Deborah Hanus, Co-founder and CEO at Sparrow, joins Amir to unpack the founder journey from academia to building a scaled company. They dig into why leave management is still a messy, high stakes problem, and how Sparrow is turning it into a clean, guided experience for both HR and employees.

Sparrow helps companies provide employee leave across the United States and Canada, and Deborah shares what it really takes to scale a compliance driven business without slowing down. From founder resilience and early stage emotional swings to hiring, onboarding, and culture design, this one is packed with lessons for operators and builders.

Key takeaways

• Academia can be real founder training, especially for building resilience and hearing “no” without losing your edge

• Early stage startups feel brutal because you have too few data points, it is easy to overreact to every win or setback

• Compliance and leave are fundamentally data problems, the right info to the right person at the right time changes everything

• Scaling leadership is mostly communication and alignment, five people and 250 people require totally different systems

• Culture does not stay stable by accident, values must drive hiring, training, rewards, and performance management

Timestamped highlights

00:37 What Sparrow does, and the 300 million dollars in payroll cost savings milestone

01:37 Why academia can prepare you for founding, and how customer pain beats outside skepticism

03:40 The leave compliance mess, and why state by state rules made the problem explode

08:25 The two real ways startups die, and why morale matters as much as cash

12:55 Leading at scale, onboarding, clarity, and the feedback questions that keep teams aligned

19:54 “Scale intentionally” as a culture principle for a company that cannot afford to break things

25:48 Keeping values stable while everything else evolves as the team grows

A line worth sharing

“Companies end when you run out of cash or you run out of morale.”

Pro tips you can steal

• Treat the employee journey like a product journey, from recruiting through promotions and hard moments

• Before a big change, collect questions early so the message lands where people actually are

• After a meeting, ask “What were the main points?” to see what people heard, then tighten your messaging

• Invest in onboarding and goal clarity to prevent teams from drifting into competing priorities

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