About Us A brief introduction to Dear Neighbor

Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Mountain View, California, Dear Neighbor aims to facilitate the communication between tenants in the same building as well as their community members. With the pandemic, most tenants will rely on Dear Neighbor to keep in touch with their neighbors in a secure manner. Dear Neighbor aims to empower tenants around the globe to send messages to their neighbors and community members without compromising their identity. Dear Neighbor primary goal is to provide a secure, yet great connection experience for tenants and their community members.

Our story

Our founder, worked as a principal software engineer at many companies in Silicon Valley including powerhouse companies like HP and Western Digital, just to name a few. At times he wanted to communicate with his neighbors without intruding. There were countless times our founder wasn't aware of condo meetings because those meetings were posted on a board near the mail boxes. This meant that if you did not pick up your mail on a regular cadence, you would miss messages posted on that board. Often, our founder wanted to let their next door neighbors know that they had a package delivery on their doorstep or that they forgot to close their garage door. Without a means to communicate efficiently with his neighbors, our founder decided to build a communication platform, which centers on delivering short messages to his neighbors when the need arises.

On his last trip overseas, our founder was running late to drive to the airport and he found that one of the neighbors had parked their car and blocked our founder from entering his garage. With 24 units on 3 floors in the complex where he lives, our founder had no idea which tenant parked their car in front of his garage. He then started to knock on the neighbors doors to find out who parked their car in front of his garage. Luckily for our founder, he only knocked on one door, and was relieved. This had our founder thinking of solving a basic problem of communicating effectively with his neighbors. If Dear Neighbor app was available when a car was blocking his garage, a simple broadcast message to the entire building could have helped our founder. That's why our founder decided to build Dear Neighbor.

Our founder’s main goal was to provide a communication platform which allows tenants to communicate without having to share their identity to the whole world, for this reason tenants within Dear Neighbor network are represented by their avatar and messages are sent from one unit to other units in the same building. Only Landlords/apartment owners or property managers can invite tenants within a building to join Dear Neighbor network. This ensures that only tenants within a given building can communicate among themselves.

For Dear Neighbor participants who need to communicate outside the boundaries of the building settings, we provide the capability for everyone to create their own community. As a Dear Neighbor community member, you can sign up to Dear Neighbor, create groups and invite anyone whether they are close by or far away. The basic premise of the site is to allow people to communicate freely and invite only members they want in their circles. This provides a high degree of closeness between community members.

Our culture

Dear Neighbor plans to evolve as a company devoted to communities, built by a community member. As neighbors, we understand what are the pain points to communicate with our neighbors and Dear Neighbor aims to facilitate that communication.