Lessons from one of the world’s top executive recruiters | Lauren Ipsen (Daversa Partners, General Catalyst)

**Lauren Ipsen** (0:00)
Regardless of whether or not you're hiring, you should always be keeping a pulse on the market. That is the most important thing. And I think that should be the case for both candidates and folks that are hiring.
You never want to put yourself in a position where you have no idea what good looks like, whether that's from a company standpoint or from a candidate standpoint. So both parties should always be having a good understanding of which companies are thriving, which individuals are building great things, and are well-known commodities in their organizations and get great references. Oftentimes, I encourage founders to simply chat with what good looks like and get a really good sense of kind of what benchmark candidate profiles could be. And who knows where that person will be in a year or what have you, but staying really, really close to really great people and using them from an advising capacity or getting them ingrained in some type of involvement in the product prior to actually having that specific need I think is really important.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:05)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. Today, my guest is Lauren Ipsen. One of the most important skills for founders and senior product leaders to develop is the ability to hire great people. You won't be able to build the best company or the best product if you can't hire the best people. And Lauren is one of the most experienced and successful people in the world when it comes to hiring product leaders. She's placed over 80 senior product leaders across tech companies and has worked with some of the biggest companies out there. When I asked a bunch of really smart product leaders who their favorite product recruiter was, Lauren's name came up a ton.
In our conversation, we get super tactical about what founders need to do to find the best product talent, what product managers should be doing during their career to give themselves the most opportunity, and we also touch on what recruiters themselves often get wrong when trying to attract great talent. This episode is rich with actionable advice for basically everyone, and I am really excited to bring it to you. With that, I bring you Lauren Ipsen.
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