Bryan Power
Appearances
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
It's the ability to pick up signals that are nonverbal when you're in an environment. And those are much more difficult to pick up over video when you're in your house with like a fake background. And I think that's why so many leaders have pressured the system to come back into work. It's really about their needs as much as what's right for everyone.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I think what's right for everyone is a different answer. But certainly you just kind of read the headlines. More and more senior executives you know, more experienced, 20, 30 plus years of experience. The bias is clearly to working in person. And I think it's because there's so much more information at their disposal to do their job.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I also found too, one of the more interesting research, I probably can find it for you, scientific research based on how your brain remembers things, people in particular, is your brain responds to a 3D representation of a person. So in person, your brain imprints who you are. where a two-dimensional screen, like on a laptop, your brain doesn't imprint who you are as well.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
This is why I always found myself, like, I feel like I've met this person before and I can't remember. I thought I was just getting old, but I think there's actually, it's more difficult to retain that in-person meeting someone. It's not the exact same thing as meeting someone on video.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And so anything that's tied to building relationships or social capital, trust, which is really rooted in those things, it's just harder to do over video. It's not that it can't be done, but it's definitely more difficult. And there's lots of studies that have showed that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I think the classic nature versus nurture debate is kind of the jumping off point for everybody. I'm very much a nurture person. I feel like leaders are created by their environment versus the idea of a born leader. I've seen too many people who were incredibly impressive that If you had gone back 10 years before, you would not pick them as the person to really be that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
So when I'm looking for leaders just internally at the company, who's going to be promoted, who is a future CEO or something like that, I really try to just pay attention to how they're impacting the environment around them. how they get their job done as much as what they were able to accomplish. That approach tends to give you signals on what the future trajectory is going to be.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And is there how or is there why do they operate a certain way? Those are the things that give you a better point of view than just were they able to get the thing done that they were supposed to.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I tend to focus on similar to questions you asked me at the beginning. Take me back to moments of adversity and what did you get through it? And just how the person responds to what was adversity, let alone like what did they do with it, can give you a sense of the types of challenges that they've experienced. had to come across.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I think if you go all the way back, I was also a dot-commer. I came to the Bay Area in 1999, and that was a really inspiring time in tech and in Silicon Valley. And I think I learned at an early age to try to chase down and lean into really challenging opportunities, probably a little more than I thought I was capable of.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
One of the more profound concepts I've learned really came from the Kapoor Foundation here in the Bay Area, which is this idea of the distance traveled. I don't know if you're familiar with this concept. It's really about, you should look at like how far did they have to come to get to where they are versus where are they? And so like,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
The hiring metaphor would be, generally speaking, people want to hire the top person out of MIT or Stanford. But if they are like third generation Stanford and had tutors their whole life and had interns all through that their parents set up for them or their family set up for them, But the fifth best person was the first person to go to college and worked all the way through.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
Would you still really want the first person knowing how far the person who came in fifth had come? So this distance traveled really means look at their journey. And so when I interview or assess, I'm trying to get a sense of what's their rate of learning in growth and achievement. By achievement, I mean, what have they been able to overcome?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
Because that path is better than zooming in almost like a case study of what was this example that showed you figured something out. Like I think anyone who's interviewing has some type of prepared example of they did something good. But when you get into their journey, like the ground someone covers and what they knew and didn't know is really, I think, what stands out.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I think particularly in tech, we don't focus on this enough. We kind of look at where are they today and does that match to where I'm in today? You know, are they at a little bigger company in the same area of experience? Then they must be able to help us instead of thinking about their learning velocity and ability to overachieve whatever's in front of them.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I can't think of any one event. I'm not the only person who grew up with this tradition, but I grew up in a blue collar, lower middle class family. We didn't have everything. We certainly weren't poor. I do remember when I was 11 or 12, my dad said I couldn't have money whenever I asked for it, but anytime I wanted a book, he would pay for it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
That accelerated my love for reading, which ultimately meant learning. Throughout all phases of my life, whether I was going to high school and college and finding a job, there's just been this desire to learn more, which ends up back to what I said at the beginning of seeking environments where I don't know what to do or I'm going to be challenged.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
If I was to pick a pattern of the roles I've taken, the companies I've joined, what's been really clear has been, I probably don't think I was totally qualified and I definitely didn't know what to do. You make a lot of mistakes, but ultimately, hopefully you get on top of it. And then the next challenge will be bigger.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
But always trying to keep that path, I think is probably the consistent theme that's shaped me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
Well, I think it's become more clear. You know, my first job out of college was a recruiter. My standards then were like, I just want to be in a role where I'm talking to people and there's a lot of energy. I don't want a job where I'm thinking by myself. But like, it wasn't much more complicated than that when I was 22.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I think as I got older, you know, and more experienced, I realized I really experienced success as a we, not an I. So my motor comes from groups that I'm associated with, whether that's team or company or my hometown or sports teams that I root for. That's when my meter really ticks up. If it's about me getting an accolade or a better grade in class, I've just noticed it's not the same gear.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And so that has led me more to roles where I'm able to impact the people around me so I can personally feel that success because it's like when we do something together. And so the people function is really an enabler of that. We accelerate organizational success versus do something ourselves the way a sales org would or a product manager would create and ship a product.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And so I've found that that desire to work together with others and be a team player on a great team, that's what's reinforced this idea of the people working in that part of the business.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I was really young. I was 23 or 24. And so I was grateful for to be exposed to like the super high bubble of the dot com where you kind of look back on it now and see that change was going to take longer than people thought it did at the time. But this period of massive change was clearly in the air, particularly in San Francisco in 1999.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
Yeah, I think they're two different things. Number one, getting into a specific type of company or another team in a company you work at, I think people underestimate just persistence, like real persistence. Taking a year to try to get into a company versus sending three emails. I found that the professional endurance to overcome some of these things, I'm particularly thinking about recruiting.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
Like when you recruit someone really good, It could take a year, but people tend to have a much shorter timeframe for when they expect success or move on to the next thing. So if you want to work at a really great company and you know the company it is, be mentally prepared for it taking a long time and then find your connection points. You know, I think another really important concept.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
This was kind of emerged in the fifties is the idea of weak ties, which you hear more about. It was actually a study on how people found jobs. What they discovered was in this famous study, it's the people you kind of know that are your way in. It's not the people you really know or don't know. It's your roommate's friend that you've met three times.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
They work at this company and they're happy to pass it along. So you have some level of social capital, but they're not like your tight And so activating that part of your network is really important. It takes a lot of hard work to get someone who kind of knows you to do something for you. But that's for sure where the connection points are.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
So your second question was about moving up into leadership. I think the more experience you get, people can get trapped into what's next versus understanding how they get things done is going to have to change as you move up in the organization. you really have to learn how to do things fundamentally differently.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
When you go from being someone who in their day job does a certain thing to getting worked on through other people, which is what being a manager is, you have to completely reframe how you think about solving problems. And then again, when you now are a leader who is managing people who lead teams, you have to go through a whole other loop. Like you're not managing the team anymore.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
So the process of unlearning and then learning new things, you want to have time to really reflect on how you're doing things versus just how do I get promoted or what's the next thing I want to be a part of.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I think when people become that like manager where they need to delegate for the first time, It's very rare they get it right the first go. But they usually do one of two things. They either keep managing too much so they continue to do what they used to do. And that stands out right away because most people don't want to be micromanaged and it stands out like get away from me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
But what equally happens is people don't manage. They just give so much space that the team is no longer really moving at the same pace or level of quality that... It should, you know, and I think people oftentimes trip themselves up there because they don't want to be a micromanager.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And so they overcorrect to like leaving everyone alone, avoiding difficult conversations, not giving people the information they need to get to the next level because they want to be liked and not be seen as adding pressure.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
It kind of reminds me similar of the feeling around AI today where people are not totally sure what exactly it's going to look like, but clearly something massive has really shifted.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And so I think you go one of these two ways and then you find your way back to what's the right balance of providing clear direction, training someone to do the right way, giving them feedback when they're not doing it the way that they should, as well as giving people the space and autonomy to grow in their role.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
Like ultimately, good managers find that that equilibrium and know how to go both ways. I think when people first start, they kind of know how to do one. Except in the rare case, it's very rare people can do both really well. And so just being self-aware of yourself, like where are you going to end up? Are you going to be too accommodating? Or are you going to be too assertive?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
You probably have a point of view on yourself when you're making that transition. And it's to really practice the one that's a little less natural to you and make sure you're building up both of those capabilities.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I think I won't pick the boss because the boss is going to play a role no matter what. You're going to get feedback. But how do you think through this problem? What's helped me is identifying people early on that you're coming up with the organization with. They're kind of like your work friends. You see things the same way. You can finish each other's sentences.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
That can give you a great space just to work through what you're going through. But then I've also found finding someone who is successful in a very different way from you This is the person, it can be somewhat of a symbiotic relationship. You can kind of contrast your strengths and their strengths.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And these combinations don't naturally come together because they tend to have different ways of operating. But if you build that relationship almost with your foil, the person who is not unsuccessful, successful, they're just doing it a way you would never do. You're almost surprised that they're successful. That relationship can be very key. And so I encourage people to be proactive
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
You can usually think about it. If the team's big enough, company's big enough, there's someone where you're like, I just don't get it. Go make a relationship with that person because they will get just as much out of you in your way. And that can help buffer you from the stuff that's either uncomfortable or confusing or unknown that's very natural to them.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
Because it's probably the opposite is true. The things that come very easy to you will probably be harder or more confusing for them.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I'll give people two, and this works for leaders as well as anyone joining a company that I think are significant.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
The first is really around three or four weeks in, you almost have these night vision goggles where you can see the company, the culture, their processes, their way of doing things in this incredibly visceral way because your brain is actually working in overdrive because it's in a new environment. Your limbic brain is charging to make sense of this world.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
So you're actually accessing like way more juice than you normally would. And a couple of weeks in, you kind of actually start to understand it, but you haven't yet assimilated. And so your ability to really share reactions over like what is this company is profound three or four weeks in around that timeframe. Not your first week, everything's too new.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
Not two to three months in because you've kind of started to settle in. But like a month in, you can just share incredible observations. So as a... People leader, like I really seek out these new higher observations a month in because they can really confirm or educate on what you think your company actually is. And they have no agenda. They're just like, wow, this is really interesting.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I've never seen this before. This really stands out. This is so cool. Those are like the observations I think are really powerful. And that can help your onboarding. You know, you're letting people understand maybe something they didn't appreciate that's so different because they've been here now for four or five years. It's just become... their day-to-day.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
The second thing, which I think is one of the most common traps, one of the most common mistakes of starting in a new environment is this urge to just prove yourself too fast, to swing for the fences. Because we all seek this validation where they're like, oh my God, Brian is such a good hire. This guy's amazing. Everyone wants to hear that a month in. Who doesn't want to hear that?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And so what that means is you're looking for this opportunity to just be like, oh, I totally got it. I understand. I know what to do. We should do this. The problem is, is related to the first point. There's so much you don't understand. And so your brain might actually be making a mistake at pattern matching. You think you're seeing something you've seen before, but you actually don't.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
It looks better looking backwards than it does in the moment. I was lucky enough to join Google. They had just gone public. This is now almost 20 years ago in 2005. And it was certainly a darling of Silicon Valley, but it wasn't like the mega corporation that it is today. And I just didn't anticipate the... journey that I went on there and everyone who's worked there has went on.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And the people you're working with will overreact to the early data points on you. They will begin a narrative about who you are with your first one or two experiences. And so we've all had this experience of someone's new, the first meeting, they just say, I know what we should do, we should do this. And you're like, yeah, we've been talking about that for months about why that's not a good idea.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
That person doesn't know, they just got here. But in your head, they're now a character in this story of they don't know what they're talking about, fair or unfair. And so it's really important to just do the little things, build credibility and trust through doing what you say you're going to do, be in the place you're supposed to be. All these little things really add up.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I think the best example, it's kind of like a pre-COVID example at this point, but we're all told don't be late to work on your first day. This was the thing our parents would say to us, do not be late on your first day. And this really illustrates the point, because if you're late on the first day, they must not care about work. They might not take this seriously. They're not a prepared person.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
You and I work in the Bay Area. Your ability to get somewhere in the morning is plus or minus two and a half hours. Like it has nothing to do with their capability. But the truth is that's what people will start spinning in their subconscious or in their conscious brain. And so you just don't want to start that narrative.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
So whatever home run idea you think you have in your first month or two, if it's that good of an idea, it will still work in month three, four, five, or six. But more likely you're going to learn something else and be like, oh, wow, I am so glad I didn't say that. Now that I understand the bigger picture, that was totally not the right idea.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
So just really that counterintuitive because you have so much energy to do your job so well when you're new, you have to hold yourself back until you have as much context as you can to really qualify those bigger thoughts.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
If I was to say in one sentence, we're an essential neighborhood network. You come for utility, but you stay for the community. And when I zoom out, to me, it just makes sense that there's a use for a product that is about your neighbors. The idea of a neighbor as a relationship is a fundamental human idea. It goes back centuries. It cuts across all cultures.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
Everyone understands what a neighbor is. And it's not the same thing as your friend or your family or your coworker. And so for me, Nextdoor just makes sense as a tool, right, as a technology that lets neighbors cultivate those relationships together. You pick your neighborhood, you don't really pick your neighbors.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
you have this shared identity with people that you might have totally different worldviews with. But at the same time, no matter what the person across the street from you thinks, politically, generationally, if you realize 20 minutes after you took off in the car, you might've left the garage door open, you could call them and they would go tell you because you would want to reciprocate that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
It's a very different way of thinking about these types of relationships. And so next door is really at the heart of giving ways for neighbors to bring their neighborhood together. And it's particularly important in the more recent years of technology where so much of people's day-to-day is now on their phones or on screens.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
We just really believe that Nextdoor is a way for people to come out of their house and get to know who's living around them. Maybe you connect online, but you will meet each other in the offline or in the real world. It's very different from the way other platforms are based on who you know, regardless of where they might live.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And even Square, you know, I joined Square One as a startup and I can't say we all thought it would play out the way that it was. We were certainly optimistic, but it just succeeded more than even we anticipated it was working there. Both of those opportunities, and this has been consistent really with all of the
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
Well, I think the most important thing is the community is kind of already there. We find people who are active on Nextdoor, the people who are telling neighbors, hey, you know, this is going on where I live in the East Bay. The power is out or no, that fire is not a real fire. Don't worry about it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
There's certain people who are like these neighborhood leaders or community leaders, like they're naturally inclined to operate like this. Nextdoor is just giving them a platform to be able to do what's already their natural instinct that much easier. We don't need to create all of these leaders.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
We just need them to learn this is an easier way for them to connect with their neighbors in their neighborhood. Again, I think almost everyone has at least some level of shared identity with the people that live around them. Sometimes it's just crisis-driven. It's like there is a fire nearby or there's a hurricane coming. But in those moments, everyone is worried about their local community.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
We've seen everywhere in the U.S. in particular, when there's a hurricane warning or a flood warning, our usage goes up because people are now, their neighborhood is now top of mind for them. It's an urgent, time-sensitive situation. And so we're a great way for them to connect to the other people who really care, where if you're in Maine, you're not as worried about a hurricane in Florida.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
So that's why the experience of the neighborhoods in Florida getting online when there's a hurricane, it's just much easier and intuitive for them to think about what's going on locally with Nextdoor.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
We see lots of little moments. What I mean by that is that what's harder for our platform is, you know, when the local neighborhood rallies around an event, like we're famous for finding lost pets, which is a deeply personal, terrifying experience when someone can't find their dog, you know?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I'm not sure that many people care hundreds of miles away about a dog that went missing, but everyone who knows the neighborhood, like they're all gonna go help find the dog, right? What was unique to COVID was that was a moment where the whole world cared about their local community. Everyone was worried about the elderly from getting exposed.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
Who can I help go to the grocery store with who might be immunocompromised? Like that was a global local moment, which was totally rare. Like I said, we've seen these local moments, but they tend to be driven by some type of local event. And so what struck me, which was really confirming was, no, yeah, this is a whole world thing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
the jobs I look at or teams I seek to join, I just felt like it was more than I was gonna be able to do. That choice that you're scared or stressed that you're gonna be able to achieve something, I've found for me personally is a better choice than taking something where you know you can do it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
It just depends on what's going on in the community during that time. That's what was really unique about the COVID experience being in Nextdoor.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
Oh man, there are so many things. I think what I found later is And it's tied to this idea of taking on challenging things. It's really about managing mental health and understanding what is really going to fill your tank or my tank with the positive energy to take on big things.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I think really early I knew I wanted to take on challenges, but what I've learned is if I'm disciplined or maybe practiced with making the right amount of time for the right amount of activities to make sure I can take on the biggest and hardest things, I'll be better equipped to take on even more. It took me like a while to really put those two things together.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And so the way I really think about it now is Worry less about is it too hard or too much as long as you're putting yourself in the best position to do your best. That time and understanding of what really gives you that juice is important.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
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The people who are really self-aware about this, who are really rigorous about doing the things that will give them energy and not do the things that don't, you can see they tend to achieve more. It took me a little later than I would have liked to really understand, like deeply understand the importance of this.
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Yeah, and it's different for everybody. Like many people, when you're younger, you think about exciting things, going on vacation, traveling and new adventures. As I've gotten older, you know, it's a different set of things that really gets me ready and really trying different things to figure out what those are. Because I think that they're different for everybody.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
But understanding what it is for you and really knowing and really sticking to it, I think is simple but significant.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
Yeah, for sure. It's also the idea of recovery. I see so many people who are burned out or stressed. They've stopped these practices that help them recover. I can think a woman I worked with who I was really fond of was just going through a difficult period. And I knew she was a college athlete, high school athlete.
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It's actually, for me, a better choice to manage the stress and anxiety or feeling like you don't know what to do because you're probably going to figure things out as you go versus look for creating an opportunity where you're kind of boxed into a safe or a small position. It doesn't enable growth the way the big, scary opportunities do.
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And she wanted to talk to me about, she didn't think she could get through this or whatever, just a tough moment. And I was like, when was the last time you worked out or went for a run? She's like, it's been months. And I'm like, that's the thing. I know you. I know that this is the thing that lets you achieve these things. And those tend to be the first things that people cut
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when they're under duress it's the exact wrong thing i think when i was younger this felt hypocritical to me like well i don't understand there's just not enough time i need more time to do this but there's only so much time right energy is really the thing that you can control and so taking away the things that will give you more energy limits the amount of stuff you're going to do with the time that's available to you and so i think that took me longer than i wanted to internalize
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And I see it again and again. I tell people and I feel them eye rolling that they just don't have time to get another hour of sleep or to work out or to read books or to think. They're like, I was too busy. But their ability to operate when busy is really compromised by this deficiency in their quality of their energy and the amount of it.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
Thank you for having me. The honor was all mine. I really appreciate you extending the invitation. I'm glad it was worthwhile.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
Well, I think whether it's a small company, like a startup or a bigger company, I've found I'm personally energized by not really knowing what to do. And that I get an extra push from needing to figure things out, whether that's personally... or at the company level, that brings a lot of energy and attention to whatever problems are in front of you.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And again, like many of us, I've also been in environments where I haven't been as challenged and I found the demands on you drop and then the growth can slow and you end up doing different things.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I have a personal ritual now that I've done. I can't remember when I started doing it, but I really take stock of where I am career-wise at the end of every year over the holidays. I kind of find a day to go by myself and just think and reflect and think about, you know, is this situation working for me? Do I like the company's future? Do I like my personal situation? Do I like my team?
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I don't want a job where I'm thinking by myself.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
Just like a whole... 360 of what do I think I need to do? And I keep this ritual every year because what allows me to do, and I usually lean back into what I'm doing, but sometimes I decide, okay, it's time to change. That allows me to really focus on the year in front of me versus constantly wondering, should I change? Like if you have a bad week at work, you're like, I should quit.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
It lets me really move through the adversity on a longer horizon, knowing that I'm going to take full stock at least once a year into what I want to do next. Because I think that we can overreact to the positive and the negative when we're in the moment. And I think that also can be really distracting if you feel like you're constantly reevaluating your situation.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
Because for me, the best growth has come from periods of real adversity where the instinct is to leave and to quit and to give up or to try something else. And it's when you really push through those steep challenges that you experience personal or professional growth at a totally different level.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I'll go back in time because I'd been at Google for about eight years and I had an offer internally for a new assignment that was exciting. This is now 2011 or 2012. So again, a really long time ago. And just to reorient what was going on then, that was three years after the major economic crash of 2008, 2009. and it was an incredibly fertile landscape in tech.
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This is when today's dominant tech companies, Uber, Airbnb, they were all 100% startups. Pinterest, Dropbox, Square, kind of the list goes on. And Google at that time was really a major player, and I had this internal opportunity, but I decided, you know, I think I kind of want to try a much smaller startup and see what I can do. There were other things.
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I was in New York at the time, and I was interested in coming back to California. But anyway, fast forward to I ended up working at Square and it was really difficult to go from Google at that time was just such a rocket ship that I don't know. And this is common.
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A lot of Google, a lot of my experience is you got to underestimate the tailwind the organization provides for you when it's really on this path of success. And so Square was the first time where I felt my personal, at the time I was leading recruiting and Square was going through a leadership transition where we really needed to bring in a lot of new leaders.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I was lucky enough to join Google. I joined Square One as a startup. Both of those opportunities, I just felt like it was more than I was going to be able to do. I get an extra push from needing to figure things out. But I think everyone wants the success, but you have to go through the level of challenge you haven't dealt with before to really feel that come through.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And, you know, that was my responsibility. Just like a be careful what you wish for moment. I had got this challenge where if I didn't do my job, the company was really going to feel it. And I'd never felt personally that level of stress before where if I failed, everyone around me was probably going to fail. The chances would really go up.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
What I learned in that moment was I'd been stressed about myself and my own job before, you know, or my manager or my team. But I'd never really worried about company level stress for a long time because, again, Google was on this run. And so I had to learn to deal with these different aspects of stress.
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And I remember the moment of being like, well, hey, do you want to just bail out or do you want to do what you signed up for? And so that began a few month run where we really rebuilt the leadership team at Square. I should say the next iteration of leadership is Square. that ultimately took the company public and really took it to new heights. And so I got that direct feedback I was looking for.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
But I think everyone wants the success, but you have to go through the level of challenge you haven't dealt with before to really feel that come through. But I distinctly remember the moment sitting by myself and thinking about this level of stress was a lot and I'd never really dealt with it before.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
Oh my goodness. There's so many things. I think what's been interesting in today's world as a leader is even as an optimist, which I subscribe myself to, I just believe we're on the path to a better future. it's a kind of a tough world. The politics in the US are certainly polarizing regardless of where you come down on the political spectrum.
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There's a lot of things globally that are making people really anxious and it just feels more than normal. And so what I think that means is a lot of people turn to their company as the thing that they feel like they have some sense of impact or control on.
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And so many people expect their organization is going to make their day-to-day better because of the fact that so much outside of their day-to-day world professionally is scary and intimidating and stressful.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And so that means leaders who have a tough enough time trying to go from A to B on your company level goals are also being asked to help people through this macro level stress problem, which fair or unfair is increasingly the expectation for a lot of people that their work is what's going to get them through this. Their professional identity is going to be a source of strength for them.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And so they look to leaders to really fulfill that. And that's very difficult, just given what is important to so many different people, how to play that role. in their day-to-day lives. So I definitely worry about that. I think that the nature of work has changed so dramatically since the COVID-19 pandemic four years ago.
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When I'm looking for leaders, I really try to just pay attention to
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
in what people expect out of work, what it means to have a job, what it means to go to work or do work. All of these things have just been disrupted in a way that it's very hard to think about the last disruption at this level of the work experience going back decades. It's really been seismic. And I think people are still really sorting out what that means.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And so in the heart of your question, what I worry about, a lot of the big plates that just going to work and doing are built upon have really been moving around. So that makes it almost like three-dimensional chess of how to figure out, just to get your work done as a company, you've got to grapple with these other external factors that are really significant.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I think that one thing we learned, and I've been at Nextdoor the entire time. I started here two years before COVID. So my whole post-COVID, during COVID experience has been with Nextdoor. The only thing I felt really confident in, if you go back to 2019 and 2020, when we were really in the throes of lockdown and pre-vaccines and just the unknown,
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
was that a lot of people were quick to declare victory on what work was going to be, whether that was everyone's going to be fully remote, this is the future, or no, no, no, no, remote was just a fad, you got to get back. Like everyone just having these declarative statements that they knew, that was the only thing I knew was wrong, because it's just too seismic, it's too disruptive.
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And seeing just past technical innovations, it's really hard to see when it's happening, the thing that's going to become the major longstanding success coming out of this. And so I think each year, what you've seen now is companies are just taking so many different approaches versus we all kind of used to do the same thing.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I think what's healthy is people are now narrowing in on what do they want their experience to be, what's right for them, for their company, for their size, for their values. And that's just creating a much richer landscape of employers or employment opportunities for people to pick between.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
I think people underestimate.
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There's just trade-offs. If you're a remote company, you can hire in such a broader geographical area than if you want to hire in a place where you can bring everybody together all the time. If you want everyone in the office every day or four or five days a week, everyone at the company kind of needs to be able to get to the office that week.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
So you can only hire within a certain circumference from where the office is. Versus remote, time zones become a factor, but that's like a much bigger... So it's like, what's more important to you? Is it the ability to get people together? Which I think for really small startups is really significant.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
When you're a company of 20 people, if you can all just fit around one table or in one room, there's a velocity to that that I think is just dishonest to not say is real. Whether you need it or not is a different choice, but it is just fundamentally different if you're all in the same room together. But when you get bigger, you all can't fit in the same room.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And so you have different choices that you need to make. But I do think hiring has really changed in that one of the challenges in hiring before was people needed to take time off to interview. They had to go to an office to meet with everybody, which means you have to take a day off, which is kind of suspect if your manager is watching, like, where were you yesterday? And now it's just easy.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
People are so much more skilled at doing really substantive conversations over video with people they don't work with. It's not that we weren't working on video before, but it tended to only be with your coworkers. But now it's just so normal to FaceTime with the grandparents or take video calls at networking meetings. This is just really proliferated on how often people are on video.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
And so I think that's really opened up how people find out about new opportunities and how you get to know people because the time and place commitment is much lighter now.
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Nextdoor’s Bryan Power: Turning Big, Scary Opportunities into Career-Defining Success | E59
My personal point of view is that the remote environment is much tougher for leaders to do their job. And in many ways, it's easier or more desirable for employees. They have more access to getting out of work quickly. But so much of what leaders do is relationship-based. It's your network internally across the company.