#134 - Sarah Nahm and Holly Liu

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Sarah Nahm and Holly Liu. Sarah is the CEO and co-founder of Lever. Lever builds modern recruiting software for teams to source, interview and hire top talent. They were in the summer 2012 batch of YC. You can try Lever out at lever.co. Holly is a visiting partner at YC. Before that, she co-founded the gaming company Kabam.
You can find Sarah on Twitter at SRHNHM and Holly is at HollyHLU. All right, here we go.
Sarah and Holly, welcome to the podcast.

**Holly Liu** (0:37)
Thanks for having us.

**Sarah Nahm** (0:38)
Yeah, pumped.

**Craig Cannon** (0:40)
So Holly, you have a question to start it off.

**Holly Liu** (0:42)
Yeah, I'm super curious. Did you ever see yourself becoming a founder, a founding CEO?

**Sarah Nahm** (0:48)
Oh my gosh. I have to honestly say no. So I, you know, growing up, I could not have grown up further from Silicon Valley. I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, so deep south. And kind of back then, I probably wanted to be, you know, a different thing when I grew up every three months. I was dabbling in anything. I was dabbling in everything. But probably one thing I spent a lot of time on was social justice. I volunteered at Civil Rights Institute because all the amazing people that were a part of the Civil Rights Movement, they're obviously still around and they're still doing amazing work. And that just was something that so defined like my experience of growing up in Alabama.
And when I came out to Stanford First School for college, I was the first person from my high school to go like west of the Mississippi River for college in like years. And had no idea what I wanted to do or who I wanted to become. And I think that that period at Stanford was a really interesting one. Like pre-med was still the number one major, which has since changed, I think, to CS.
And it wasn't super obvious that you as an undergraduate could be a founder.
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 market. And I remember so many kind of moments where the people around me were stepping into, you know, taking the leap, like stepping into these kinds of roles and positions where they were just going for it. And I think subconsciously that influenced me, but consciously it did not. I studied design, and I always thought I was just going to go into design consulting.

**Craig Cannon** (2:50)
So you're going to take a job at IDEO and see what happens? 100%.

**Sarah Nahm** (2:53)
Exactly.
And I loved it. I mean, I was like drinking the Kool-Aid, mixing the Kool-Aid, distributing the Kool-Aid to everybody else. Design thinking was… Post-its.

**Holly Liu** (3:00)
Oh, yes. More post-its.
It's going to solve everything.

**Sarah Nahm** (3:04)
I mean, I got to admit, it's still a huge part of how I see the world. It's still a huge part of what I bring to my company. So I totally thought that's what I was going to do.
And you ended up at Google. Yeah. Total surprise to me.

**Holly Liu** (3:17)
Was that your first job of Stanford?

**Sarah Nahm** (3:19)
Yeah. Yeah. And I was very unfocused in my job search.
I think the only way I even ended up, quote unquote, applying to Google is like I was dropping off some form for a friend at Stanford's Career Development Center. And there was somebody there who worked there was like, oh, are you going to sign up for the Google interviews?

**Holly Liu** (3:43)
Oh, that's really fast. I know.

**Sarah Nahm** (3:46)
A part of me is sort of like, look, total privilege check, because it's not normal, so to speak, for there to be a clipboard with a pencil dangling from it, for you to sign your name up for an amazing career opportunity.
But that was right in front of me. Did you know what you were signing up for?

**Holly Liu** (4:05)
Did you do design?

**Sarah Nahm** (4:08)
No, not at all.
I think I just kind of went into it and was curious and was engaged. I think I was one of those annoying ones who couldn't make up my mind, and I just had this outstanding offer for months, like literally nine months before I officially kind of made the decision. And then I think even then I didn't know what I would do until my first day of work. That's the whole story.