Lauren Ipsen

She is an accomplished talent partner and executive recruiter with nearly a decade of experience building teams for high-growth startups and venture-backed companies. She currently serves as a Talent Partner at Decibel Partners in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she helps technical pre-product-market-fit companies find rising stars for critical roles, specializing in developer platforms and tools, data and AI engineering, and cybersecurity. Her earlier career includes serving as a Talent Partner at General Catalyst, where she focused on executive recruiting for a multi-stage venture capital firm with over 650 portfolio companies globally and built the firm's seed-stage talent practice, as Head of Talent at IRL, where she scaled the business from 30 to over 100 people globally, built full-stack recruiting engines, implemented ATS systems, and developed end-to-end recruiting strategies after the company raised over $200 million from investors including SoftBank, Goodwater, Floodgate, Founders Fund, and Dragoneer, and as an Executive Recruiter at Daversa Partners, where she recruited executive teams for dozens of high-growth venture-backed clients across every stage and industry. Her career reflects a deep commitment to identifying exceptional talent, supporting founders, and helping early-stage companies scale.