Sarah Nahm
Board Member, All Raise. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveoperator@srhnhm ↗sarahnahm.com ↗
Sarah Nahm co-founded the talent acquisition software company Lever in 2012 and served as its CEO from 2014 to 2020. She previously worked at Google and currently advises startup founders on hiring, culture, and go-to-market strategy.
1shows
1appearances
19statements
0resolved
0supported
0contradicted
Everything Sarah Nahm said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Nahm: Silicon Valley grants engineers an unearned seat of privilege
“Silicon Valley has actually this deeply ingrained stereotyping around technical, People. And, like, for the most part, I think that's a seat of privilege. Like, if you are an engineer, if you've got, like, coding chops, if you're a hacker, like, there's all th…”
Nahm: Facebook shifted Silicon Valley to see young founders as innovators
“And my freshman class at Stanford was the first class to start with Facebook. And I think that that really changed so much in Silicon Valley where young people now were seen as people that could innovate and that could bring kind of game changing ideas to mark…”
Nahm: Founders should treat their startup as a product
“Hey, you know, I still work on a product. The product is this company and I still have to do user research. It's just that my users are my employees and my customers. And that same process for, you know, generating a clear strategy around user needs was just a…”
Nahm: More designers should become startup founders
“I really got to say that to me I think more designers should be founders. I think that that skillset is so, so relevant to the work it takes to actually get a lot of people together to work in a system and to create value from scratch.”
Nahm: Team and macro trends matter more than personal ability
“Probably the biggest thing to truly getting started was, you know, again, people. Believing in the people that you're working with. Believing in the people around you. And then secondly, you know, I think believing in a change that's happening in the world. An…”
Nahm: A product's true identity is defined by customer word-of-mouth
“Like you can think that you're delivering this game changing such and such platform, something, something, but like what your customers say about you or what they say to their friends when they're talking about your software, I mean, that's ultimately who you …”
Nahm: Founders hold startups back unless hiring is a core strategy
“Hiring is, like, hiring is the strategy when you're a startup. Like, there's a period at which, like, you know, like, you can be the best founder on the planet, and you will be holding your own company back if you haven't figured out how to truly prioritize hi…”
Nahm: Remote work demands communication systems that physical offices get free
“You've got to build a culture that can support remote work as a first class citizen. And I think there's some people that really nail it and they think about the details. They think about how meetings work. They think about how information's transferred. They …”
Nahm: Impact descriptions attract top-tier talent and diversify applicant pools
“And I would attribute, you know, this impact descriptions, As opposed to job descriptions as not just being one, like a great way to get the most talented people, like the top 10 percentile of the talent market interested in your opportunities. It's also been …”
Nahm: Companies must build inclusive culture before diversity recruiting
“Before you're about to do a big investment into diversity in your recruiting, and making kind of your hiring more diverse, I actually think it's really critical to start by making sure your culture is inclusive. Because what's the point of, like, hiring all th…”
Nahm: The technical vs non-technical divide harms B2B software companies
“We needed our quote, non-technical people to embrace and adopt like designing systems that were as sort of like scalable, sophisticated, scalable, and have that sort of engineering mindset about their work. And then we also needed our technical people to under…”
Nahm: Lever team agreed to make her CEO before Series A closed
“Literally kind of on the eve of our series A, we had signed a term sheet, but we hadn't closed the round. Kind of we as a team collectively agreed I should be CEO.”
Nahm: 81% of Lever's engineering team was proactively sourced
“81% of his team was proactively sourced.”
Nahm: Pre-nurtured candidates get hired 35% faster than cold applicants
“They actually get hired, like we have the data to prove this, like, 35% faster, Than people who are meeting you for the first time.”
Nahm: Lever's first interview stage is explicitly named Motivation Fit
“At Lever, our first stage of our hiring process, it's not
Phone screen.
It's not something like that's just screening.
I can't, it's motivation fit.
Like literally that's what the name of the stage is.”
Nahm: Lever uses a career trajectory interview walking candidates from college forward
“We do a step in our process that we call career trajectory, and it's basically
A behavioral interviewing interview where you go in and you just kind of start at, you know, college and then go step by step by step through people's career and allow them to tell …”
Nahm: Lever built a Slack bot to enforce equitable dish duty
“We built a Slack bot that assigned a rotational dish duty, and it would just tell you in the morning, today's your dish duty day, and then we just, like, made it completely equitable.”
Nahm: Lever discarded its first product after customer feedback proved it incremental
“So I would actually say that first we built an entire thing and Actually had to kind of come to terms with you know, what our customer feedback kind of was, and we had built just something incremental, and we had built something that was just like a better ver…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Sarah's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Board Member, All Raise | 1 | 19 | — | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |