The Pulse #116: Netflix sets live streaming world record with boxing match
Also: why some late-stage companies don’t want to go public, possible crackdown on low-output remote engineers, and more
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. AI coding editor Cursor buys another AI startup, Bluesky user growth explodes, Stripe launches API for LLMs, US could force Google to sell Chrome, more tech business sales to come, and more.
Netflix sets live streaming world record with Tyson/Paul fight. A record 65 million concurrent streams were served for the celebrity boxing match, upping the previous record set in 2023 by Disney Hotstar in India. The livestream also had glitches, and we look into what could have gone wrong.
Why don’t late-stage companies go public these days? Databricks plans to raise more funding, but not by going public. It plans to raise a larger-than-ever round of fresh funding, totalling $7-9B from private investors. This means the company has little to no reason to sell shares on the stock market.
Crackdown on low-output remote engineers to come? An investor shared a list of companies where remote engineers can reportedly get away with submitting not very many pull requests per month, and generally doing little work. The CEO of Box was surprised his company is on the list, and it’s possible that some remote engineers face uncomfortable conversations about productivity; not just at Box, but at other startups, scaleups, and Big Tech.
1. Industry pulse
AI coding editor Cursor buys AI startup
Cursor is one of the most popular AI code editors, and has been soaring in popularity, partially due to using Sonnet 3.5 for code generation, as well as adding other neat features, like code suggestions and proactive debugging.
Last week, Cursor announced it is acquiring AI code completion tool Supermaven – as well as putting the tool in maintenance mode. Supermaven was founded this year, and has raised $12M in funding, while Cursor was founded in 2019, and raised $62M in funding.
The acquisition seems to make a lot of sense for both parties. The Supermaven team was starting a big effort to build an AI code editor around its advanced code completion product, while Cursor wants to provide even better auto completion. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but it’s safe to assume this is a mostly stock-based transaction, where Supermaven shareholders become Cursor shareholders. In the end, there are only so many coding editors that have a reasonable chance of challenging Microsoft’s dominance with Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot, and Cursor is a front runner for AI coding capabilities.
Bluesky growth explodes after US election
Bluesky has suddenly become the hottest text-based social network, especially within the software engineering community.
This week, the app became the #1-ranked app in the US on the App Store (iOS) and Google Play (Android). It also started growing at a rapid, 1 million users/day pace; from 15 million users late last week, to 20 million users five days later. For context, Bluesky’s entire team is 20 people, around 15 of whom are software engineers.
The surge coincides with the recent US election, in which X owner Elon Musk campaigned for Trump and turned the social media platform into a tool for the Republican candidate, the next US president. This has helped normalize a brand of politics as a key part of the platform’s identity under the South Africa-born billionaire’s ownership. As a result, some users are voting with their feet by quitting X.
Following Trump’s decisive win, Musk is to take on a governmental efficiency role in the next government, heading up something called the “Department of Government Efficiency.” Meanwhile, Bluesky traffic is up 500% since the election which has led to Musk being the first owner of a major social media company to head up a cost-cutting government role. So it’s unsurprising some users are seeking a new home for their text-based social media activity. However, the surge in users is causing some issues at Bluesky:
Bluesky has mostly on-prem infrastructure, as the company moved off AWS months back, as we covered in our Bluesky architecture deep dive. They made the move because going on-prem meant far lower infra costs and better performance. Also, the team had plenty of headroom for scaling challenges, until this massive growth spurt!
I’m active on Bluesky, and you can follow me there. If you join and are looking for a “starter pack” (tech accounts to follow), check out tech starter packs to make your feed interesting.
We previously covered How Bluesky was built and the engineering culture of Bluesky. Good luck to the Bluesky engineering team in dealing with extra users; events like this are a nice problem to have.