Paul English, Co-Founder, Lola

Paul is the founder of Boston Venture Studio. Paul has previously co-founded and successfully sold six startups – Kayak, Lola, Moonbeam, GetHuman, Boston Light and Intermute.

Paul is also the founder of four nonprofits – Summits Education in Haiti, Embrace Boston, The Winter Walk for Homelessness, and the Bipolar Social Club.

Paul is the subject of Tracy Kidder’s book “A Truck Full of Money”. You can hear an interview with Paul on “How I Built This” with Guy Raz, and you can see his video from TEDxBoston in 2022.

Paul grew up in Boston (as did his parents), his father was a pipefitter at Boston Gas Company, Paul’s first job was delivering the Boston Globe, and he went to Boston public schools until he studied music and computer science at UMASS Boston. (As you can guess, Paul is a Boston Red Sox fan, and his accent gets worse in bahs.)

Ancient History

Paul was briefly an entrepreneur-in-residence at Greylock, VP of Engineering at NetCentric, SVP of Engineering and Product Management at Interleaf. He also did contract programming for the US Air Force, operations research programming for Data General, programming for a medical device company, and even some video game software and sound-effect development.

Paul received a BS and MS in computer science from the University of Massachusetts, and was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2019. Paul was named Chief Technology Officer of the year by Mass Technology Leadership Council in 2009.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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Speaker 2 (00:07):
My name is Kate Fox. I'm the executive director of
the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism. You know, it's
a highly competitive industry. We're competing with other states, other regions,
and the other countries. So being able to make the
investment to do the marketing and need the ability to
clearly communicate all of the assets we have in Massachusetts

(00:27):
in the ways that we can support visitors at all levels.
We have a couple of different focuses right now. One
is Made Possible in Massachusetts and it celebrates everything that
you can do in Massachusetts and really leans into the
historic firsts and the authenticity of the Massachusetts story. And
the other is the semi Quincentennial of the American Revolution,

(00:50):
which is coming up in twenty twenty six. Tourism thrives
in an environment of competitive collaboration, and you can't collaborate
if you don't know each other. So I was really
proud that we were able to bring that Governor's Conference
back and we'll be doing it again in twenty twenty five.
And this is an opportunity for the Massachusetts Travel industry
to come together, network and learn from each other and

(01:12):
build that statewide tourism family.

Speaker 1 (01:16):
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