Greg Charles

About

Greg Charles

I owe much of my career to the internet. I've spent the last decade in marketing, scaling revenue ($30M+) for ad agencies, venture-backed startups, and enterprise companies.

Now, I'm the founder and CEO of Parallel AI, an early-stage startup building AI agents operators to replace human marketing teams, cut enterprise labor OpEx by 97% and execute workflows up to 100x faster.

Looking back, I stopped out of business school at 20 and shortly after discovered Google Ads. I became obsessed with the money printer as I saw it, $1 spent -> returned $4 or $44, so I invested 12-18 hours a day that summer learning how to multiply money through advertising and becoming and expert.

Fast-forward, a couple things happened in 2017. I got my professional start at Online Marketing Group (OMG), a full-service real-estate marketing agency (Before that I ran socials for a franchisee in my hometown Montclair, NJ). I also launched my first company in 2018, themugshop.us on Shopify and lost about $4 on every mug sold.

That was my first taste of entrepreunership.

After OMG, I bounced around from agency to agency working with dozens of businesses and business models, compounding my surface area of skill. I went on to launch multiple ecommerce stores (none would make money until 2020).

Enter the pandemic, I was a lazy marketing analyst working at Greater Than One (GTO), this one in biosciences and pharma. And three formative things happened, I stumbled across Naval's How to Get Rich tweet storm, I learned finance wathcing Bloomberg TV night and day, and figured out something big.

I thought like a marketer, not a owner. I had to evolve.

Later, I went on to work at an accelerator and mediahouse owned by some asshole who sold his company for $50M to yahoo in the heyday of internet 1.0. I scaled ad campaigns for D2C brands like ]Eight Sleep](https://www.eightsleep.com/) and Savage x Fenty. Facebook, Instagram, Snap, TikTok, Quora – you name it, I ran it. Learned the plumbing, co-wrote tech docs with Product/Engineering.

After Geist, I got serious about impact and mission. I joined 2U/edX, the online education giant, managing multi-million dollar budgets and driving 20M+ revenue. I optimized CAC by 20% year-over-year, spearheaded an AI bidding migration (saving 400k+), and boosted team efficiency 80% with OpenAI-powered automation. For a second, I felt like I’d figured it out.

Then I blinked—consulting at Micro1 and delivering 8.3x ROAS in a crowded market, launching a 30-client paid pilot at Reach Market Inc., hitting a 7x ROAS in just 3 weeks, and somehow teaching digital marketing at Columbia University (with a suspiciously perfect student rating).

But one thing nagged me. Despite the wins, marketing felt too manual, too slow—too human. So in 2023, I founded Parallel AI, building Google Ads co-pilots to replace entire marketing teams—cutting OpEx by 97% and executing workflows 100x faster. 400+ teams, including heavy hitters like ByteDance, lined up on our waitlist before launch.

Turns out the money printer still fascinates me. Only now, it’s automated.

Parallel is my life's work and my response to years spent watching millions of marketing dollars being flushed, and burnout running endless campaigns with a fiduciary responsibility to generate returns on ad spend for other people's businesses.

Stats and track-record