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It’s almost impossible to compete with the bottomless wallet of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta (META) when it comes to recruiting AI talent.
So smaller companies have to build the talent themselves, said Nextdoor (KIND) co-founder and CEO Nirav Tolia.
“People are the real asset,” Tolia said in a new episode of Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid Unfiltered podcast (watch above; listen below). “It’s not the code. It’s not the product itself. It’s the brains behind this.”
“That means teaching ourselves to be great at AI,” Tolia continued. “We don’t have the benefit of having all that cash and picking up something off the shelf or someone off the shelf who has that expertise. We have to build it internally. Ultimately, I think that’s a lot more durable and we really have no choice.”
Zuckerberg is having a summer to remember, including poaching top artificial intelligence talent such as Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang with multimillion-dollar paychecks. Wang now leads Meta’s new superintelligence lab.
Just last week, Meta reportedly lured AI researchers Mark Lee and Tom Gunter from Apple (AAPL) to join the superintelligence team.
“AI may be one of the first big platform shifts where there is true advantage flowing to the incumbents versus the startups,” Tolia said. “But I don’t think about that. I think about what can we do at Nextdoor to use the power of AI to build a better product.”
Digital turnarounds like the one Tolia is trying to pull off take time and great talent, and they are far from guaranteed in a world dominated by Big Tech and disruptors like OpenAI (OPAI.PVT).
Tolia co-founded social media platform Nextdoor in 2008 and led the company until 2018. The platform seeks to keep neighborhoods connected with updates on local happenings.
“After running the company for almost nine years, I was really tired and burned out,” Tolia said of his decision to leave. “And I think this happens to a lot of CEOs. You’re in the grind, you’re in the middle of a deep, dark tunnel. You don’t know if you’re ever going to get out. And it’s difficult to have perspective.”
He returned to the company as CEO in May 2024 and found the social media platform was struggling to grow, with a weak product and a sliding stock.
Tolia has since refocused the organization on the user experience with initial signs of success in increasing weekly average users. The company relaunched its app earlier this month, with an emphasis on local news and better engagement.
