The Pulse #71: The Tech Behind Stripe’s Realtime Cyber Monday Dashboard
Also: a startup bragging how it “tricked” Google search found Google respond in record time; Sam Altman back at OpenAI; and the DevTernity scandal
The Pulse is a series covering insights, patterns, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Send me a message.
Today, we cover:
Industry pulse. A roundup of recent events, with commentary. Morale rebound at Meta; Okta’s breach worse than it looks; Black Friday and Cyber Monday upticks and more.
Stripe’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday Stats. $18B of sales processed; a peak of 27,395 requests per second; and a realtime stats portal that 12 Stripes built in two weeks on top of Apache Pinot.
Be wary of bragging that you tricked a Big Tech. A SEO agency bragged how they tricked Google by AI generating pages that Google then drove traffic to. Google noticed, and promptly resolved the issue, and took away the traffic that this “SEO heist” generated.
Sam Altman officially back as CEO at OpenAI. Things should be back to normal at the market-leading AI company. There are still questions on what happens with Chief Scientist and cofounder Ilya Sutskever, and it’s still unclear if OpenAI is, in practice, a for-profit or nonprofit.
A tech conference listed fake speakers, and I accidentally noticed. For 3 years, tech conference DevTernity listed non-existent speakers who claimed to work at Coinbase on their conference website. All fake speakers happened to be women. I noticed because my friend was scheduled to talk here, and I was surprised that a core Ethereum contributor would decide to work at Coinbase as a staff engineer. Now, more shady things are coming to light beyond the fake speakers.
1. Industry pulse
Black Friday and Cyber Monday spending at all-time high
Black Friday and Cyber Monday tend to be the biggest spending days for merchants. Statistics on how the annual spend compares to previous years is always telling, though. This year, both days delivered good news: