Pulse News

» see pulse.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

pulse showed up on phones around 2011 as the news reader that looked good on a small screen and let you collect a few sources into a single feed. it had been launched a year earlier on the ipad and then ported to android. you opened it in the morning and scrolled the headlines. it was a clean iteration on the rss-reader idea at a time when rss was already in decline.

the founders were two stanford students, akshay kothari and ankit gupta, building the app for a $2,000 entrepreneurship class project that turned into alphonso labs inc. on june 8 2010, four weeks after launch, steve jobs displayed the pulse logo on the ipad demo at wwdc and called out the app by name. that one mention pushed pulse to the top of the app store. the rest of the year was a 30-million-user run.

linkedin bought pulse in april 2013 for $90 million in mostly-stock. the brand survived another two and a half years inside linkedin. on november 25 2015 the company announced the standalone pulse app would be retired on december 31. the feeds stopped updating at year-end. the brand persisted for a while as linkedin's in-app news section, then quietly dissolved into the regular linkedin feed.

~ the dossier ~

~ the wwdc moment ~

every founder who ever shipped a stanford-project app remembers what happened to pulse on june 8 2010. four weeks after launch, in a keynote demo of safari on the ipad, steve jobs displayed the pulse app on the home screen and named it. apple's traffic alone pushed pulse to the top of the news category. that night the new york times sent the founders a cease-and-desist about using its rss feed without permission. by morning the app was pulled. apple paid the times directly the next day to get pulse restored. the founders later said they had not slept for 36 hours, and that the wwdc-to-takedown-to-restored arc compressed about three years of normal startup events into one weekend.

~ what linkedin actually killed ~

pulse was bought for the team more than for the product. by 2013 the news-reader app category was crowded and the rss-feed market was collapsing. linkedin had a separate problem. it had a lot of articles being shared inside the network and no clean way to read them. for two years pulse-as-app-inside-linkedin filled that gap. then linkedin decided it wanted a single in-app reading experience under its own brand. the standalone pulse app died on december 31 2015 and the pulse name lived on for another year as the section header for linkedin's article feed. akshay kothari left linkedin in 2018 and is now coo at notion.

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