Spara CEO says hiring decisions set company culture

By Daniel Okafor

Spara CEO David Walker says he fired two high performers at a prior company after feedback failed to stop them from trying to prove they were smarter than colleagues rather than collaborate.

No blowup or misconduct triggered the departures. Walker said the employees tried to prove they were smarter, and his feedback changed nothing. More than a dozen staffers then told him firing them was right. He reported a marked change in energy and culture, along with more referrals of job candidates, but said he regretted waiting months to act.

“The thing that most CEOs get wrong is that they make hiring decisions and then they go try to set their culture,” Walker said.

Walker treats culture as an output of whom leaders hire and reward, not a layer applied afterward through amenities such as ping-pong tables or a corporate-feeling office.

He draws on that experience while building Spara, an AI startup he cofounded in 2024 that creates agents for sales teams. The company has about two dozen employees. Before Spara, he cofounded and ran a tech-enabled real estate brokerage, which he later sold.

“If you don't feel like the dumbest person at your company, you're just bad at hiring.” Walker called that the best advice he had received and described the desired condition as self-imposed imposter syndrome.

That does not mean ignoring talent. Walker said the attribute he believes is most correlated with his desired culture is whether someone gains energy by bringing colleagues up or pushing them down. He supplied no sample, survey instrument or correlation analysis for that proposition; it remains a leadership framework built on direct experience.

His example was hypothetical: a worker doing 80% of the work uses an all-hands meeting to explain that colleagues who did the remaining 20% deserve credit because the result would not have been possible without them. Walker uses credit-sharing as a counterweight to people who must win every interaction and may treat colleagues’ ideas as threats.

What does this change for sales leaders?

It moves culture controls upstream into hiring and puts customer evidence into sales decisions. The practical change is to judge collaboration before people join a team and evaluate sales changes after they reach customers, rather than expecting a policy or company event to repair a poor fit.

• Hiring stage — founder-led teams at Spara’s scale: Before adding people to a sales team, apply Walker’s test: look for people who draw out ideas, share credit and challenge leaders, rather than counting expertise alone. The context is a roughly two-dozen-person company; Walker set no headcount threshold.
• Customer-facing stage — teams with recorded calls: When a sales process or message goes live, review call recordings during the first month to see whether customers understood the change. Walker presented this as an example, not a measured sales result.
• Decision stage — teams that set review criteria: Before deferring to a team’s expertise, agree how the decision will be judged and what will happen if it fails. That turns disagreement into a reviewable commitment rather than an open-ended delay.

The account reports no win rate, cycle time or result by pipeline stage. It supports a hiring-and-review practice, not a claim that a particular tactic raises conversion.

Expertise alone does not meet Walker’s bar. Employees also need to feel comfortable challenging him, and the CEO must explain how he reached a decision. A leader defines how the company communicates and makes decisions.

Walker said he initially struggled to say no to older or more experienced people on his leadership team. Following an employee’s suggestion, he began explaining his reasoning before giving an answer, giving staff room to challenge it and learn how he weighs trade-offs. He now expects capable people to accept a no, which he describes as a marker of great people.

He also applies disagree and commit to himself. When he disagrees with a team’s approach but accepts its expertise, they agree in advance on how to judge whether it works and what to do if it does not. This keeps decisions moving without turning every reversal into a crisis.

Walker’s governing rule is operational: a decision that never gets made damages company-building more than one revisited after evidence changes. As Spara grows beyond its roughly two-dozen-person phase, the framework points to a concrete checkpoint: review sales-call recordings in the first month after a change, then decide whether customer understanding justifies the new direction.