Melanie Alder & Dave Wright
Co-Founders | Pattern
Melanie Alder and Dave Wright’s visionary partnership at Pattern culminated in Utah’s largest IPO with a female co-founder, raising $300 million at a $2.5 billion valuation. Ever maintaining that it’s their employees who deserve the spotlight, they flew 100 people out with them to ring the NASDAQ Opening Bell.
When Melanie Alder and Dave Wright rang the NASDAQ Opening Bell in September 2025, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder with many of the people who were responsible for getting them to the historic milestone. Ringing the bell celebrated Pattern as the largest IPO with a female co-founder in Utah history. It also marked a $300 million fundraising round and $2.5 billion valuation. But if you ask Alder and Wright, the televised moment belonged to their people.
The co-founders asked about the maximum number of people that could physically fit behind the NASDAQ podium. They purchased plane tickets for the 100 employees with the longest tenure at the company — one of whom being a beloved janitor — and filled every inch of the bell-ringing stage.
“It was a celebration of everyone who built beside us,” Alder says. “Every late night, every small win, every small innovation that added up.”
Pattern’s origin story is that of Alder and Wright’s partnership. Before they were married, before they were even dating, they were co-founders grinding through 12-hour days, solving problems no playbook could guide them through. When one hit a wall, the other pushed. When one considered quitting, the other brought clarity, courage or a new idea.
Alder and Wright’s complementary leadership styles created the foundation for everything Pattern has become. Wright is the rapid-fire visionary, constantly generating ideas and momentum. Alder is the grounded operations strategist, capable of talking through every angle of a problem until the best path becomes clear. They call it “the dance,” a rhythm built over years of trust, candor and tireless collaboration.
Both aligned on the idea that they needed to hire the most capable people in the world and give them the autonomy to innovate. They remove red tape. They avoid micromanagement. They give their teams wide decision-making latitude paired with rigorous data measurement. And above all, they lead with a kind of fairness that employees can feel in the room.
“You have to be ridiculously fair,” Wright says. “If we lean more into their side than ours, that’s usually where fair actually is. People feel that and they trust the system.”
Alder says her growth journey as an entrepreneur consists of thousands of small moments, including late-night calls, micro-problems solved and roles that adjusted and evolved as the company scaled. Wright admits he once imagined himself as a coach-style leader, only to learn that his greatest contributions are autonomy, clarity and decisive accountability.
Together, they’ve built a company known for an enviable internal culture and for pioneering what they call the Pattern Intelligence Layer, an ecosystem of agentic AI workflows connecting data, market insights, content creation and brand optimization.
But despite the scale, the patents, the global footprint or the unprecedented IPO, their answers keep circling back to the same place: their people.
“We’ve been lucky to work with incredible humans,” Wright says. “We get treated better than we deserve. All the credit goes to the team.”
For Alder and Wright, leadership is partnership. Partnership is trust. And trust, between them and with their teams, is the real engine behind Pattern’s success.
