Instructor: Parry Malm
Parry is a self-proclaimed digital anarchist, although according to the Metropolitan Police, he’s just an anarchist. When not busy teaching wayward youths the error of their ways through the magic of interpretive dance… he is… well… either unemployed, or semi-retired. He’s just not quite sure which.
In 2015, he founded a company called Phrasee, which was an AI company that generated and optimised… wait for it… email subject lines… for big brands to get more opens and clicks. Pretty niche, right? It'd probably never work, right? Hard pass, right? Well, if you think that, then you're probably like the 99% of VCs he met. But 1% disagreed - and they all made a load of money as a result. Remember 2015: people could barely spell AI, let alone believe it could write not just like a human, but better than a human. This needed a story. A hell of a story. And a hell of a delivery of that story. And that’s what he and his team did. Along the way he was named the Tech Entrepreneur of the Year in 2016, won the CB Insights Demo Day in 2017, and was even invited to speak to the UK Parliament in 2018 about AI (before it was cool obv).
<narrator> "Well now, if you think Parry was just gonna coast through life, you’d be as wrong as a possum at a dog show. Life sure came at him faster than a jackrabbit on a hot griddle, and let me tell ya, things got real interestin’ real quick..." </narrator>
What started as a mega niche tech became an absolute juggernaut... and was bought for >$100m by a global private equity consortium in 2022. Now known as Jacquard, Parry sits on the board as a non-exec director.
Other than that, he’s advising an AI coaching business, an AI fantasy football business, an AI training business, and most importantly cruises his kids to school on his sick ecargo bike (the single best purchase he has ever made, so he tells me).
(Editor’s note: Parry wrote this himself, and decided to use the 3rd person because it gives him an enormously satisfying sense of unearned grandiosity).
.png "Parry Malm")
