Our Team
Ian H. Clark founded Crescendo to help growing companies with monetization.
For more than a decade, he has helped hundreds of software companies as an advisor, manager, and investor. He most recently ran the Monetization Strategy practice at Alpine Investors. Before that, he led growth and monetization at Evernote, and an investor with Contrary Capital and Array Ventures.
He is the author of Monetization, and his work has been featured in case studies by the Harvard Business Review.
Ian received his BA from Harvard, his MBA from Stanford, and first learned the nuts and bolts of pricing at Simon-Kucher & Partners, the largest pricing firm in the world.
When he’s not thinking about pricing, you might catch him on stage with the Boston Symphony Orchestra or at the dog park with his dog Cali.
Patrick Despres-Gallagher is a Partner who focuses on monetization from the lens of product, growth, and sales execution.
Patrick joined Crescendo in 2024 after a merger with the advisory business he had founded. Prior to Crescendo, Patrick was the cofounder/CEO of Stage, a VC-backed monetization and billing automation tool for software and internet companies. Prior to Stage, he was an early product leader at Loom focused on platform growth and monetization, where he helped the company scale from <$1M to $35M in ARR in just under two years (acq. $975M by Atlassian).
Prior to Loom, Patrick was a family office investor in early and growth-stage technology businesses such as Personio, Gloat, Affinity.co, and others (TVPI > 10x). Patrick started his career as a top-performing Senior Consultant at Deloitte.
He holds an MBA from Stanford University and a B.A. with honors from Johns Hopkins University. Beyond work, he enjoys performing and attending live music, meditation, outdoor activities, and running.
Past engagements
