I remember lots of stories of people selling things on ebay at a young age back in the day. I'm pretty sure some must have made more than $1MM in revenue.
Recently there was a story about a 16 y/o who's converting a sports car to electric and runs a CAD business that seems to be doing pretty well.
A friend and I did about 30k in profit at age 15 in '02-'03, and it would have been way higher if we weren't having issues with merchant accounts. I doubt it would have gone into the millions, but easily 100k-200k.
Finding a market and executing on an opportunity isn't that difficult of a thing to do - the trick is finding one within your grasp. This was virtual goods, so it required almost no upfront capital and very little development and maintenance costs. It's no massively-scalable startup, but when your goal is just to create a profitable lifestyle business, it isn't actually that complicated.
I love that the age for starting such endeavors is getting lower and lower. If more and more people are exposed to the possibility of creating their own solutions (and fostering their own interests) from a younger and younger age, it will become the kind of culture that will change the world.
I think it's a return to historical standards. Teenage is a construct of the modern age, which prolonged schooling more and more, keeping young people out of active work life, to an extent that is detrimental both to these young people and society, IMO. Historically, a male of 15-16 was a man, he could work and get married to a girl even younger. Now, I'm not advocating teenage marriage, but teenage implication in work life.
While it's good that building technology is becoming so much more accessible at a young age, you can see the ramifications and consequences of funding this early when the entrepreneur in question says that he doesn't really know how to build this into a company and, more importantly, he has other ideas that he will probably much rather pursue.
The idea isn't particularly unique and it wasn't particularly well executed when the first version was built but with the investment he was able to hire some talented people and from what I've seen the application (as is available now) is excellent, however it seems that he is now primarily their advertising vehicle. He's being used to market the app and it's certainly working, it's getting them huge amounts of press compared to the other companies in the same space.
edit: oh apparently Stephen Fry is an investor, that explains the "free" video.
edit edit: I wonder how he feels about his age being such a huge part of the stories now, back in August 2011 he said this:
So he kept it under wraps. "It was a conscious decision
to not disclose my age to Apple and the media," he says,
because he wanted "Trimit to be judged on its own merit,
and not the story of its creator being 15."
Exactly, to all of the people worrying about the fact that he's 16. I don't think it's really him doing much of it. I've seen these deals happen before, where an investor gives someone some money, brings in their executive team and outsources development. If you look at the list on the about section about five agencies and freelancer teams are working on the app. I've met a few people that are over the last few days.
They are basing it on his age (Nothing wrong with that) because they seem to have a huge agency or press team working to get two BBC headline's and coverage in all of the big publications.
The worry with this is if all fails and the app doesn't take off (As it didn't the first time and with most companies) will they all stick around and will the investors put more in? This is why I don't particularly like this model.
All the best to him and the team though. I'll be interested to see how it goes.
On the latter point, that's just playing coy. If you have an advantage that people might criticize, you play it down while still revealing it. It's the old "I'm not going to talk about [fact]" (but you just said it!) rhetorical device.
having other ideas doesn't disqualify him from being a successful entrepreneur. successful companies were built by a team, not a single person. as long as the kid is able to gather bright people around he will sell this eventually to facebook for $1b. it looks like some smart and much older folks agreed on that. otherwise they wouldn't have invested.
As an aside it would be interesting to see the legal structure of this transaction. At that age you can't (iirc) enter into a contract, at least not in the US.
Obviously his parents would need to be involved in this. It's possible also that one of the big draws for the investor was the obvious publicity potential (for the venture) of funding someone 15 yrs old vs. someone who is (ho hum) 20. This type of angle plays well in the media.
I believe in the UK you can be a director of a company at 16 and you can hold shares in a company at any age. I would guess that Nick has a registered company and the investment is in that company, which probably has his parents involved somehow in some nominal capacity.
edit: upon investigation it would appear that Summly Limited has his mother as a director ("MS DIANA JULIA D'ALOISIO") and he is listed as secretary ("NICHOLAS D'ALOISIO-MONTILLA") -- search for "summly" via http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk and then select the option to order information.
edit edit: so from the filing the following is true:
Summly Limited has Nick's mother as a director along with the investors, he is a secretary.
The company has 900,000 shares. 600,000 "Ordinary" are allocated to his mother ("DIANA JULIA D'ALOISIO") 120,000 "Series A Preferred" are allocated to GERSHWIN INTERNATIONAL LIMITED and 180,000 "Series A Preferred" are allocated to TWINHILLS LIMITED.
So it seems that Nick has no actual stake in the company and is using his mother as the proxy for his ownership.
edit edit edit: Something might be worth noting, the site lists "Summly Inc" as the company responsible for Summly, not Summly Limited.
First off, good luck young man! You've built something and attracted people to your work, and it's paying off. Additionally, you realized your own limitations and used the resources provided to build a better product by hiring skilled developers and engineers, that should be commended.
Now.
The algorithm works by selecting words from a given article to build a summary that will perfectly fit onto the screen of your iPhone--no more scrolling to read or waiting to load.
I have a serious problem with this. On The Verge he made the statement that the activity of scrolling was "horrific"[1]. Why? This is mainly personal bias-as someone who carries serious nerdboners for long-form journalism-but I don't think the problem with news on mobiles is something you solve by shrink wrapping content so you don't have to move your finger a few inches on an iPhone.
IMO the problem with reading content on mobile has already been addressed by XKCD [2].
I have no problem with D'Aloisio wanting to change media for the better, to make it more accessible, easier to digest and syndicate written content. I do have reservations however about algorithmically summarizing news articles because of a perceived notion that there is something wrong with reading long articles.
As a self employed sole trader, he could be any age (but it would be rather difficult to take funding). To be a director of a corporation, he'd need to be 16 now (although prior to 2006 it was any age, with provisos).
British people become relatively emancipated at 16. You can leave school (I did!), go to work, join the army, smoke, have sex (sadly, I didn't), and do many things. Just not vote, drive, drink, and a few other things.
The Summly app doesn't create summaries and I don't think algorithms will ever create good summaries.
Nick D’Alosio deserves a ton of credit. He's smart, creative, young, ambitious, pulled together a good team and created a great looking app but I don't believe this will solve the problem.
Before I created Skim That[1], a human powered news summarizing website, I looked into how Summly and other TL;DR algorithms worked to decide which direction I wanted to go in. I concluded that, even if you create the best algorithm that takes the best sentences from a story, you're still going to end up with a poorly written and out of context paragraph.
Try it yourself. Read a story and try to manually find a few sentences that best summarize it. Then, without rewriting anything, try to put those sentences into a paragraph or two. You'll find that you end up with a confusing summary that's difficult to read.
The amount of words Summly limited itself to (one iPhone screen worth) is brilliant. It keeps things simple and easy to skim through but what's produced by the service is so short that it should be called a "tease" not a "summary".
Of course, the Summly app does hit the nail on the head with a summary every once in a while but this hit or miss style makes for a bad experience.
Summarizing algorithms aren't the automation challenge, those will never work right as demonstrated by the "try it yourself" challenge above. The real automation challenge is rewriting the important sentences in such a way that they make sense together and provide proper context.
On Skim That, I'm trying to solve the problem by crowd sourcing the summarizing process and asking readers to summarize a story. I've gotten a few people to give it a shot and several of those continue to summarize stories every once in a while. My challenge is how to get people more interested in participating and how to get search engine traffic to a website that goes against many SEO principals.
Edit: Human or machine, I think the summary race is great for readers and helps people be more informed. I wish Nick a lot of luck and hope that one of us solves this problem soon.
I concluded that, even if you create the best algorithm that takes the best sentences from a story, you're still going to end up with a poorly written and out of context paragraph.
Even worse, many (most?) writers are pretty bad at this too. Writing summaries has become one of my main jobs over the past couple of years and it's still pretty tough with a lot of source material where a full read and comprehension is required.
Algorithms currently suck as 'one size fits all' approaches for almost anything, including curation and summarizing, but.. it's an interesting and narrow enough problem space that some genuine AI or natural language processing innovations could come out of it, so as you say, it'd be great to see it come good.
Exactly! Not only that but sometimes the original author does a poor job of writing the article and a rewrite of the content is needed just to make the story coherent.
Natural language is interesting and SEO guys are also working on rewriting tools so they could repackage articles as OC.
This is awesome, I am surprised someone this young hasn't received VC funding previously. Whatever you think of the idea it isn't important, the person is important and he is one to watch. Ideas change all the time, and if this doesn't work he will have to change it. If it does work then all the negative commenters can eat their words.
I bet younger people have been "funded" before but there should be a clear definition to "VC funding" that guides this race.
What I mean is that it's easy for friends and family to "fund" a child's project but that isn't a fair comparison to what Nick has done.
I'd suggest something like $250,000 from VC that isn't a friend or family member. That would still qualify Nick's earlier round of funding and give us something to rank others in this race to the youngest.
I like Summrly. It came in to my attention when it was featured in the Appstore as Editor's Choice.
I have been poking around Circa for the last two week as well and I prefer this format better.
It's more playful, more to discover. It took a little bit to get used to the gestures, but I like it.
I like this approach more than getting pushed updates on my pre-selected news stories (how Circa works). Problem with Circa is that you have to make a decision right then and there. You have to decide if you care to hear about this story in the future or not. And the result is a) i subscribe to very little subject or b) I over subscribe to many subjects and get overwhelmed with updates, and this dilutes my interest in all of the subject.
But that's not how we generally read the Newsaper or any content for that matter. We often read the side lines. the news before and after, or the surrounding industries. That's the reason why I think Circa will have a hard time converting me to a daily user of their app. Summrly on the other hand, i load it 5 times a day.
Anyway, Hearing that a young entrepreneur is behind this is even more impressive. Fantastic work!
I actually downloaded and tried out the app for myself, and I liked it. While an algorithm cannot best a human, this app seems to do a pretty good job at summarizing the news. I think it's feasible - a large portion of any given news article is typically spent expanding on a few main ideas that are typically expressed in one or two sentences. Your typical 1000 word news article follows a predictable narrative structure.
That being said, I found the whole user flow of swiping through sections to be terribly unintuitive and confusing.
28 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 67.6 ms ] threadhttp://www.forbes.com/2008/02/09/teen-millionaires-startups-...
Recently there was a story about a 16 y/o who's converting a sports car to electric and runs a CAD business that seems to be doing pretty well.
Edit: I just dug up the car conversion thread I mentioned. This kid is making amazing progress: http://www.s2ki.com/s2000/topic/975497-wait-that-isnt-an-f20... (that's the last page of his forum updates)
Finding a market and executing on an opportunity isn't that difficult of a thing to do - the trick is finding one within your grasp. This was virtual goods, so it required almost no upfront capital and very little development and maintenance costs. It's no massively-scalable startup, but when your goal is just to create a profitable lifestyle business, it isn't actually that complicated.
Stephen Fry is in the advertisement video for Summly, he tweeted it to his ~5 million followers: https://twitter.com/stephenfry/status/264066858225905664
The Summly team: http://summly.com/about.html
edit: oh apparently Stephen Fry is an investor, that explains the "free" video.
edit edit: I wonder how he feels about his age being such a huge part of the stories now, back in August 2011 he said this:
From: http://www.fastcompany.com/1772823/15-year-old-creator-trimi...They are basing it on his age (Nothing wrong with that) because they seem to have a huge agency or press team working to get two BBC headline's and coverage in all of the big publications.
The worry with this is if all fails and the app doesn't take off (As it didn't the first time and with most companies) will they all stick around and will the investors put more in? This is why I don't particularly like this model.
All the best to him and the team though. I'll be interested to see how it goes.
Obviously his parents would need to be involved in this. It's possible also that one of the big draws for the investor was the obvious publicity potential (for the venture) of funding someone 15 yrs old vs. someone who is (ho hum) 20. This type of angle plays well in the media.
edit: upon investigation it would appear that Summly Limited has his mother as a director ("MS DIANA JULIA D'ALOISIO") and he is listed as secretary ("NICHOLAS D'ALOISIO-MONTILLA") -- search for "summly" via http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk and then select the option to order information.
edit edit: so from the filing the following is true:
Summly Limited has Nick's mother as a director along with the investors, he is a secretary.
The company has 900,000 shares. 600,000 "Ordinary" are allocated to his mother ("DIANA JULIA D'ALOISIO") 120,000 "Series A Preferred" are allocated to GERSHWIN INTERNATIONAL LIMITED and 180,000 "Series A Preferred" are allocated to TWINHILLS LIMITED.
So it seems that Nick has no actual stake in the company and is using his mother as the proxy for his ownership.
edit edit edit: Something might be worth noting, the site lists "Summly Inc" as the company responsible for Summly, not Summly Limited.
Now.
The algorithm works by selecting words from a given article to build a summary that will perfectly fit onto the screen of your iPhone--no more scrolling to read or waiting to load.
I have a serious problem with this. On The Verge he made the statement that the activity of scrolling was "horrific"[1]. Why? This is mainly personal bias-as someone who carries serious nerdboners for long-form journalism-but I don't think the problem with news on mobiles is something you solve by shrink wrapping content so you don't have to move your finger a few inches on an iPhone.
IMO the problem with reading content on mobile has already been addressed by XKCD [2].
I have no problem with D'Aloisio wanting to change media for the better, to make it more accessible, easier to digest and syndicate written content. I do have reservations however about algorithmically summarizing news articles because of a perceived notion that there is something wrong with reading long articles.
Again, this is personal opinion.
---
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/1/3583720/summly-nick-d-aloi...
[2] http://xkcd.com/869/
British people become relatively emancipated at 16. You can leave school (I did!), go to work, join the army, smoke, have sex (sadly, I didn't), and do many things. Just not vote, drive, drink, and a few other things.
Nick D’Alosio deserves a ton of credit. He's smart, creative, young, ambitious, pulled together a good team and created a great looking app but I don't believe this will solve the problem.
Before I created Skim That[1], a human powered news summarizing website, I looked into how Summly and other TL;DR algorithms worked to decide which direction I wanted to go in. I concluded that, even if you create the best algorithm that takes the best sentences from a story, you're still going to end up with a poorly written and out of context paragraph.
Try it yourself. Read a story and try to manually find a few sentences that best summarize it. Then, without rewriting anything, try to put those sentences into a paragraph or two. You'll find that you end up with a confusing summary that's difficult to read.
The amount of words Summly limited itself to (one iPhone screen worth) is brilliant. It keeps things simple and easy to skim through but what's produced by the service is so short that it should be called a "tease" not a "summary".
Of course, the Summly app does hit the nail on the head with a summary every once in a while but this hit or miss style makes for a bad experience.
Summarizing algorithms aren't the automation challenge, those will never work right as demonstrated by the "try it yourself" challenge above. The real automation challenge is rewriting the important sentences in such a way that they make sense together and provide proper context.
On Skim That, I'm trying to solve the problem by crowd sourcing the summarizing process and asking readers to summarize a story. I've gotten a few people to give it a shot and several of those continue to summarize stories every once in a while. My challenge is how to get people more interested in participating and how to get search engine traffic to a website that goes against many SEO principals.
[1] http://skimthat.com
Edit: Human or machine, I think the summary race is great for readers and helps people be more informed. I wish Nick a lot of luck and hope that one of us solves this problem soon.
Even worse, many (most?) writers are pretty bad at this too. Writing summaries has become one of my main jobs over the past couple of years and it's still pretty tough with a lot of source material where a full read and comprehension is required.
Algorithms currently suck as 'one size fits all' approaches for almost anything, including curation and summarizing, but.. it's an interesting and narrow enough problem space that some genuine AI or natural language processing innovations could come out of it, so as you say, it'd be great to see it come good.
Exactly! Not only that but sometimes the original author does a poor job of writing the article and a rewrite of the content is needed just to make the story coherent.
Natural language is interesting and SEO guys are also working on rewriting tools so they could repackage articles as OC.
What I mean is that it's easy for friends and family to "fund" a child's project but that isn't a fair comparison to what Nick has done.
I'd suggest something like $250,000 from VC that isn't a friend or family member. That would still qualify Nick's earlier round of funding and give us something to rank others in this race to the youngest.
I have been poking around Circa for the last two week as well and I prefer this format better.
It's more playful, more to discover. It took a little bit to get used to the gestures, but I like it.
I like this approach more than getting pushed updates on my pre-selected news stories (how Circa works). Problem with Circa is that you have to make a decision right then and there. You have to decide if you care to hear about this story in the future or not. And the result is a) i subscribe to very little subject or b) I over subscribe to many subjects and get overwhelmed with updates, and this dilutes my interest in all of the subject.
But that's not how we generally read the Newsaper or any content for that matter. We often read the side lines. the news before and after, or the surrounding industries. That's the reason why I think Circa will have a hard time converting me to a daily user of their app. Summrly on the other hand, i load it 5 times a day.
Anyway, Hearing that a young entrepreneur is behind this is even more impressive. Fantastic work!
That being said, I found the whole user flow of swiping through sections to be terribly unintuitive and confusing.