David Walker learned the hard way that company culture starts with who gets hired.
The cofounder and CEO of AI startup Spara, which creates agents for sales teams, had to fire two high-performing employees at a prior company because, he said, they undermined the culture he was trying to build.
There wasn’t a single blowup or any misconduct, Walker said. Instead, he said, they tended to try to prove they were smarter than their colleagues rather than collaborate with them. Walker said he offered feedback, and nothing changed.
“The thing that most CEOs get wrong is that they make hiring decisions and then they go try to set their culture,” he said.
After he made the call, Walker said, more than a dozen staffers told him it was the right thing to do.
“I could see a marked change in the energy and culture,” he said, adding that employees started referring more job candidates. His only regret: that he had sweated over the decision for months before acting.
Walker is drawing on those types of experiences as he builds out Spara, which he cofounded in 2024. The startup has about two dozen employees. Before starting the company, he cofounded and ran a tech-enabled real estate brokerage, which he later sold.
Hire for how people treat colleagues
For Walker, culture isn’t defined by whether a company has a ping-pong table or a “corporate-feeling office.” It’s shaped, he said, by the people a company chooses to bring in and reward.
“Hiring decisions are the bedrock of setting your culture,” Walker said.
He said the best piece of advice he’s received on this is simple: “If you don’t feel like the dumbest person at your company, you’re just bad at hiring.” Ultimately, Walker said, you want “self-imposed imposter syndrome.”
Talent alone isn’t the test, however. Walker said the attribute most correlated with the culture he wants is whether someone gains energy by bringing those around them up or pushing them down.
That might look like someone who did 80% of the work taking time in an all-hands to talk up colleagues who did the remainder and saying it wouldn’t have been possible without them.
“They’re sharing the credit,” he said.
Walker said that those who need to “win” interactions might view colleagues’ ideas as threats, whereas workers who draw out others’ ideas and knowledge are more likely to foster genuine collaboration.
Hire people who will challenge you
That distinction also shapes how he wants employees to interact with him. Walker said it’s not enough to hire people with expertise in their areas of the business. They also need to feel comfortable challenging the CEO — and Walker, as CEO, needs to explain how he reached a decision.
Walker said a leader’s job is, in part, to define how a company communicates and makes decisions.
Early on in his career, he said, he found it difficult to say no to people on his leadership team who were older or more experienced in their area of the business.
To make it easier, Walker said he followed an employee’s suggestion and began explaining why he was making a decision before simply delivering an answer. That gives staffers a chance to understand the reasoning, challenge it, and learn how he weighs trade-offs.
“Great people expect to be told ‘no,'” Walker said.
He said he’s a believer in the idea of disagree and commit — including for himself.
When he disagrees with a team’s approach but defers to its expertise, Walker said, he and the team discuss in advance how they will judge whether it is working and what they will do if it is not.
That might mean reviewing sales call recordings in the first month after a decision to see how customers understand a change. Setting up a plan to evaluate a decision down the line can make it easier to change direction without it feeling like a blunder.
That keeps things moving. “The worst thing you can do building a company is just have decisions that don’t get made,” he said.
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