Michael Kiernan is Chief Revenue Officer at Nextdoor, the neighborhood network connecting more than 110 million verified neighbors across 350,000 neighborhoods — roughly one in three U.S. homes. An operator-first revenue leader, he built his career across ad tech and bizops: he started in public accounting (where he learned to 'find some grit' grinding 80-hour weeks), then moved into campaign management and sales engineering at BrightRoll, and did operational-turnaround work at Turn before joining Nextdoor in 2018 and being elevated to CRO. He describes himself as an operator first and a sales leader second, and is two months into a nine-month 'Human + Agentic GTM' plan that embeds agentic AI into the revenue motion without removing the humans who carry the relationships — while helping CEO Nirav Tolia build new monetization systems beyond advertising and delivering quarter over quarter as a public-company executive.
“To so quickly try and remove human from what we're doing as a business just doesn't feel right. In fact, I think anyone trying to force us to go down that path is actually not thinking about it correctly.”
“Over the past six months to a year, you've gotten a ton of inbound. It's super low quality, the volume's 10x. It's turning me off to this entire experience.”
“The agent's there to make the rep look good, to make the rep sharper. It's not to make the rep redundant.”
“The fastest way to learn from customers experiencing a new product is to talk to them, to get their feedback, and to engage with them.”
“The pendulum started way out to the left, then it swung way out to the right, and now it feels like it's starting to settle a little bit more in the middle where it belongs.”
“The sales team would tell you I'm not good at sales, and the ops team would tell you I'm not good at ops either.”
“I get my energy from the plan winning more than I get it from having a great meeting or dazzling someone out in the real world.”
“One of the most important things you get out of an operational role is the ability to see the whole elephant.”