The Story Behind Pulse

From Email Newsletters to Content Curation

In 2002, an 18-year-old tech entrepreneur from North Carolina named Ryan Allis set a goal: build and sell a company for $100M.

Ten years later, he had done it. The company he co-founded, iContact, had grown into a global marketing automation platform and was acquired for $169 million by a public company called Vocus (now Cision). By most traditional measures, he had “made it.”

But success brought a quieter question into focus: What actually matters?

After the sale of iContact in 2012, Ryan went searching.

He traveled to refugee camps in Kenya. He spent time with social entrepreneurs across Africa. He studied global systems, development economics, and exponential technologies at MIT, Harvard, and Singularity University. He moved to Silicon Valley. He built a community of social entrepreneurs called Hive. He built a community of tech entrepreneurs called SaasRise.

He even went to Burning Man, lived in Bali and Costa Rica, and got married and had two wonderful kids.

And what he saw—again and again—was this:

The world doesn’t suffer from a lack of intelligence. It suffers from a lack of access to the right information, at the right time, in the right form.

Brilliant people everywhere—founders, policymakers, scientists, creators—were making decisions in environments flooded with noise, distraction, and fragmented data.

The internet had solved access. But it hadn’t solved clarity. And it had created a new problem – information overwhelm.

He realized it was more important than ever for professionals to curate the content that they consume.

And that if he could make it simple for people to put better quality information into their brain – they would.

And if he could get millions of people to get better quality content about what they are interested in – it could make a difference.

The Problem with Modern Information Overload

Over time, the information ecosystem had fractured:

• News became polarized and overwhelming
• Social feeds became addictive, not informative
• Search became filled with ads over quality
• Content exploded—but signal did not

For busy, high-performing professionals—the people shaping companies, markets, and ideas—keeping up became a full-time job.

Ryan experienced this firsthand. As an investor, founder, and community builder, he needed to stay informed across dozens of domains: AI, venture capital, SaaS, geopolitics, martech, energy, climate, philanthropy, and more.

But instead of insight, he found himself drowning in tabs, newsletters, podcasts, and feeds.

“I didn’t need more information. I needed a way to filter in the right information—and then compress it and contextualize it intelligently.”

The Spark That Became Pulse

The idea for Pulse didn’t arrive as a grand vision. It started as a personal vibe coded tool in the Summer of 2025.

Ryan began experimenting with ways to aggregate the highest-quality content from across the internet—Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, YouTube, news sites—and distill it into something usable.

Not just summaries. But signal.

• What actually matters today?
• What are the key ideas, trends, and shifts?
• Who is saying something worth paying attention to?

He started with the topics he wanted to track personally (SaaS, VC, AI, etc.) – and created a system that would identify the best creators and publishers in each vertical.

Over time, that tool evolved. It became structured. Then scalable. Then intelligent. By March 2026 it reached 100 topics. And the capability to create a personalized daily newsletter for every user was added.

And eventually, it became something bigger than a personal dashboard. It became Pulse. And Ryan hired a team to help make it available to the world.

Pulse: A New Kind of News

Pulse is not just another news aggregator. It’s an attempt to reimagine how humans consume information in the age of AI, content slop, and information overload.

At its core, Pulse is built on a simple belief: Every person in the world should have access to a personalized, high-signal daily briefing on the topics that matter most to them.

Instead of forcing users to search, scroll, and filter endlessly, Pulse does the work for them:

• Tracking thousands of companies, creators, investors, and publishers
• Curating the most important content across hundreds of topics
• Allowing users to follow their favorite blogs, podcasts, and videos
• Using AI to compress and synthesize information into clear, actionable insights
• Delivering it in a format designed for speed, clarity, and depth

It’s not about replacing original content. It’s about unlocking it—making it accessible, digestible, and useful.

We call it “My Pulse”

The Founder’s Deeper Why

For Ryan, Pulse is more than a product. It’s part of a much larger mission: How to accelerate human progress.

That was the mission at iContact when he built one of the earliest email communication platforms. And the mission at Hive when he created a global community of 3,500 purpose-driven leaders from 130 countries.

He believes that when the right ideas reach the right people faster, everything improves:

• Smarter businesses are built
• Better decisions are made
• Problems get solved faster
• And ultimately, the world moves forward

Pulse is a lever for that. A way to increase the rate of knowledge transfer across humanity – and get the right information to the right people at the right time.

From Information Overload to Insight

The modern professional doesn’t actually need more content. They need an intelligent filter that delivers:

• Clarity over chaos
• Signal over noise
• Insight over information

Pulse exists to deliver that. It’s designed for the founder trying to stay ahead of market shifts. The investor scanning for emerging trends. The operator making daily strategic decisions. The VP who is rising in her career.

Building the Future of News

If the 20th century was defined by newspapers and the early internet by search engines, then the next era will be defined by intelligent curation.

Pulse is building toward that future:

• A personalized daily “newspaper” for every human
• A platform that organizes the world’s knowledge by relevance, not volume
• A system that continuously learns what matters—and surfaces it instantly

Not just for tech and business. But eventually for every domain, every interest, every community.

Pulse is the world’s first social news network in which every publisher, company, investor, and creator you follow and each piece of content you like or comment on forms a custom social graph, built uniquely for every user.

Pulse is also the first news platform where the editorial job—the selection of the creators who get picked and the curation of the content—is done by extremely smart and well-trained autonomous AI agents.

A Return to What Matters

At its heart, Pulse is a response to a simple but profound realization: The quality of our lives—and our world—is shaped by the quality of the information we consume.

Ryan started his journey building tools to help businesses communicate better. With Pulse, he’s building something broader: A way to help filter and curate content intelligently and help humanity think better, decide better, and move forward—together.

Pulse isn’t just about staying informed. It’s about staying aligned with what truly matters.