The question

A debate round ends the same way every time. You sit down. The judge writes. A ballot comes back with a verdict on it, sometimes a paragraph of reasons, and never the arithmetic.

In 2012, Shah Ullah won the Indiana state championship in Discussion as a student at Culver Military Academy. He knew how to win rounds. He could not see why he won them. In his notes that year he wrote a line that turned out to be a company: why is there no scoreboard?

Competitive debate is the most formal persuasive arena people have ever built. It has rules, rubrics, trained judges and a century of refinement, and even there the score is never shown, because nobody computes it. Outside the room it is worse. Courtrooms, legislatures, lobbying meetings, boardrooms and ad markets all run on persuasion, and all of them run unscored.

Persuasion is always persuasion of someone, and that someone can say no.From The Long Argument, Shah's history of the fifty minds who built the parts of this instrument

An apartment in Atlanta

In 2019, Shah and I were in my apartment in Atlanta, working through an idea. Online engagement was becoming more toxic and less engaging. Could we build technology that actually improves how people engage online?

Wen Zhang, co-founder

Wen and Shah had been roommates at Culver. That same year Shah had another idea he loved: Blocky Trippe, a psychedelic version of Tetris. Wen talked him out of it. The question won.

The first year was a set of forks. Was this about metacognition, about helping people think about their own thinking in public? Should Pulp be a plugin for the platforms people already used, or a platform of its own? Educators gave the idea a nod, which was enough to keep going. Charles Best, Jennifer Cerny and John Buxton were there at the start alongside Wen.

The first deck

In November 2019 Pulp wrote its first pitch deck. Its title slide read: "A social platform enriching the relationship between content and engagement." Its purpose was to increase the quantity and quality of online engagement. Its vision was "a world where people are excited to engage with other perspectives."

It named six things wrong with online discussion: cluttered threads, toxic engagement, the spread of misinformation, fear of association, a lack of data transparency, and disruptive advertising. And it proposed six fixes.

That last line on the roadmap was the most expensive idea in the deck and the furthest away. Pulp put it last. Seven years later it is the core of the company: an engine that reads what was said, scores how well, and estimates how it lands with a particular person.

The question was right. The first answer was not. The next five years were about finding the right one.