Spara's CEO: The Hiring Mistake Leaders Keep Making

Spara CEO David Walker once fired two high-performing employees at a previous company he ran — and afterward, more than a dozen staffers told him he had made the right call.

The cofounder and CEO of the AI sales-agent startup Spara said the two employees were not guilty of misconduct or a single blowup. Their failure, in his view, was behavioral: they tried to prove they were smarter than their colleagues rather than collaborate with them. Walker gave feedback, nothing changed, and he acted.

"I could see a marked change in the energy and culture," Walker said. Employees began referring more job candidates after the exits. His only regret was hesitating for months before making the decision.

What does Walker say CEOs get wrong?

"The thing that most CEOs get wrong is that they make hiring decisions and then they go try to set their culture," Walker said. In his framing, the sequence is backwards: culture is not the output of perks or office design, but of who a company chooses to bring in and reward.

"Hiring decisions are the bedrock of setting your culture," he said.

Walker cofounded Spara in 2024 to build AI agents for sales teams. The startup has roughly two dozen employees, and he is applying those lessons as he scales. Previously, he cofounded and ran a tech-enabled real estate brokerage, which he later sold.

The best hiring advice he has received cuts against comfort: "If you don't feel like the dumbest person at your company, you're just bad at hiring." Walker said the goal is what he calls a self-imposed form of imposter syndrome — leaders surrounded by people who know more than they do in their domains.

Which attribute does he screen for?

Talent alone is not the test. Walker said the attribute most correlated with the culture he wants is whether someone gains energy by lifting up the people around them or by pushing them down.

The distinction shows up in small behaviors. Walker pointed to someone who did 80% of the work on a project but uses an all-hands meeting to talk up the colleagues who did the rest, saying the result would not have been possible without them. "They're sharing the credit," he said.

By contrast, employees who need to win every interaction tend to view colleagues' ideas as threats. Workers who draw out others' ideas and knowledge, he said, are more likely to foster genuine collaboration.

How should employees challenge the CEO?

Walker said domain expertise is necessary but not sufficient. New hires also need to feel comfortable challenging him directly — and he, in turn, owes them an explanation of how he reached a decision.

Early in his career, Walker found it hard to say no to leadership-team members who were older or more experienced in their area. An employee's suggestion changed his approach: he now explains his reasoning before delivering the answer. That gives staffers room to understand the logic, push back on it, and learn how he weighs trade-offs.

"Great people expect to be told 'no,'" Walker said.

He applies the disagree-and-commit principle to himself as well. When he disagrees with a team's approach but defers to its expertise, the group agrees in advance on how they will judge success and what they will do if the plan falls short. That might mean reviewing sales call recordings in the first month after a decision to see how customers respond.

Pre-agreed review points make it easier to change course without the reversal feeling like a blunder, he said. The alternative carries a steeper cost: "The worst thing you can do building a company is just have decisions that don't get made."