CTO & Co-founder · Parrot
Erik Dahl
Erik spent years believing he was bad at languages until comprehensible input taught him Spanish, French, and Italian in one year. Now he leads the engineering that brings that method to every Parrot learner.
About Erik
Erik Dahl is the CTO and co-founder of Parrot (YC F25). He leads engineering at Parrot and builds the systems behind its personalized feed of short videos in the language you are learning.
Erik spent years believing he was bad at languages. Then he discovered comprehensible input and learned Spanish, French, and Italian in a single year, through real conversations, videos, and stories instead of drills. That experience showed him how little grammar exercises and gamified apps did for real fluency, and it became the seed for Parrot: an engineering-first way to give every learner the kind of input that worked for him.
Erik studied Integrated Engineering at the University of British Columbia, with a specialization in computer engineering. Before Parrot, he was a full-stack software developer at Delta Controls, where he built a cloud tool that simulates building-control firmware and worked on the company's server and cloud building management software. He also co-founded and wrote Little by Little, a weekly personal development newsletter, with Amir Hanna. The two built several startups together before Parrot.
At Parrot, Erik runs engineering with AI coding agents. A team of cloud agents reviews every pull request, and in July 2026 alone Parrot ran more than 20,000 of them. Other founders now point to the setup as a model for how a small mobile team can ship.
Outside work, Erik taught sailing to children at the Burrard Yacht Club in North Vancouver.
Areas of expertise
- Comprehensible input
- Self-directed language learning
- Spanish, French, and Italian
- Mobile engineering (React Native, TypeScript)
- AI coding agents
Find Erik online
Articles by Erik Dahl
Erik has not published on the blog yet. Read the latest posts from the Parrot team.