Jul 10, 2019 · 58m · y-combinator
Startup Hiring Advice from Lever CEO Sarah Nahm with Holly Liu · Y Combinator
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In this Y Combinator podcast episode, Lever CEO Sarah Nahm and Holly Liu discuss how design thinking principles can be applied to startup leadership, talent acquisition, and building inclusive company cultures. Sarah shares actionable recruiting strategies, product iteration lessons, and practical tactics for fostering diversity and psychological safety in growing organizations.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. How this is scored →
The partners as informed peer 2.5 Guest teaching 5.8 Guest disagreement 0.5 The partners pushing back 0.1
speaking balance: gold is the partners, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 18:38 Calling out passive job board hiring
Nahm playfully yet forcefully shames startups that rely on passive job postings, insisting that aggressive outbound recruiting is mandatory for startup survival.
Hardest push from the partners ▶ 34:41 Inquiring about baseline technical qualificationsCannon challenges Nahm's pure impact description model by questioning whether essential technical skill requirements still need to be explicitly listed to filter unqualified applicants.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 40:15 Inclusion must precede diversity hiringNahm educates the hosts and audience by flipping standard diversity assumptions, arguing that hiring diverse demographics without first building inclusive infrastructure sets candidates up for failure.
The partners hold their own ▶ 13:14 Citing Bay Area employee tenure metricsCannon validates and extends Nahm's macro talent shift narrative by citing the specific 18-month average tenure in Silicon Valley.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The partners as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The partners pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Early Career at Google and Applying Design to Startup Leadership | 2 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Holly Liu and Craig Cannon warmly guide Sarah Nahm through her early career at Stanford and Google. Nahm shares how her background in design thinking shaped her perception of startup leadership, framing the entire company as a product. | |
| Leaving Google and Identifying the Macro Shift in Startup Talent | 3 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Nahm explains the macro economic shift in 2012 where competitive differentiation became talent-constrained. Cannon contributes the data point of average Silicon Valley tenure dropping to 18 months. | |
| Early Product Iterations and Developing Customer Accountability | 2 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Nahm details the messy early years of Lever, noting they built and discarded an entire initial product after realizing it was merely incremental. The hosts listen as she emphasizes holding the company accountable directly to customer feedback. | |
| Proactive Outbound Recruiting Strategies for Early-Stage Startups | 2 | 7 | 2 | 0 | Nahm passionately calls out startup founders who merely post job listings and wait for inbound applicants. She provides detailed strategies on outbound sourcing and multi-year candidate relationship nurturing. | |
| Evaluating Candidate Motivation Fit and Utilizing Behavioral Interviews | 3 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Cannon and Liu ask how to evaluate candidate motivation and validate track records. Nahm explains why Lever names its first stage motivation fit and advocates structured behavioral interviewing across an applicant's entire career history. | |
| Navigating Remote Work Trade-Offs and Cultural Infrastructure | 2 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Cannon probes for tactics on assessing remote candidates, and Nahm outlines the trade-offs of remote infrastructure versus the organic communication efficiencies of co-located teams. | |
| Replacing Job Descriptions with Outcome-Based Impact Descriptions | 3 | 6 | 0 | 1 | Nahm explains how replacing static job descriptions with outcome-based impact descriptions attracted non-traditional candidates. Cannon pushes back slightly to clarify whether baseline required skills are ever included. | |
| Overcoming Diversity Roadblocks and Prioritizing Cultural Inclusion | 3 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Answering an audience question, Nahm reframes diversity hiring, arguing that founders mistakenly focus on demographic metrics before establishing an inclusive internal culture capable of supporting diverse talent. | |
| Practical Inclusion Tactics: Office Chores and Breaking Stereotypes | 3 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Nahm shares concrete examples of cultural inclusion, such as automating dish duty via Slack bot and dismantling the harmful technical versus non-technical hierarchy. Cannon adds validation regarding engineers lacking product sense. | |
| Fostering Psychological Safety, Employee Resource Groups, and Shared Language | 2 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Nahm describes using personality color frameworks and onboarding rituals to provide neutral shared language for interpersonal conflict, underscoring that diversity initiatives must be driven bottoms-up. |
Statements from this episode (19)
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: 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…”
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: 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: 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: 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 was the only woman at Lever for two years
“You know, for two, two and a half years, I was the only woman at Lever.”
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: 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: 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: 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…”