(Bloomberg) -- Square Inc. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar is leaving the electronic payments company to become chief executive officer of Nextdoor, a social network for local neighborhoods. Square shares declined as much as 9 percent in extended trading.

David Viniar, Square’s lead independent director and a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CFO, will lead the search for Friar’s successor, the San Francisco-based company said Wednesday in a statement. Friar will stay at Square into December.

A longtime Goldman Sachs analyst, Friar joined Square as CFO in 2012 when she was an executive at Salesforce.com Inc. Her hiring received applause from analysts and investors, who saw her as a driver of growth and stability at Square, where CEO Jack Dorsey is also the leader at Twitter Inc. The company, which held its initial public offering in November 2015, has more than doubled in value over the past year as it topped Wall Street estimates.

Dorsey, in a tweet, credited Friar with helping steer the company through its IPO and said his sadness at her departure was outweighed by his joy that she is“finally fulfilling” her “lifelong dream” to become a CEO.

Nextdoor, based in San Francisco, raised $75 million last December at a $1.5 billion valuation, according to Pitchbook Data Inc. Nirav Tolia, co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor, announced in July that he would step down from the executive post.

“Nextdoor is one of those rare companies that transcends its utility as a business and is quickly making its mark on communities here and around the world,” Friar said in a statement announcing her appointment as CEO.

Square investors viewed Friar, 45, as a disciplined executive that set ambitious financial targets, while carefully choosing areas of market expansion. Since she joined the company, Square has transformed itself from a credit-card reader for street sellers into a payments and business software tool for retailers around the globe. It has expanded into loans, food delivery, instant deposits, accounting, inventory, website building and more. In the most recent period, it reported $21.4 billion in gross payments volume.

To contact the reporter on this story: Selina Wang in San Francisco at swang533@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Andrew Pollack, Molly Schuetz

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