The story behind Nextdoor. Now think of it

as the local Facebook of neighborhoods for the Western world.

It's quite a remarkable one, to say the least.

Nextdoor is amongst the distinguished few to have attained

unicorn status. Now these are privately held

startup companies that have been valued at well over

$1 billion without going public at all.

Now, I've used the Nextdoor platform for so many weird and

wonderful things, but what's even more remarkable is the

CEO behind Nextdoor, which is Sarah

Friar. Now, here's a little bit of a background to

Sarah's life. She's a successful

Irish businesswoman who's held some high-flying roles in the

tech industry, including SVP at

Salesforce finance department, CFO at

Jack Dorsey's Square. In addition, she even serves on

boards of other tech companies, including Slack.

Be sure to check out some of our previous Podbite episodes

spotlighting Mr. Dorsey.

Now, by the time Sarah became the CEO of Nextdoor in

2018, which is a Silicon Valley company in

California, she had already been exposed to multiple

cultures and countries, including the United

States, England, Northern Ireland,

South Africa, and you guessed it,

Ghana. Yes, Ghana. On

Keep Connected with Meetup, a podcast run by the CEO

of the platform meetup.com,

Sarah reveals that her first internship was in Ghana

on the back of studying at Oxford and Cambridge

University. On the podcast, she says, and I

quote, it was my first internship. It wasn't

my first job. I was a waitress. I

technically worked on the farm, then I was a waitress, but

it was my real first job. I was

still at university. It was an internship, not a

full-time job, but it was scary. I went off to

Ghana in a place called Obuasi in the middle

of nowhere. The cockroaches were the size of

elephants as far as I was concerned. I did

go down that mine many times,

although most of my work was on the surface because I was

figuring out a process with my tutor back at Oxford

on how to extract gold out of sulfide ones.

You know, it's so easy to write off internships as not adding

any form of value in someone's early career,

but it can actually bring so many benefits that can really help to launch

someone into a successful career, such as the one

of Sarah Fryer. Now, Do you know about

any wildly successful founders, CEOs, or even

C-level executives that began their early career in Ghana?

I would love to hear from you. Hit us up

info@thesoundofaccra.com via email

or visit the website www.thesoundofaccra.com and smash that contact us page.

If you're on social media, feel free to drop

us a message on Instagram or LinkedIn. Just look first at

the sound of accra. I'm Adrian Daniels, and

I'll catch you in the next episode of Pod Bites. Thank you for listening.