How to Build High-Performing Teams at Every Stage of Your Startup
episode
Startup Success: A Podcast for Founders & Investors
27 min
1 speaker
7 chapters
transcribed 16 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is Lidiya Becker’s background and how does it shape her approach to scaling startups?
Welcome to Startup Success, the podcast for startup founders and investors. Here you'll find stories of success from others in the trenches as they work to scale some of the fastest growing startups in the world. Stories that will help you in your own journey. Startup Success starts now.
Welcome to Startup Success. Today we have a very special guest. We have Lydia Becker in studio, who is the founder and principal of Build It Labs, which caught my eye because they provide operational consulting for startups. Welcome, Lydia.
Thank you so much. It's fun being here.
Yeah, I'm excited we're doing this. If you could walk us through your background and then we could get into a little bit more detail about what Build It Labs does. But I know from all the startups we work with, there's a lot of needs for some operational help as you scale. So I'm excited about this conversation.
Me too. Well, I've been an operator for over 15 years and I've had the luxury of working at very big, like mature companies, the multi-billion dollar profit. And also building something from scratch, pre-revenue, which is a company called Happiest Baby Snoo, which I'm sure we'll we'll get into. And having kind of both views of the spectrum of what success looks like in a mature state, and then how do you build and scale something quite rapidly. informed a lot of what I built at Build It Labs and what I do currently, which is support rapidly growing companies as they scale. Oh
great. Okay. So you help them primarily with like the operational piece.
Yes, operations and strategy. I really engage when companies really have these high-stakes projects where they can't afford to drop the ball. So things like launching into a new market, launching a product for the first time, scaling operations. So you have some traction in the market, you have some early maybe product market fit. But how do you repeat that at a high quality level, meeting your customers' needs day in and day out, and basically at scale?
Right. You're spot on. I mean, the startups I've worked with, that's where the challenge happens, you know, when you need to scale your operations and it can be really difficult. When you caught my eye online, you had a image that you used to describe the three components of operations. If you could w like we don't have a visual. here that we can show the audience, but the three components of operations, and then I want to dig into one that I think founders grapple a lot with.
Yeah, so when I think of like a high performing team. that ultimately can scale and can deliver, I think of three concentric circles. And at the core and like the very center of the circle is purpose and vision. Why are you doing what you're doing? How are you adding value into the world? And like what's your vision for the company? That that's kind of like the core, right? And then the next layer of is people. Like this one is critical. Who's on your team? Do you have the right people in terms of skill set, alignment with your purpose and vision and their drive? And then the final layer is process so. How do you work together as a team to get from point A to point B? what is a company but a bunch of people making a lot of decisions day in and day out.
And you want those decisions to be aligned, aligned with your vision, aligned with your purpose. You want everybody to be rowing in the same direction. And it turns out it's like a lot easier to do this if you have the right people on board in the first place. So if you have great people, the right people, you need lighter processes and less infrastructure that can slow you down. And enable you to move faster.
I love how you explain that because we hear this on the show over and over again. The founders come on, they have the mission, the product, the problem that they're going to solve. They're all excited about it. And where things always start to fall down is the people. And in my own experience, It's when you have like the low performers or the people on the team, like you said, that aren't moving in the right direction.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is Lidiya Becker’s background and how does it shape her approach to scaling startups?
0:01–5:29
2
Why does Lidiya say getting the “people” right is the most critical part of building high‑performing teams?
5:29–9:47
3
How should founders hire differently at each revenue stage of a startup (pre‑$15M, $15‑$50M, post‑$50M)?
9:47–15:11
4
What are the biggest early‑stage hiring challenges and how can founders avoid them?
15:11–19:47
5
What are the two common hiring pitfalls and how does a structured interview process fix them?
19:47–24:29
6
How can founders define success up front and work backwards to create interview questions that surface the right data?
24:29–26:57
7
What tactical interview questions and follow‑up techniques reveal a candidate’s real impact and fit?
26:57–27:30
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Startup Success: A Podcast for Founders & Investors
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