Paul M. English was born in 1963[2] in Boston, Massachusetts, the sixth of seven siblings in an Irish Catholic family[3] that lived in the West Roxbury neighborhood.
[12] His grades were not good enough to get him into a competitive school like Harvard, where several of his classmates would attend—but his high SAT scores meant that he could attend the University of Massachusetts Boston tuition-free.
[13] While attending classes at night, English worked part-time for Ed's new company, adding music and sound effects to video games.
[18] Interleaf's chief product was a WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") program, document editing software that displayed user revisions as they would appear on a printed page, a new innovation at the time.
[23] After a few years in the leadership of Interleaf, English left in 1995 to join NetCentric, a local startup that was working on a tool to allow businesses to send fax over the Internet.
[30] English set up office space for Boston Light in Arlington, Massachusetts, and hired several of his old colleagues from Interleaf and NetCentric.
[33] Their company was safely merged into Intuit when the dot-com bubble burst taking with it many tech startups like Boston Light.
[35] After three and half years at Intuit, English left in 2001 to take care of his ailing father who was suffering from dementia brought on by Alzheimer's.
[38] English also started GetHuman, a website to help users get around automated customer-service hotlines to get to a real human agent to assist them.
[41] In 2004, English and Hafner co-founded Kayak, a website that allowed users to search for travel services, including flights, hotels, and rental cars.
[42] English became chief technology officer (CTO) at Kayak and was responsible for the website's development while Hafner handled the business side.
[59] The rough business model for Blade included a plan to give new start-up e-commerce companies free office space and advice as they develop and seek VC financing.
[61] By this point, both O'Donnell and Schwenk had transitioned out of Kayak, but English remained for a little longer to coach his successor as CTO.
[63] English was also a senior instructor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the students whom he imagined would be the intended audience for recruitment for the incubator.
[2][64] He secured additional funding of $20 million from the VC firms General Catalyst and Accel in return for a combined 30% share of the incubator.
[65] Blade opened with a party on May 16, 2014, that was attended by half of Kayak's engineers and also Deval Patrick, the outgoing governor of Massachusetts.
He and his cofounders selected three start-ups to focus on: Wigo, an app to allow college students to inform each other about parties, Bevy, a hardware and software solution for storing photographs and video, and Classy, a website for reselling used books.
A platform for listing tech industry jobs and avenue for recommending personnel called Drafted eventually replaced Classy.
[68] In July 2015, English founded the travel startup Lola.com[68][69][70] and was the company's first CEO, with O'Donnell as co-founder and CTO, and Schwenk as vice president of operations.
[74] As travel slowed during the COVID-19 pandemic, English and Volpe shifted Lola's focus to other business expense management services.
[75] After the sale of his first company, Boston Light, English began making philanthropic donations under the tutelage of Tom White, who helped start Partners In Health (PIH), a non-profit focused on improving healthcare in Haiti and other developing countries.
[79] English serves as a director of Partners In Health[6][80] and co-founded Summits Education, a network of free schools in Haiti.
[87] English was diagnosed with bipolar disorder while working at Interleaf in the late 1980s or early 1990s and was prescribed Lithium which he took on and off for a short period.
[90] In 2023, English founded the Bipolar Social Club, to show how community can help people in their mental health journeys.