Spara CEO’s hiring test: Can new hires make colleagues better?

By Sophie Lindqvist

David Walker, cofounder and CEO of AI startup Spara, fired two high-performing employees at a company he previously ran; more than a dozen staffers later said the decision was right, according to his Business Insider profile.

The account provides no date for the dismissals, employer name, geography, turnover rate, output measure, sample size or revision history. It is therefore a founder’s retrospective, not evidence of a national hiring trend; the source offers no vacancy, layoff, wage or role-level data against which to place it.

What changed after two high performers were dismissed?

Walker said the pair committed no misconduct and caused no single blowup. Instead, they tried to prove that they were smarter than colleagues rather than collaborate with them. He gave feedback, but their behavior did not change.

Walker’s diagnosis was categorical: "The thing that most CEOs get wrong is that they make hiring decisions and then they go try to set their culture." Afterward, more than a dozen employees told him the dismissal was right. He reported a marked change in energy and culture, more employee referrals of job candidates, and one regret: he had agonized for months before acting.

He now applies that experience at Spara, the AI startup he cofounded in 2024 to build agents for sales teams. The company employs about two dozen people. Before Spara, Walker cofounded and ran a tech-enabled real estate brokerage; he later sold it.

What does Walker mean by a good hire?

Walker does not define culture through perks such as a ping-pong table or a corporate-feeling office. He says culture takes shape through the people a company hires and rewards, making hiring decisions its bedrock.

His blunt test: "If you don't feel like the dumbest person at your company, you're just bad at hiring." The practical aim, he says, is self-imposed imposter syndrome, meaning employees should question their own certainty rather than treat expertise as permission to dismiss colleagues.

Talent alone fails his test. The attribute he says correlates most strongly with the culture he wants is whether a person gains energy by lifting colleagues or by pushing them down. The distinction appears in small credit-sharing choices, not office décor.

He described an employee who does 80% of the work, then uses an all-hands meeting to credit colleagues who did the other 20% and says the result would not have been possible without them.

Such a worker shares credit. Employees who need to win interactions may treat colleagues’ ideas as threats, while those who draw out others’ ideas and knowledge are more likely to foster genuine collaboration.

How should a team disagree with its CEO?

Expertise does not suffice for Walker. New hires must also feel able to challenge the CEO, and the CEO must explain the reasoning behind each decision. Walker sees communication and decision-making as part of a leader’s job. Early in his career, he struggled to say no to older or more experienced leaders on his team, particularly in their areas of expertise.

He adopted an employee’s suggestion to explain his reasoning before delivering an answer. That gives staff a chance to understand the trade-offs, question the choice and learn how he weighs competing considerations. Walker also argues that strong employees expect to hear no, a point he applies to himself through the principle of disagree and commit.

When Walker disagrees with a team’s approach but defers to its expertise, he and the team agree in advance on how to judge whether it works and what to do if it fails.

For example, they can review sales-call recordings in the first month to see whether customers understand the change. A pre-agreed review, he says, makes course correction easier without turning a decision into a blunder and keeps the company from leaving decisions unmade.

What can job seekers take from this case?

Taken as hiring guidance, Walker’s model puts weight on observable behavior: credit-sharing, constructive challenge and willingness to accept a decision. For employers, the remedy carries a visible cost, because he removed two high performers even though they committed no misconduct.

The evidence remains thin. The profile supplies no control group, interview rubric or performance and retention data, and it does not show that the result transfers from a roughly two-dozen-person AI startup to a larger employer. It documents one leader’s recollection of two dismissals and the reaction of more than a dozen colleagues, not a general rule about culture.

Walker’s forward-looking test is concrete—review sales calls after one month to assess customer understanding—but his broader hiring rule still needs retention, output and candidate data that the profile does not supply.