The people
Builders, operators, apprentices, and the advisors and mentors who carried us through the lean years.
Three builders invented the engine and turned research into product
Shah Ullah
Founder and CEO · since 2019
Invented Pulp's core scoring measures, Persuasive Force and Persuasive Resonance. Debater, teacher, and entrepreneur in residence at Cobalt Speech and Language and Capicua.
Uday Turakhia
Co-Founder and CTO · since 2024
Built the AI and ML engine behind the Pulp API, from research in multi-agent argumentation and knowledge graphs at Stony Brook.
Damani Thomas
Co-Founder, Research Engineering · since 2023
Pulp's first apprentice. Built the language pipelines and orchestration layer the engine runs on. NYU computer science.
Four operators turn the technology into a durable company
Hannah Peyton
Co-Founder and COO · since 2020
Presidential appointee in the Biden Administration, with more than ten years in campaigns, lobbying and government relations.
Wen Zhang
Co-Founder, Product Analytics · since 2019, back in 2025
Applies Pulp's measurements to product-market fit. Senior data scientist at Home Depot Marketing; master's degrees from Penn and Emory.
Jeff Harris
Co-Founder, Partnerships · since 2020
Fourteen years as CEO of the Junior Statesmen Foundation, teaching young people how civic life works. Golden Globe Foundation board.
Pat Arcadipane
Co-Founder and CFO · since 2021
CPA and CFA with twenty-five years as a financial strategist. NYU Stern MBA.
Research and product
Ismael Larrosa
Chief of Product Experiences
Founder of Capicua, the studio where Pulp learned the difference between an idea and a product.
Milana Kumar
Research Engineer, ML
Joined as a machine learning apprentice in 2026. Works on how Pulp builds personas. Read her story.
Abdullah Al Mubin
Senior Research Engineer
Razy Hassan
Senior Research Designer
Nasir Nasir
Finance Associate
A dot is the color that person chose for Pulp's palette.
The apprenticeship
A team built by teaching
Since 2023, more than 100 apprentices from campuses including Princeton, MIT, Duke, Yale, Dartmouth and NYU have put more than 15,000 hours into Pulp. Most were between 17 and 24. They studied math, computer science, psychology, political science, business and the arts. Two of them now work on Pulp's core research team. The newest, Milana Kumar, tells her story in her own words.
Technology doesn't make you a better thinker. It never has. Habits do.
Their working papers
- Who controls attention once it becomes a currency? Princeton
- How does the attention economy keep corrupt politicians in power? NYU
- Is social media teaching us to think in shortcuts? NYU
- Can a model recommend the right persuasive move, and explain why? MIT
- Does Nvidia speak differently to engineers than to everyone else? Stony Brook
- What happens when public health messages carry no feeling? Duke
- Why do parasocial fandoms fall apart? Boston University
- How does crime news shape what people fear, and what they support? CUNY Graduate Center
- Where in an app or a checkout do people decide to stay or leave? Dartmouth
- How does a global company keep one voice across many cultures? Mercy University
Advisors
Jen Cerny
Metacognition research
Nan Li
Social sciences, University of Florida
Joseph Hoefer
AI policy
Scott Radcliffe
Business analytics
Toby Chaudhuri
Communications
Mentors along the way
Jeff Adams
Cobalt Speech and Language; one of the people who built Amazon's Alexa
Scott Earnshaw
CEO of Cobalt
Rousseau (Nafiz) Mannan
Founder and CEO of Melabel
Charles Best
Founder of DonorsChoose, there at the start
Early investors
The people who believed first
To the friends and family who invested before there was a product: you are the reason the lean years were survivable. Your names are yours to share, so they are not published here.
Picture credits
- Photographs: Marcelo Cidrack (mentors), Papaioannou Kostas (dusk).