A CRO who helped deliver an eight-figure exit.
A founder who built and sold a company of his own.
As a CRO, Tom Parrish has led every part of the revenue engine. He helped grow a company to more than 1,500 clients — building the sales organization, the marketing engine, the partnership network, and the account-management discipline — and helped deliver its founders an eight-figure private equity exit. Today, he serves as CRO of a crypto company, leading revenue through a live market cycle in one of the most demanding industries LaunchCRO serves.
His career began at Price Waterhouse and continued through sales and marketing leadership at a Nasdaq-traded company and a virtual-card payments business.
He also knows the other chair. As a Founder and CEO, he took a new concept from inception to an eight-figure private equity sale in five years, then remained CEO for four more.
That experience gives him firsthand insight into what founders need from a CRO — and what exceptional CROs need from the companies they serve. It also showed him something he didn't expect.
In my own words —
After more than 25 years — building companies, leading sales organizations, helping founders grow, and finally building and selling a company of my own — I found myself back in the executive market. What surprised me was that the very experience that made me valuable often made me invisible.
Seasoned executives get overlooked — not because they aren't capable, but because the process quietly assumes things about age, or experience, or that someone who's already succeeded won't stay. It reduces decades of hard-earned judgment to keywords, titles, and résumé filters. To me, that's backwards.
I saw the same thing from the founder's chair. Founders don't get to choose from the people who have actually solved the problem in front of them. They choose from whoever interviews well or has the impressive résumé — and they still don't know who can say "I've seen this before. Here's what happens next."
There isn't a shortage of exceptional founders. There isn't a shortage of exceptional operators. There's a shortage of efficient ways for the two to find each other.
The hiring market has become remarkably good at processing résumés and remarkably poor at recognizing judgment. That's why I built LaunchCRO — not to create another recruiting company, but a place where founders building extraordinary companies can find operators whose judgment was earned the hard way: through decades of building, scaling, failing, learning, and winning.
He began with payments, fintech, crypto, and AI deliberately. Twenty-five years in payments — an industry sitting at the intersection of technology, banking, commerce, and global business — taught him that relationships and pattern recognition in these markets can't be developed quickly, and that experienced judgment matters most exactly where the stakes are highest.
LaunchCRO is the platform he wished both sides had: verified CRO-level leadership, matched by capability, stage, and industry — with human judgment where it matters most.
CRO-level scope. Our executives have owned the full revenue engine — sales, marketing, partnerships, and account growth — and led the teams behind it.
Four industries only. Crypto, payments, AI, and fintech. Specialists, not generalists.
Verified, not self-reported. References are checked before a profile is ever shown.
Transparent economics. A clear fee to begin, then a straightforward monthly platform fee paid by the company — never taken from your executive, and never a hidden markup on their pay.
Aligned with the executive. The executive pays LaunchCRO nothing and keeps 100% of what they negotiate — so the best operators actually want to be here, and our only incentive is to place them well, never to warehouse them.