Anne Fulenwider, co-founder and co-CEO of Alloy Health, Nirav Tolia, co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor, and Sarah Lynch, Recognition program director, Inc. Photography by Nathan Bajar
Founders often chase fast growth, but the demands—and the dilution—that can come with that growth can create a new set of challenges.
At the 2026 Inc. 5000 Conference & Gala, Nirav Tolia, co-founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based neighborhood network Nextdoor, and Anne Fulenwider, co-founder and co-CEO of the New York City-based women’s digital health company Alloy Health, reflected on their own early growing pains.
For Tolia, it was Nextdoor’s big moment: being featured in ABC’s 20/20, only for their service to shut down in seconds at a critical moment of visibility, not to be restored for 10 hours. For Fulenwider, it was the moment when a vendor she relied on for her growing trove of customer data went belly up, forcing her engineers to scramble to build a backend platform of their own in weeks.
Now, both see these early challenges as critical turning points, forcing their businesses to stretch to meet their next phases. Today, Nextdoor is a publicly traded company, reporting 15 percent year-over-year revenue growth in its Q2 earnings, and Alloy Health ranked No. 61 on the 2026 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America, posting 4,503 percent three-year revenue growth.
Refreshed leadership advice from CEO Stephanie Mehta
They recently shared what they learned about leading and scaling companies.
Be picky with your investors—and investment
Both Fulenwider and Tolia built their businesses with co-founders—and in Fulenwider’s case, a co-CEO. But Tolia says founders should also think about investors as teammates in building their companies, calling one of his earliest investors almost a co-founder. “He was there on day zero, and he’s been through all of those highs and lows,” Tolia says.
But in aligning with investors, he says founders need to consider two things: chemistry and references (and that many wait too long for the latter). Instead of considering references at the end, you should start there, he says: “Entrepreneurs will tell you what it’s like to work with these people, and you haven’t formulated a view at that point, so you can actually take the references actionable.”