Nextdoor is backed by some of the largest and hottest VCs in Silicon Valley, including Benchmark and Greylock, which share LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Uber as recent hits among them. Nextdoor is growing steadily and has raised some $200 million in capital. Nothing about this company isn’t a Silicon Valley and startup success story.

And yet, amid the current climate, Nextdoor is an outlier in almost every other way. It has grown slowly, not just relying on building local city-by-city network effects like an Uber or Postmates, but building neighborhood-by-neighborhood network effects.

It’s essentially vying to be another great social network, while Twitter and Pinterest struggle to grow, LinkedIn has already sold, and even Faceb...