Parse launches your boldest ideas into the world.
I’m Sylvie Carr—I began my career in New York at Fletcher & Company (now part of UTA), where I worked with authors and innovators like Eric Ries, Leslie Berlin, Ed Catmull, Chip and Dan Heath, IDEO, Gretchen Rubin, Bob Sutton, Ken Kalfus, and Ron Lieber. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area with my family. I’m the mom to three young girls.
Everything starts with a mission. Your life’s work and your boldest ideas can change lives and change the world—if people truly understand them.
I specialize in helping visionaries communicate complex ideas clearly and effectively. That means transforming breakthrough research, innovative product design processes, and groundbreaking journalistic reporting into accessible, compelling content for bookshelves, screens, and meeting halls around the world.
Take my longtime client Jake Knapp, for example: we first met when he was at Google Ventures, where he created the design sprint—a radical new way to test ideas and develop products. Sprints save time, energy, and money. They create alignment. And they’re fun—way more fun than a typical meeting.
Jake had run nearly a hundred sprints at Google and GV with teams at Uber, Airbnb and Twitter. The system worked. Now it was time to democratize it—so anyone could use it in fields like healthcare, basic science, education, government, and consumer tech.
That’s how Sprint, the book, was born. We designed, wrote, edited, and created a guide that anyone could pick up and use. It became a global bestseller and changed the way organizations—from Flatiron Health and Slack to the province of Ottawa and the British Museum—work.
Since then, I’ve continued to support Jake and the Sprint team, from refining messaging and process to launching Click, which compresses the five-day sprint into a two-day framework to solve foundational challenges. I’ve also helped them take the message to bigger stages—speaking events, fireside chats, all-hands meetings. Check out the ideas behind The Foundation Sprint in Lenny’s Newsletter - a Top 10 all time post ✨!
I spun Parse out of the traditional publishing model to do this kind of work—not just for Jake, but for all my clients who share a goal: changing the world with their ideas, research, experiences, reporting, and hearts.
In addition to editorial work, I broker book deals and develop speaking engagements and workshops for Fortune 500 companies, tech startups, nonprofits, and schools around the world.
I also work with a select group of startups and venture firms with strong values on messaging and communications. My experience translating complex ideas for diverse audiences has been especially valuable for organizations looking to strengthen internal communication and align teams around shared missions and values.
Please feel free to reach out—though note I’m no longer accepting new book clients, as I continue to support current ones and point my arrow toward new challenges developing communications within tech. (Read more about that decision here.)
