if you look at the Edelman Trust Indicator, a lot of the big institutions people historically trusted in, the church, government, media, that trust has been massively eroded. That's why businesses are, that's why CEOs and businesses are being asked, because trust for them has actually grown, stayed flatter in the last year, but it's still in a trust plus situation. Interestingly, in that same study, the two places where trust has increased in 2022 are your neighbors and your work colleagues. And I think that is definitely

symptomatic of COVID, by the way. So it's good to know that there's a trust well being created around this power of proximity. I want to switch gears and talk about one of my favorite topics, which has been one of the main ingredients of my success, preparation. But not the kind of preparation that most people think about. It's what I call extreme preparation. 99% of the time, I'm always the most prepared person in the room, which means that when someone prepares one hour for a meeting, I'm usually preparing at least five hours for that same meeting or sometimes 10 hours. Can you tell us how important preparation has been to your success and give us a few very specific examples. And going a step further, how important is extreme preparation, going way above and beyond what would normally be considered great preparation?

I'm talking about the kind of preparation that you spend 30 to 40 hours on for a single event or meeting. Yeah, I love that you do that. And I'm experiencing it right now in this podcast. It's proving like this, the kind of distance we're traveling is far beyond anything I've gone through in another podcast. So you know, kudos and you see it in action here, everyone who's listening. To me, I love the statement of, you know, luck is opportunity meets preparation. I fully buy into it. So I am also an

extreme preparer. I'll give you an example of just even how we run our company. So we write a lot of stuff down. We buy into the pros memo. Now, some of that is I'm an ex-research analyst, so I like the written word, not just slides. But I really fundamentally believe in having a pre-read for every meeting because it gets everyone closer to being on the same page. That way you don't waste half the meeting just bringing people up to speed and the other people are, I don't know, multitasking. The second thing I really love about intense preparation going into meetings and that pre-read is it allows the extroverts and the introverts to find a balance.

And particularly in tech, you'll find a lot of the more technical people tend to be a little bit more introverted in meetings, right? They've not been schooled in the way to present as a salesperson. And so you're getting the best of them when you're giving them that prose pre-read. They can comment in documents on the side, but you're really starting to see the way they brainstorm, the way they want to respond in a meeting. It's actually great for diversity as well, because the people who are loudest don't always just win in the argument. But there is that moment now you're in the meeting where great preparation moves you much more quickly to what really matters.

Most recently, if I give an example, again, back in the UK, ahead of every trip I take, I am quite maniacal about making sure that if I'm going to make the trip, I'm going to make every hour count. So I want to see customers. I want to get out. I did all of those meet and greets with neighbors. But then I want to go in and meet government officials that I should be meeting with. I want to go meet our potential regulators. There's a new bill in the UK around online safety. So it's a good example where definitely I'm not in that meeting winging it. I have read everything that's been sent ahead. I'll often go back and forth with the team to get a little bit more information.

Because then in the meeting, I think you're able to very quickly credentialize yourself, not as just a talking head or what they're used to, which is kind of a CEO or a leader who's clearly gotten the briefing literally walking in the door and is now going to do a lot of kind of chitty chat and glad handling. And then at the end, we'll all shake hands and feel good. I'm going to get to the substance with you. And I think that just puts me in a different place in terms of respect, recognition for someone who cares about the issue. And then the follow-ups are so much more meaty than just a bunch of like, great to meet you. I'm sure I'll meet you next time I'm here.

And so my career, it's really served me well. It's interesting to hear how much you prepare. I think women prepare a lot more than most men. I think we have to, because I think there's a higher bar for us. But it's often my secret weapon is like, I am definitely going to have done more work for you ahead of you. I'm going to be much more on point. And you better bring your A game. Otherwise, I am going to take everything that I can from this meeting to kind of get more for next door, whatever institution I'm kind of working on behalf of. Love that. Other than preparation, we've talked about resilience. You've talked about being the hardest worker. What are the other elements of success? And as part of these, can you tell us

what your board member, John Bryan, saying that you have two ears and one mouth means? Yes, I love that statement from John. It's all about listening. It's ironic to say that on a podcast where all I'm doing is talking, but there is so much to be learned in the silence. It's actually another great trait of leaders is being able to listen through a whole meeting, even when you want to speak up and you want to kind of make your point, just listening, being comfortable in silence. I love those moments when I'm interviewing someone, I ask them a question, they talk, then we pause. I just stay silent for a minute because I want to

see what their reaction will be. I find that it's a really good tell for someone's confidence and preparation because if they got to the end and they stopped and then they look back at me and they wait, then clearly we're moving on. And so if I want more, I'm going to push. The number of people that just start talking again is incredible. And then they get into almost like the place you don't want to be in any situation where you're now either repeating yourself or worse, you're now heading off on tangents or places where your lack of expertise is maybe showing through. So there's a tremendous power in silence. So that is John's two ears and one mouth.

You've talked about mentors a little bit today, but a few include Mark Benioff, Jack Dorsey, and Mary Meeker, who at one point was a top-rated technology analyst in the world who is now a successful venture capitalist at Bond Ventures. You said that you can't be what you can't see and should have at least three mentors you trust at every point in your career. In search of excellence, how important are mentors? And if you don't have one, what's your advice on how to get one? Yeah, so big buy into mentors. Really quickly, my grid is someone in your organization currently that sees you in your day-to-day, and you should be explicit in asking them to be your mentor. Equally,

if you want them to be an advocate, be explicit in that. Slightly different roles, right? But a mentor first and foremost. Second group is folks you used to work with. I find they have great context for maybe a situation that you find yourself in that you want to take them through because they know how you've reacted previously. But they also tend to have a little bit more kind of 50,000 foot view now on you. The third one is these stretch mentors. Like Daphne Mark was a stretch mentor for me. I really had to kind of persuade him to do it. Sometimes you have to do extraordinary things.

I've got a little side note on that. And then the final one for me is actually a four gripping, which is people who just care about you deeply. And they can give you the toughest feedback because you know they care about you deeply. I've mentioned my husband a couple of times on this podcast. You can tell he's definitely a mentor for me. If you don't have a mentor today, go get one. You are not going to be excellent without them. If you're wondering the a mentor today, go get one. You are not going to be excellent without them. If you're wondering the how, you know, I would go through that quadrant, start writing some names in and go make the ask. Going back to that comment I made about women on both building networks,

but leveraging networks, go make the ask of someone in your network. Even if you think they'll say no, who cares? It's just a no. If nothing else, they probably leave with that no. And maybe next time you ask them something, it's harder to say no a second time. But they're in all likelihood going to say yes. And they're going to find some way to mentor you. And then do not do the mentor me moment where you kind of flop down in front of them. You're like, okay, thank you for being my mentor. Mentor me. You must bring them an actual problem, something that you're working on that's tangible, a real live experience that you are living through. Ask them a question about what the thing is that you're trying to work on, fix, grow, etc. Go take their advice, go do the thing,

and then go back and explain what happened, good, bad, what's the next thing that you're trying to work on from there. But be extremely kind of detailed, prepared, and tactical about it because that's the way that you get the most out of a mentor rather than just kind of randomly asking them to mentor you. Let's switch gears and talk about patience and job hopping. I see a lot of people who are in their first or second job who are impatient about their progress there and they want to move on and do the next thing or move to a company for what they perceive as better work. And one of the things that's often important to them is getting a better title.

We have 35 students in our summer intern program. One piece of advice that I give them is to stay in their job, first job for a minimum of two years. When I hire people at my investment firm and at Sandy and for the other companies, our job posting always says, we don't hire job hoppers. If you've had three jobs in any two-year period, please don't apply. What's your advice to these people? And as part of this, why is it a red flag when a job candidate asks what their title is going to be? I'm with you. I actually, my hiring of smarts first, loyalty second, I'm looking for people that are not job hopping.

And if I'm interviewing someone and they have jumped around, it's actually probably going to be my first question for you because I'd rather just ask the thing I'm most concerned about. It doesn't mean that you have to be stuck in mud in your current company. There's lots of alternates of places to go within your company where you can keep learning and growing, but only make the ask when you're being incredibly successful at the job at hand, because there's nothing worse as a manager than someone who wants to move to the next thing,

but has not finished the current thing. On the title front, titles to me are baloney, right? We all like I've seen so many people get cut off. And I just told you my whole experience of wanting to be a partner at Goldman Sachs, which was a lot about title. And in the end, it doesn't matter when I interview someone, I'm interviewing them for what's the work they've done. Great examples where they've moved the needle for the company that they're in or the environment that they're in. I never ask anyone about their job title or how they got a promo. That just seems nonsensical because particularly in a world where I see a lot of title inflation going on, it's not a good way to compare and contrast across companies or across people. In the end,

I want to know what you did, what the outcome was, what you learned, and why you created a great impact. I'm from Detroit. Sometimes I like talking about cars, and why you created a great impact. I'm from Detroit. Sometimes I like talking about cars, and I want to talk about cars, sort of. This is your favorite interview question. What helps a car go fast, and what are the lessons from your answer? Yeah, I've had all sorts of answers. I get the materials, the tires, the accelerator, the fuel, the driver. To me, the right answer is the brakes, because you are not going to hurdle yourself down the autobahn at 100 miles an hour if you don't think you can stop. And so it was always a good question to ask, particularly when I ran a finance organization,

because finance people in some way are the brakes. It doesn't mean that they stop you. In fact, it's the opposite. Knowing that there's a well-run organization that's helping you analyze, take educated risks, and so on, are the things that allow you to go faster inside companies and even with your life. Let's talk about work-life balance. You're married. You met your husband, David, at Stanford. You have two kids, Mac and Isabella. You run a large public company. You serve on several prominent boards. Your hobbies include hiking, reading, traveling, and having game nights with your family. You're also very involved with philanthropy, which we're going to talk about next. Your husband often tells you to be careful of burning out and running too fast. You've given the advice to the others that it's okay to jump off the treadmill sometimes to pull back and rest, recover, and then lean in again. And you said that you wish you had taken time off after you had your children. As we become more successful and take on more responsibilities, what's your advice on how to strike the right work-life

balance? Yeah, it gets harder and harder because, again, you've heard through this podcast, I'm someone who prides myself in my ability to have a high pain threshold on a lot of work. Super curious. I want to do lots of different things, but I want to show up and make sure I'm there for the people that depend on me. I therefore try to not think about it in grandiose, like I'm going to take three weeks off in this period. I'm more trying to bite size it down even into a day. I'm very

deliberate about the fact that I do love to get up early, but in that get up early, I always work out first. Even when I know I have something really pressing that I have to get done, I will not let anything encroach in that time of me getting some physical activity going. I think there's a huge link between your physical health, your mental health, and then your ability to perform. So I think of it almost like a performance athlete. The second thing, I have a deep, deep, deep love of books. And so I have to create some time every day to read. Sometimes I'm starting to cheat a little bit more by doing a little bit more listening to books on Audible, but I really love to read. Sometimes I'm starting to cheat a little bit more by doing a little bit more listening to books on Audible, but I really love to read. That's usually a little bit more end of day. I trade off things like I won't spend a bunch of time. I don't watch a lot of TV, for example,

because that's my passion. And again, it allows me to decompress. So it's finding these moments across the day, just to step away and to remind yourself that it's happening, to be just almost like incredibly grateful for it. Like sometimes I will just step outside and go for a short 10-minute walk because the sun is shining and I love to see the green space. And it's not just going and taking the 10-minute walk, it's telling yourself you're going to go do it. So it has like a moment of anticipation. When you're on it, being grateful that you have that just breath of fresh air going on. And then when you come back, reminding yourself that you got to take that moment away. Again, it's like I think of being your best in leadership is being a high performance

athlete. So physically healthy, taking time to that 10 minute or for me is kind of my meditation moments of taking the brain space moment. And then even with my family, I've always been really diligent about carving out the time that they need for the most important thing. So I often talk about, I get my assistant to put, quote unquote, meetings for my kids into the calendar. I now sound like, you know, an automaton.

But when they needed me to go to the school choir, or they needed me to show up for the school play, or they needed me to go to the soccer match, I made those appointments as important as a board meeting. They were not movable. I couldn't go to everything, but I actually asked them to choose what was most important. So I kind of made them part of my whole system by saying, you are important.

You get to choose your most important things, but I'm not going to show up for everything either. And that kind of helped them think about their balance in life too. And I think it's teaching them ultimately, how are they going to show up in the world for other people? I want to talk about philanthropy, which is hugely important to you as it is to me. Your parents taught you the importance of giving to others above all else and instilled in you a people-first mentality that you have to this day. In 2013, you and Kelly McDonald started an organization called Ladies Who Launch, whose mission is to celebrate and empower women entrepreneurs on Main Street versus Wall Street and provide a safe and authentic space to share ideas, failures, future hopes, and tough lessons to show women they are not alone in their entrepreneurial journey and to inspire them by learning from successful people like you. In our search of excellence, how important is it to give back to others in our community? I mean, it's incredibly important. It goes back to what gives you passion and meaning in life. To me, it's everything. And it is a great source of

energy too. So a thing I've learned with Ladies Who Launch is, yes, I've given a lot into this organization. We've done some amazing events around the world. When COVID happened, we too had to pivot and become much more virtual, but that allowed us to create broader reach. One of the things I'm super proud of is during COVID, we talked for a long time about a grant program and we fiddled around on what it could look like and how we'd fund it and so on. And in the end, COVID was we were just like, we're doing it. And so, you know, today, we actually just completed our next cohort of 20 amazing women, all getting grants from ladies who launched, but most importantly, getting kind of a next six months of mentorship. But that all sounds great. Like I gave a lot,

what I got back, I think is even bigger. I don't know if I would ever have made the leap to being a CEO at Nextdoor without the fact that I stood in front of all of these women for so many years saying, you have to take the leap and step up and be leaders and go ahead, go for it, run your own company. If I hadn't heard that same talk track coming back at me, they helped me

make my own leap back into being a CEO away from kind of my job at Square being a CFO. So that was a huge give back. And then beyond that, I think just the sometimes it's a break in the day, right? Yesterday had a pretty intense day all around, but we're finishing out our second half plan for the company. We're living in an environment where it feels like it changes by the hour. I had a brief interlude where I was working on something for ladies who launch. And even though it could be looked at as more work, it actually refreshed me. My brain kind of stepped away. It did something else. I got to see a couple of the women that are being impacted by our organization. They kind of refilled my tank, so to speak, which allowed me to then come back to my full-time moment job, but feeling very, very refreshed. And I think that is the other, the kind of the

secret side of philanthropy. It's not really what you give. It's actually what you get back. And that can be an incredible source of energy and a big part of building resilience, as we talked about earlier. Before we finish today, I want to go ahead and ask some more open-ended questions. I call this part of my podcast, fill in the blanks to excellence. Are you ready to play? Sounds good. When I started my career, I wish I had known. That perfection wasn't everything. The biggest lesson I've learned in my life is. That in your moments of deepest sadness, sorrow, feeling of failure,

that's where you're actually going to rise most and learn the most. My number one professional goal is. To make Nextdoor, if not the, certainly one of the most important companies in the world. My number one personal goal is? To continue to be a great wife and mother. I love my family. My biggest regret in life is? That I didn't jump out of my time at Goldman much sooner

and start building companies earlier in my career. The one thing I've dreamed of doing for a long time but haven't done is? I want to go to Everest Base Camp and I'm getting older, so I need to go do it soon. If you could fix one thing in the world today, what would it be? That feeling of loneliness. I really want every single person to feel like they have a community or a tribe to turn to instead of feeling isolated and alone where they live. If you could meet one person in the world, who would it be? Top of my mind at the moment, because it just was Nelson Mandela Day yesterday,

and I went to South Africa when Mandiba took over, never got to meet him. But I would love to talk to someone like that about how they transitioned from probably feeling a lot of hate and a lot of maybe wanting kind of retribution against people who imprisoned you, imprisoned, you know, imprisoned your people, but was able to kind of come forward with such a sense of openness and community building. Like, how do we get that into the communities we live in today where people feel they're so divided and they will never find anything in common? He found things in common with the very people who had upheld the system of apartheid. It's kind of amazing. One question you wish I

had asked you but didn't is? Oh my God, you're so prepared. I actually don't know if there's a single question in there that you haven't uncovered. I can't think of anything. My last question is, if you could go back in time, what's the most valuable piece of advice you would give to your 25-year-old self and 10 years later to your 35-year-old self? And what are you telling yourself now that you're a few months shy of your 50th birthday? Oh, dear goodness.

I can't say that. I'm only 27. I actually love this. There's a great, since I told you I'm a reader, there's a great short story by Borges, which is exactly this, right? Two people sitting on a bench and it turns out it's the same person, but talking to their 20-some self. I think for my 25-year-old self, I would definitely tell her, going back to the point of perfection, right? Do not overemphasize perfection, but also take tons of risks. It's what I did, but I would like lean into that. My 35 year old self, I would actually say you've stopped taking risks. I was kind of right around

the time I'd had both my kids. I was still at Goldman. And I would say, Hey lady, you got to turn back up the burners again, right? You used to be massively curious. You wanted to travel the world. And right now, you've gotten very insular again. So time to take it up a notch. And myself at 50? Yeah. Myself at 50 is really about how do I get next door to this incredibly important level, like being one of the most important companies in the world. But then how do I set up the next kind of 20 years of my life where it feels fulfilling, but I find a balance where, you know, my curiosity about travel, about staying fit and healthy, about like my spending time with my family in new ways because they're going to be flying the nest relatively soon. How do I continue to find that balance where it doesn't feel like it's only work every day,

but that it's much more of a diverse way of having a portfolio on life? Sarah, you've been somebody I've admired for a very long time. You've been a phenomenal role model and inspired tens of thousands of people with your success, your humility, your philanthropy, and you've made an immeasurable contribution to changing our culture and the way we live our lives. I'm very grateful for your time today. Thank you very much for sharing your story with us. Thank you so much, Randall. It's been a pleasure. I have done thousands of interviews in my career, and this is the most prepared I've ever seen someone. And it's made the interview much more enjoyable and I think much more far-reaching. I'm going to walk away

needing to take my game up a little. Thanks for doing this. You're the best. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Bye-bye. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye. Bye.