My hunch is that this says more about Yahoo than anything else, but without technical details it's hard to be sure. There's been good summarization tech that Yahoo hasn't implemented for at least a decade, despite having dozens of engineers who could be doing so. Did this startup they bought for $30m implement something another class above that yet? Or are they buying themselves up to the par they should've already been at?
Wow. I didn't think of that before, but it fits. Yahoo's reputation, at least in the eye of the public, largely consists of being a failed competitor to google, a has-been. Hiring Marissa Mayer certainly got the tech world excited, but I'm not sure that excitement spread far beyond those who were already familiar with her in the context of her work at google.
This acquisition answers the skeptical question I think many of us were asking ourselves: how will yahoo shed its reputation as a has-been and get people to give it a second chance? This is how. This says "we're young and exciting again" more effectively than a high-budget series of TV ads and billboards ever could. Maybe it doesn't send quite that message to the jaded startup crowd, but it certainly sends it to the tech bloggers and interested bystanders, who are the people yahoo is after in the first place. The message is even stronger because of the timing with respect to google reader. I haven't yet decided weather or not I want to believe that it was planned all along.
My intent is not to diminish Nick's accomplishment, although in the name of full disclosure I freely admit jealousy (who wouldn't?). I'd categorize it under both deserving and lucky, with the proviso that "deserving and unlucky" is a rather large category. Good job, Nick, although you certainly don't need to hear it from me :)
I still have to reserve my loudest (virtual) applause for yahoo. This is a brilliant move with brilliant timing which has already generated more hype than I would have expected yahoo to be able to pull off had you asked me only a week ago. Bravo. Maybe they actually do have a turn-around in their future. Maybe.
Stop over-analyzing things. Saying Yahoo made this acquisition for the sake of publicity is an extraordinary claim which is completely unsubstantiated.
I'll probably have lost my knee-jerk enthusiasm by tomorrow, but I'm not ready to back down from my opinion quite yet. The parent post resonated with me because it made me realize that, in just the past few hours, I had already overheard / participated in three separate conversations with nontechnical people regarding the acquisition. In one of those conversations, someone expressed a desire to check out the app. I can't remember the last time a non-apple product hit that level of visibility. In my neck of the woods (obviously not a representative statistical sample of anything) this story achieved something extraordinary for yahoo, and if it generalizes at anywhere near the same level of effectiveness I could easily believe that it was worth the money.
I'm sure that a significant portion of the acquisition price came from the quality of the app as opposed to publicity (it IS a great app), but I simply don't believe that Yahoo AND Summly didn't know/care about the publicity potential, and by extension I believe it impacted the purchase decision and pricing.
I can't speak for it now, but it certainly was at the time. "Was" does not necessarily mean there was a cessation, merely that said state was true at an earlier time.
FWIW though, I was a huge fan at the time and it went majorly downhill after it was sold to Yahoo. I don't know how it is with the new owners, because I moved away.
Replying here, because for some reason can't reply to your child comment. I still use Delicious for all my book-marking. For a time, it looked like it would get killed off, but that didn't happen. I'd be interested to know what anyone else uses, but Delicious.com still works fine for me.
I recently moved to diigo after staying with delicious for about 6 years and being disappointed by the lack of "vision" in the future of the product.
Diigo feels like what delicious would have been if yahoo didn't stop improving it, it is fast, simple to use and the browser extension for firefox is okay (which is more than I can say about the delicious one).
Had diigo been unsatisfying for me, I would have likely moved to pinboard which is I think quite popular in the HN crowd.
I guess I was a 'power' Delicious user with several thousand links and.. I switched to a giant text file synced over Dropbox between all my machines and a Ruby script to manage and search it. All I lose are the social features, which I never used anyway (although I remember when del.icio.us/popular was my go-to site for links in the way HN and Reddit are now).
That's not an extraordinary claim at all. It's called marketing. Companies spend millions on it all the time.
And it's far from "completely unsubstantiated." Summly was objectively not very good, and the developer appears to have more family connections than he does raw engineering talent.
Yahoo! has tons of talented engineers working for them who could have easily put together another shoddy summarization app (except Yahoo! isn't even using the app--they're shutting it down). Why would they dish out (reportedly) $30 million for a kid who hasn't even graduated from high school?
Your logic: It's not option 1 or 2 (statement is unsubstantiated - when you say it "was objectively not very good," you really mean "in my opinion it was not very good"). So it must be option 3 (also unsubstantiated), since option 3 is the only option left (unsubstantiated).
To answer your last question: 1) As far as I know that kid did not hold any high-ranking role at the company anymore; the talent probably lay elsewhere. 2) There are many reasons and unless your name begins with Marissa and ends with Mayer, you cannot know for sure.
I think I agree with that claim actually. Yahoo's biggest deficit is not a lack of news summarizing apps, and is not a lack of engineering talent. Its deficit is a shitty reputation as a has-been company that is uninteresting to dynamic young talent.
I very much think they bought themselves a boy wonder so they could show him off to the press. I doubt the company actually needs him or his product in any direct sense.
Like you suggest, the technical part just isn't quite there. I used Summly for almost 3 months, giving it chance and chance again to impress me. It never did. The summaries were mediocre at best and commonly irrelevant, and it got deleted soon after. It's stuck at the point voice recognition is, where it works ok at time, but generally isn't worth the hassle.
Yahoo's been buying up start-ups with good talent but middling traction to do a turn-around. Stamped, Jybe, and now Summly all fit the mold. Yes, they're purchasing at a premium - it's hard to convince a young, scrappy start up founder to join a company with Yahoo's stodgy reputation. But that's exactly what they need - a new infusion of big thinkers to turn around the company.
Having briefly touched this area myself I like to think it is possible to deliver quality summarizations. As with voice recognition the problem is that there is far too much variation in the real world, too many different different standard forms of sentence/ paragraph structure.
In my honest opinion Yahoo! acquired Summly for their launch video: https://vimeo.com/52014691 It's simply so cool. Yahoo! is nowhere near that cool. The experiment now is if buying cool makes you cool.
Those aren't disconnected points: To a great extent we can attribute the "luck" here to the video launch. It clearly cost some money to put together the launch video, and that's not necessarily something most people have or are willing to spend.
And this is the stuff that dreams are made of, other people's dreams. The dark side of this move will be dealing with his new colleagues at Yahoo, there are dragons there and I hope he has enough introspection to understand the less nice reactions he will get. That said, let's hope that he finds his passion and doesn't leave us early like Aaron did. If nothing else it is difficult to fathom the impact that will have on his psyche going forward.
this is the stuff that dreams are made of, other people's dreams
This sounds a lot like René Girard: people desire others' desire. I think it's one of the most important things to understand about human psychology. Without it, you can really run aground in a painful way.
It's worth noting how shamelessly the article's headline exploits this. How many people here are compulsively comparing themselves to what it depicts?
It seems that he came from money and privilege? He attracted a very peculiar crowd of investors to say the least, and I wonder what role (if any) his background played. Good on him though, and congratulations. He certainly seems brilliant.
While stories like his are interesting novelties, I feel like they are distracting and counterproductive to the startup scene at large.
Instead of focusing on what Nick D’Aloisio has actually created, perhaps looking at this "algorithmic invention, which takes long-form stories and shortens them for readers using smartphones" and digging into what makes it special, the story is all about the jackpot of millions he's lucked into.
I'd love to know more about the technical details behind Summly, or what Nick went through to create it.
This kind of lottery mentality just gives the general public the impression that there's a gold rush going on, and causes the kind of magical thinking that's similar to teenagers all hoping to become the next rock star or sports legend, or in this case, startup founder, that will make millions, focusing on the money instead of asking themselves what they want to do with their lives.
For every teenage millionaire that hits the startup jackpot, there are thousands of hard-working entrepreneurs that build for the love of building. I'm not saying Nick D'Aloisio isn't doing what he does out of genuine passion - I don't know anything about him, I expect he's very driven and geniune - but I would rather focus on the work than the jackpot.
I hear what you're saying but I think what you're describing is not the most notable part of the story, in fact, possibly the least interesting part of it. I don't know what his algorithm is; I have some doubts as to it's efficacy but apparently Yahoo! did not. I'm more interested in how this person got celebrities and billionaires interested in the product early on. Seems odd.
It seems like we're seeing evidence that the class system is alive and well in the UK. Listen to his posh accent, and look at the easy way he casually hangs out with Stephen Fry: http://vimeo.com/52014691
I suspect the story behind this is simply "upper-class child with family connections finds success."
That's the impression I got from day one. Him or his parents had connections to get someone interested from day one.
I am also very curious about this so called "algorithm".
For all I know, it could be a very well made genuine admin interface plugged into multiple turks. That is what I would have done.
"Now we've wasted $10,000 as we dont have the article to accompany the efforts. / That puts us in debt and we can't pay that back for ourselves so now I'm going to have to go without food for the next month."
What an elevator pitch! If this Yahoo! thing doesn't pan out....
I was commenting on his desperate sounding emails when clearly he was not in personal financial peril. After reading more about the project and his background, he seems talented enough.
Indeed. I haven't tried the app in months, but downloaded it shortly after launch, and it unequivocally sucked. The summarization simply wasn't effective and often gave incoherent information or incomplete sentences.
This story seems to boil down to an individual that created a moderately-functioning app who's success was enabled by his family connections and amplified by a media industry voracious for this kind of shit.
From the video, he also seems like he's greatly overhyping the whole thing (as is everyone else, of course). Genetic algorithms are not even remotely close to human intelligence, quantitatively or qualitatively, so his claims to that effect are nonsensical and misleading.
One common strain I see with child prodigies, or whatever you want to call them, is that their accomplishments are often greatly exaggerated and they usually don't end up contributing as much as many who make great contributions later in life (few famous historical scientists and artists, with the exception perhaps of Mozart, were what we would consider child prodigies, and many were quite the opposite). I don't know if it's caused by resting on their laurels, burning out, or them just not being as good as they claimed, but it doesn't seem like a healthy model at all.
Summly in particular doesn't come across as being all that complicated - genetic analysis of text is a well-researched and thoroughly trodden part of applied complexity theory - but rather a smart business move made by investors and businessmen mostly behind the scenes. D’Aloisio comes across more as a poster boy than anything - he's put up as this child prodigy, but I've never read or heard anything particularly new, profound, or even that interesting from him.
Not forgetting Mendelssohn as the prime example. Neither Mozart nor Chopin wrote anything comparable in stature to the Octet written when Felix was 16 years old. It's one
of the those pieces where within a minute or so you simply 'know' you're listening to a work of genius. Yes, entirely o/t especially on this site. Sorry!
I don't like that the word 'child prodigy' is thrown around for this. For Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, etc. you simply have individuals who were all offspring of musicians, who started at young ages, who both listened to music played by their parents for hours and practiced it for themselves for hours more. Likewise with mathematicians, programming prodigies, etc.
And, Chopin's later work is indeed much more mature -- compare the difference for example between the Nocturne in E minor which he wrote when he was 19, and Nocturne in C-Minor, No 21, which he wrote shortly before his death. The difference is pretty stark -- and even non-musicians can sort of detect the growth. I can say likewise for most composers, their craft honed with time -- it's difficult for me to think of any composer who composed something tremendous in the very beginning just out of nowhere -- that kind of stuff doesn't happen.
I'm not sure calling Mozart and Chopin prodigies qualifies as throwing terms around [lightly]. With so much recorded music being created over the millennia (since the invention of musical notation), these two, among a few others, stand out as undeniable geniuses of their craft. It also so happens that they started to make waves very early, which wasn't that easy to accomplish in an artist's lifetime back then, especially when you consider that Chopin gave only some 30 public performances in the last 19 years of his life spent in Paris and away from oppressed Poland. Chopin was seven years old when he composed two critically-acclaimed Polonaises, in G minor and B-flat major. Would you really not call him a prodigy?
The techcrunch article[1] mentioned SRI as a partner.
Just a wild guess, but maybe all the "intelligence" of the app is courtesy SRI, which has proven expertise in the machine learning & natural language processing fields.
Now, for the rest of us: we've got some bootstraps to pull, because we can achieve success too, if we work hard enough (yes, that's sarcasm, not purple koolaid)
The class system is alive and well in the USA too. Less easily recognized perhaps, as the myth of the American Dream(sm) with its "look at these successful underdogs" is the perfect misdirection. Dig a little deeper and you'll most hugely successful startups came from money (i.e. "friends and family" rounds under rule 506).
Christ, get over the class thing. Yes, if you have parents and good connections you've got an advantage. Yes, these traits are often a result of class historically. But trying to use class as an excuse for your own failure is not valid in this day and age.
>But trying to use class as an excuse for your own failure is not valid in this day and age.
If it's a factor, then it's perfectly valid. All this talk about "it's your own failure" only serves to stop anybody from attempting to change the overall class thing (not by his individual, outlier, success: systemically).
I don't see many rich black entrepreneurs coming from Mississippi or Alabama, for example. Or from "white trash" trailer parks. Or the latino California population.
Mostly upper and higher middle class white and asian families with mucho dinero.
Do you see anything different?
Let's take the top 100 successful startup founders of the last 10 years and check their backgrounds.
Can't really comment, I have no understanding of USA's class system, but as I said, coming from a wealthy and connected background is no longer exclusively for the upper classes. Passive aggressive reverse snobbery is pointless.
The parent of your comment is exactly the other prong of the faux meritocracy argument. One side is this story about the 15 year old kid who "made it". That's the carrot. The other side is, "yeah, if you don't make it, its your own fault. Just work harder, smarter, etc." That's the stick.
So, the implication is that we are living in a meritocracy. If you happen to be astute enough to point out how ridiculous that is on its face, then the response is that you're whining and you should be able to overcome anyway. Nothing needs to be addressed in the system and nevermind that the game is rigged. You just need to be less of a loser.
No. The upper classes have lived on the same estate for 5 generations, can trace their family back to the Doomsday Book, don't work in the "have a job" sense, had a massively disproportionate wealth up to the first world war and possibly still do (or, conversely, are massively in debt against their crumbling mansion which they won't give up a. out of principle and b. because no-one wants it) and inherit usable practical clothes that their grandparents wore.
That's a very narrow definition which would even exclude people like Alan Sugar who has an actual lordship and knighthood as well piles of cash.
It's not an especially useful definition anyway, if your family has a lot of money it doesn't make much practical difference whether they got that via inheritance or via starting facebook you will get similar advantages either way.
What? There is no way that anyone could consider Alan Sugar to be upper class? Was that an attempt at a joke? There's some sort of deep cultural disconnect going on here. Are you English?
"Practical difference" What are you talking about? Rich is rich. Upper class is upper class. Traditionally / historically being upper class has implied money. Having money has never implied upper class.
Are USAians so disconnected from the concept of "the rest of the world" as to fail to realise that an English article about class has nothing to do with USAian concepts of class?
The number of downvotes and poor quality of debate has been really quite shocking.
>It seems like we're seeing evidence that the class system is alive and well in the UK.
Yes of course it is, I think anyone in the UK would know that. But do you imagine you're making a contrast here? The class system is alive and well in most places. Do you know what Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have in common? They all grew up well to do.
"I'm more interested in how this person got celebrities and billionaires interested in the product early on. Seems odd."
Ding ding ding! That's my real issue with stories like this. They don't explain how these young geniuses got capitol to build their ideas or how they were able to market them to people with influence or how they are able to convince influencers like Marissa Meyer to fork over $30 million.
Not hating on the kid, but without proper explanation of those three aforementioned things, there's no real story here.
It sounds like he came from a very wealthy family which was willing to invest a lot of its own money in extraordinary marketing for what is otherwise a fairly ordinary app (or so it appears).
I'd say the Yahoo! acquisition was more about the buzz and marketing this would create and less about the technology. I imagine they could have just had their own engineers make a similar app quite quickly and for considerably less money.
This paragraph summarizes the entire article nicely:
Yahoo said in a statement that while the Summly app would be shut down, “we will acquire the technology and you’ll see it come to life throughout Yahoo’s mobile experiences soon.”
Shutting it down it the dumbest move ever. This story is all over the news and everyone wants to download it. Many developers pay a great deal to acquire more users, and Yahoo is just throwing this chance away.
If the app is crap it would make less sense to keep it. Perhaps relaunching the app after an "update" might be a good use of the name and positive press it has.
They shut down the app, because it probably sucked and would have killed the hype. Imagine the PR fiasco if the headlines were "Yahoo bought worthless app that doesn't even work properly for 30 Mio $".
So, they (are rumored to have) paid "tens of millions", not for the product, but for a technology in a field that must be ripe with patents? They must have had a very novel idea, if it's worth that.
One would expect that all of that wording means they licensed technology from SRI (likely heavily patented). So a curious badger might wonder if SRI is owned partly by his family or their friends. It seems highly unlikely that some kid with an idea for a news app would be able to license at any affordable rate patented technology that is "creating billions of dollars of marketplace value", or afford a work contract for original R&D.
That then makes me wonder what Yahoo gets out of the deal if indeed the algorithm behind the application is mostly patented, especially at such an overpriced valuation. Or if SRI did the R&D and what's being left out here is that his family/friends paid tens of millions for the research to build the algorithm, then this barely covers the cost? And if they did the R&D, then one wonders what this kid has really done (did he build the rest himself, or hire engineers?)
Personally, this feels like Yahoo buying a story about how it's acquiring "big, successful, talent." It's hard to understand at all what's going on here.
But the jackpot is the work. His professionally managed "career", designed to make him look like the leader of a project, is the only reason his product became notable.
This lottery mentality trivializes everything and keeps people focused on the jackpot vs. building sustainable or even meaningful businesses.
It's this constant holding up of people who got lucky as some sort of cruel carrot for everyone to chase that's really started to irk me. I don't begrudge the young man his success in the slightest, but enough with turning everything into a soulless reality show.
The problem is that many people labor away in their own fields while making significant contributions, and never get anywhere near this kind of payout. That diminishes people's faith in the idea of a broadly meritocratic private sector.
Bingo. I have a profitable, scalable enterprise. We're worthless because we're profitable - if you make money, your value is a multiplier of profit.
Now, if you run a startup that makes no revenue, or even loses huge amounts of money, your value is a multiplier of the profit you couldtheoreticallyin a crack dream make.
Well, the thing is that those people making significant contributions probably generated just as much or more wealth. They just had a rent seeker between them and the market that absorbed it.
Believe me, this is not a lottery, at least in this case. No, I don't have any facts just my intuition. I consider this more in lieu of the case how BillG got the DOS contract.
I have observed in various walks of life that whoever is in "it" for the money ends up being, at best, moderately useful for their organization, moderately effective at growing, moderately effective at learning and ultimately moderately effective at being successful. And that's one of the more optimistic scenarios. As an ironic consequence, they also end up being only moderately successful at getting rich, that is if they even have the mental chops necessary and a healthy dose of luck.
This is like Orwell's double-think: You need to care every once in a blue moon about your well being (compensation, benefits, etc.) and then immediately forget about it and do whatever it is that you're doing for the joy of it. I have found people's sustained focus on their own well-being to be one of the best predictors of their (lack of) contribution to wherever they are in life.
Being in it for the money is not the same as caring about your well-being. I have no trouble imagining someone who does not care about money but cares greatly about their well being.
I don't think double-think is necessary here. You need to be passionate about what you do; but you then find a way of using that passion to take care of your well-being. It's not about pursuing one at the expense of the other (well, maybe sometimes, but we don't all have to be "struggling artists").
More people make 1+ million per year working for other people than cross get there from doing a start-up. And a 7 figure income is a long way from 'wealthy' in today's world. Of course that's not to say you can't retire on 2 million and live vary comfortably, but just because you get a windfall at 17 does not mean your 'done'.
I was listening to Marco Arment's old podcasts and he mentioned that the Tumblr CEO (Dave?) tried extremely hard to keep his age a secret for this exact reason. As soon as his age leaked to the press (19 years old) all articles about Tumblr turned into pieces about his age rather than what Tumblr was about. :(
> This kind of lottery mentality just gives the general public the impression that there's a gold rush going on, and causes the kind of magical thinking that's similar to teenagers all hoping to become the next rock star or sports legend, or in this case, startup founder, that will make millions, focusing on the money instead of asking themselves what they want to do with their lives.
Isn't it related or similar (should I say the same ?) to the notion that "every american is a potential millionaire" when discussing high-income taxes ?
The most nonsensical part of all of this seems to be that Yahoo's going to kill the app and just integrate the technology into it's own products.
As far as I can tell, the reason the app was so valuable was due to the story that came with it, not the technology. Two years ago it got it got national coverage due to the surprisingly young age of the founder managing to create a popular app and raise funding. At the time the summarisation technology was highly unsophisticated. It appears that's now improved by using a combination of machine learning and natural language processing but I'm yet to hear a strong case that this tech is particularly innovative or protected from being reproduced elsewhere.
By killing the app, they're losing all the users up to this point and all the potential customers that would check it out after hearing this story. These people don't particular care for the summarisation algorithm, they're not going to be searching for yahoo's own version of the app in a months time.
Yahoo's either being stupid or know something we don't.
You think all his users are using his app because he's young? I think that is unrealistic; they use it because it provides value. Yahoo! just wants to incorporate that value into their own offerings. How is this surprising? To make something great, you have to bring lots of good things together.
No, I think they started using it because they heard of it (because he is young) and then stuck with it because it provides value. Whether that value is strong enough to essentially start again with a whole new app is debatable.
Nice to see he got the last laugh. It's inspiring to think that his company went from a joke to some people to a $30MM acquisition in a little over 2 years.
Success breeds success. There is very much a class system alive and well in the world today, which reinforces wealth creation. While there are many exceptions to the rule, it's undeniable that those who come from the upper classes (not necessarily wealthy, mind you) have certain privileges the hoi polloi don't.
Lots of speculation about how this young man managed to achieve these accomplishments, a lot quite negative and bitchy.
Seems straight forward to me - his prototype generated interest and investment (nepotistic or otherwise), he paid SRI to develop real technology behind the product, Yahoo bought that technology.
What I really want to know is why he's planning on majoring in philosophy. Why not computer science?
Also, did he write this app himself? Watching the video/ad he made with Stephen Fry, it seems like it was one hell of a lot of work... I frankly find it hard to believe he created that all himself by hand at age 15. (Or did I miss something?)
For whatever it's worth, I got more out of my graduate level logic sequence about logic and the deep grounding computability theory than I did from any of my CS classes as an undergraduate (philosophy was one of my majors – CS was a minor)
Personally, I think this kid will be fine majoring in Philosophy because, well, he has other skills to carry him through =) (I still wouldn't go back and change my education one bit)
Even if he's only a little rich as some say he is, a bit of money could put together a ragtag team of outsourcers. Anything's possible I guess. 16 year old dev managing some extra help? Why not?
"How to cause massive ressentiment among your current employees?" Well, maybe he's a genius but there are no examples provided, so I'm guessing this is an expensive promotion by Yahoo!. From what I've seen, summarization software's quality is no where near the typical tldr at the end of reddit post, so what exactly has he done that's worth 30 million dollars? What does the average Yahoo! employee think?
Is that the point? To get >30 million dollars worth of them to quit in rage?
For me, I think this should receive more attention.
You have a company that's trying to attract talent, but they pay market wages for you and me and anyone else. Then there are stories like this, where they outright throw money at some people whether it be to generate a huge story or to acquire a team and research contracts that weren't a part of the hyped story. Employees look at this and get jealous and rightfully so -- they are probably not super-long-timers with valuable equity. Why would they stick with a company that's throwing money around for things that don't appear to have a coherent vision nor that will likely improve the company overall?
It feels like the no-telecommuting decision might've been short sighted in the same way. Sure, there might've been bad apples abusing the system, but to outright ban the practice would put a very bad taste in my mouth as an employee.
The article makes it sound like a "whiz kid loner" sort of company, but the summly.com website suggests there's a lot more to it than is implied by this article. The About page shows a pretty senior, experienced team (decades of engineering and research experience): http://summly.com/about.html
And the technology page says the algorithm is actually from SRI! http://summly.com/technology.html (SRI language technology was also behind Siri, of course.) There are various NLP researchers on their SRI team list, like Appelt, Israel, Nallapati, etc. Did Summly license the technology from SRI? Did they contract with SRI to maintain or develop the core algorithm? Who owns it?
If the valuation includes Yahoo acquiring SRI technology, IP, and some portion of those researchers' time for futher product development, plus the very nice UI and marketing for it, and maybe they want to acquihire some of the team as well, that all makes the valuation seem a bit less far-fetched than you might think from the NYT's coverage (or the negative comments on HN).
The more interesting question than the valuation, I think, is how this company went from a very young founder to all those investors, a pretty senior executive team, and getting the NLP technology.
[I once worked for a startup, Powerset, whose core NLP system was licensed from Xerox PARC; Powerset also quietly acquired an SRI spinoff and its NLP technology, and I think IP acquisition was an important motivation. When Powerset was acquired by Microsoft, I am told IP was at least a somewhat important part of the valuation. I have no idea if this is actually applicable to this situation; maybe it's an overextrapolation.]
My guess is that if what was reported is close to real, it was basically an SRI spin-out, there was a real team behind it before it even started, and they either merged with Summly or brought on D’Aloisio as 'Founder' as a marketing tactic.
Oh, and Yoko Ono was also an investor in the series A...
If it smells like it doesn't quite make sense, the most likely explanation is that it doesn't make sense and they are spinning a narrative that suits them.
Wait a second - Yahoo! couldn't figure out how to algorithmically shorten a long-form story for display on mobile? It took a 17-year old and $30M to make this happen?
It's hardly a simple problem. And by buying out another successful company they get the consumer base it already has rather than spending resources and pushing their own product and risk having it fail or having to compete with the other company.
Do you mean is it worth $30 million or do you mean does it cost that much? I don't know the economics behind it but I imagine if there were enough consumers using it, it could conceivably be worth that much.
As far as taking that much to build a system like that, definitely. It's a natural language problem. The computer not only has to process natural language, which is a hard enough problem on it's own, but then decide what parts are "important" or not. And then this has to be scaled up to process hundreds or thousands of articles simultaneously, each within a few seconds or less.
I had that idea jotted down a few years ago, but no idea how to implement such a thing with robustness in relation to the several formats of articles you may find...
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 80.2 ms ] threadThey must have decided it was easier to extend summly than to build it organically.
This acquisition answers the skeptical question I think many of us were asking ourselves: how will yahoo shed its reputation as a has-been and get people to give it a second chance? This is how. This says "we're young and exciting again" more effectively than a high-budget series of TV ads and billboards ever could. Maybe it doesn't send quite that message to the jaded startup crowd, but it certainly sends it to the tech bloggers and interested bystanders, who are the people yahoo is after in the first place. The message is even stronger because of the timing with respect to google reader. I haven't yet decided weather or not I want to believe that it was planned all along.
My intent is not to diminish Nick's accomplishment, although in the name of full disclosure I freely admit jealousy (who wouldn't?). I'd categorize it under both deserving and lucky, with the proviso that "deserving and unlucky" is a rather large category. Good job, Nick, although you certainly don't need to hear it from me :)
I still have to reserve my loudest (virtual) applause for yahoo. This is a brilliant move with brilliant timing which has already generated more hype than I would have expected yahoo to be able to pull off had you asked me only a week ago. Bravo. Maybe they actually do have a turn-around in their future. Maybe.
I'm sure that a significant portion of the acquisition price came from the quality of the app as opposed to publicity (it IS a great app), but I simply don't believe that Yahoo AND Summly didn't know/care about the publicity potential, and by extension I believe it impacted the purchase decision and pricing.
See: broadcast.com ($5.7B), delicious ($20MM), MyBlogLog, then some Middle Eastern social network Maktoob ($167MM) that then disappeared soon after.
FWIW though, I was a huge fan at the time and it went majorly downhill after it was sold to Yahoo. I don't know how it is with the new owners, because I moved away.
Had diigo been unsatisfying for me, I would have likely moved to pinboard which is I think quite popular in the HN crowd.
And it's far from "completely unsubstantiated." Summly was objectively not very good, and the developer appears to have more family connections than he does raw engineering talent.
Yahoo! has tons of talented engineers working for them who could have easily put together another shoddy summarization app (except Yahoo! isn't even using the app--they're shutting it down). Why would they dish out (reportedly) $30 million for a kid who hasn't even graduated from high school?
To answer your last question: 1) As far as I know that kid did not hold any high-ranking role at the company anymore; the talent probably lay elsewhere. 2) There are many reasons and unless your name begins with Marissa and ends with Mayer, you cannot know for sure.
I very much think they bought themselves a boy wonder so they could show him off to the press. I doubt the company actually needs him or his product in any direct sense.
Like you suggest, the technical part just isn't quite there. I used Summly for almost 3 months, giving it chance and chance again to impress me. It never did. The summaries were mediocre at best and commonly irrelevant, and it got deleted soon after. It's stuck at the point voice recognition is, where it works ok at time, but generally isn't worth the hassle.
Yahoo's been buying up start-ups with good talent but middling traction to do a turn-around. Stamped, Jybe, and now Summly all fit the mold. Yes, they're purchasing at a premium - it's hard to convince a young, scrappy start up founder to join a company with Yahoo's stodgy reputation. But that's exactly what they need - a new infusion of big thinkers to turn around the company.
http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=...
... he will make arrangements to test out of his classes and work from the Yahoo office in London.
They do the best (and most imitated) promotional work for tech companies going.
Think of the in-crowd in high school, they looked great, but one wouldn't come close to calling them unique.
EDIT: I just watched the launch video, and apparently Summly uses a genetic algorithm. I doubt that Mac OS X does.
The media always has the same story they want to tell:
- Brush over the amount of time/work real achievement takes
- Downplay the amount of investment taken or starting capital
- Over-hype the selling price to give a rags-to-riches over-night success story
Those aren't disconnected points: To a great extent we can attribute the "luck" here to the video launch. It clearly cost some money to put together the launch video, and that's not necessarily something most people have or are willing to spend.
This sounds a lot like René Girard: people desire others' desire. I think it's one of the most important things to understand about human psychology. Without it, you can really run aground in a painful way.
It's worth noting how shamelessly the article's headline exploits this. How many people here are compulsively comparing themselves to what it depicts?
sigh
Me. I can't help myself.
Instead of focusing on what Nick D’Aloisio has actually created, perhaps looking at this "algorithmic invention, which takes long-form stories and shortens them for readers using smartphones" and digging into what makes it special, the story is all about the jackpot of millions he's lucked into.
I'd love to know more about the technical details behind Summly, or what Nick went through to create it.
This kind of lottery mentality just gives the general public the impression that there's a gold rush going on, and causes the kind of magical thinking that's similar to teenagers all hoping to become the next rock star or sports legend, or in this case, startup founder, that will make millions, focusing on the money instead of asking themselves what they want to do with their lives.
For every teenage millionaire that hits the startup jackpot, there are thousands of hard-working entrepreneurs that build for the love of building. I'm not saying Nick D'Aloisio isn't doing what he does out of genuine passion - I don't know anything about him, I expect he's very driven and geniune - but I would rather focus on the work than the jackpot.
I suspect the story behind this is simply "upper-class child with family connections finds success."
I am also very curious about this so called "algorithm". For all I know, it could be a very well made genuine admin interface plugged into multiple turks. That is what I would have done.
Each line is a separate email. http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-deve...
What an elevator pitch! If this Yahoo! thing doesn't pan out....
This story seems to boil down to an individual that created a moderately-functioning app who's success was enabled by his family connections and amplified by a media industry voracious for this kind of shit.
One common strain I see with child prodigies, or whatever you want to call them, is that their accomplishments are often greatly exaggerated and they usually don't end up contributing as much as many who make great contributions later in life (few famous historical scientists and artists, with the exception perhaps of Mozart, were what we would consider child prodigies, and many were quite the opposite). I don't know if it's caused by resting on their laurels, burning out, or them just not being as good as they claimed, but it doesn't seem like a healthy model at all.
Summly in particular doesn't come across as being all that complicated - genetic analysis of text is a well-researched and thoroughly trodden part of applied complexity theory - but rather a smart business move made by investors and businessmen mostly behind the scenes. D’Aloisio comes across more as a poster boy than anything - he's put up as this child prodigy, but I've never read or heard anything particularly new, profound, or even that interesting from him.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean
Plenty of artists: Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, Bizet, Bieber (all right, maybe not the last one) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_music_prodigies
Others: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_child_prodigies
And, Chopin's later work is indeed much more mature -- compare the difference for example between the Nocturne in E minor which he wrote when he was 19, and Nocturne in C-Minor, No 21, which he wrote shortly before his death. The difference is pretty stark -- and even non-musicians can sort of detect the growth. I can say likewise for most composers, their craft honed with time -- it's difficult for me to think of any composer who composed something tremendous in the very beginning just out of nowhere -- that kind of stuff doesn't happen.
Just a wild guess, but maybe all the "intelligence" of the app is courtesy SRI, which has proven expertise in the machine learning & natural language processing fields.
1. http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/01/summly-app-nick-daloisio-vi...
Now, for the rest of us: we've got some bootstraps to pull, because we can achieve success too, if we work hard enough (yes, that's sarcasm, not purple koolaid)
The class system is alive and well in the USA too. Less easily recognized perhaps, as the myth of the American Dream(sm) with its "look at these successful underdogs" is the perfect misdirection. Dig a little deeper and you'll most hugely successful startups came from money (i.e. "friends and family" rounds under rule 506).
If it's a factor, then it's perfectly valid. All this talk about "it's your own failure" only serves to stop anybody from attempting to change the overall class thing (not by his individual, outlier, success: systemically).
I don't see many rich black entrepreneurs coming from Mississippi or Alabama, for example. Or from "white trash" trailer parks. Or the latino California population.
Mostly upper and higher middle class white and asian families with mucho dinero.
Do you see anything different?
Let's take the top 100 successful startup founders of the last 10 years and check their backgrounds.
Isn't that basically the definition of upper class in any practical terms?
The parent of your comment is exactly the other prong of the faux meritocracy argument. One side is this story about the 15 year old kid who "made it". That's the carrot. The other side is, "yeah, if you don't make it, its your own fault. Just work harder, smarter, etc." That's the stick.
So, the implication is that we are living in a meritocracy. If you happen to be astute enough to point out how ridiculous that is on its face, then the response is that you're whining and you should be able to overcome anyway. Nothing needs to be addressed in the system and nevermind that the game is rigged. You just need to be less of a loser.
It's not an especially useful definition anyway, if your family has a lot of money it doesn't make much practical difference whether they got that via inheritance or via starting facebook you will get similar advantages either way.
"Practical difference" What are you talking about? Rich is rich. Upper class is upper class. Traditionally / historically being upper class has implied money. Having money has never implied upper class.
It's a very English definition.
The number of downvotes and poor quality of debate has been really quite shocking.
Yes of course it is, I think anyone in the UK would know that. But do you imagine you're making a contrast here? The class system is alive and well in most places. Do you know what Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have in common? They all grew up well to do.
Ding ding ding! That's my real issue with stories like this. They don't explain how these young geniuses got capitol to build their ideas or how they were able to market them to people with influence or how they are able to convince influencers like Marissa Meyer to fork over $30 million.
Not hating on the kid, but without proper explanation of those three aforementioned things, there's no real story here.
I'd say the Yahoo! acquisition was more about the buzz and marketing this would create and less about the technology. I imagine they could have just had their own engineers make a similar app quite quickly and for considerably less money.
Yahoo said in a statement that while the Summly app would be shut down, “we will acquire the technology and you’ll see it come to life throughout Yahoo’s mobile experiences soon.”
That then makes me wonder what Yahoo gets out of the deal if indeed the algorithm behind the application is mostly patented, especially at such an overpriced valuation. Or if SRI did the R&D and what's being left out here is that his family/friends paid tens of millions for the research to build the algorithm, then this barely covers the cost? And if they did the R&D, then one wonders what this kid has really done (did he build the rest himself, or hire engineers?)
Personally, this feels like Yahoo buying a story about how it's acquiring "big, successful, talent." It's hard to understand at all what's going on here.
This lottery mentality trivializes everything and keeps people focused on the jackpot vs. building sustainable or even meaningful businesses.
It's this constant holding up of people who got lucky as some sort of cruel carrot for everyone to chase that's really started to irk me. I don't begrudge the young man his success in the slightest, but enough with turning everything into a soulless reality show.
Now, if you run a startup that makes no revenue, or even loses huge amounts of money, your value is a multiplier of the profit you could theoretically in a crack dream make.
This is like Orwell's double-think: You need to care every once in a blue moon about your well being (compensation, benefits, etc.) and then immediately forget about it and do whatever it is that you're doing for the joy of it. I have found people's sustained focus on their own well-being to be one of the best predictors of their (lack of) contribution to wherever they are in life.
sounds like Mailbox App's story to me,
Isn't it related or similar (should I say the same ?) to the notion that "every american is a potential millionaire" when discussing high-income taxes ?
:)
As far as I can tell, the reason the app was so valuable was due to the story that came with it, not the technology. Two years ago it got it got national coverage due to the surprisingly young age of the founder managing to create a popular app and raise funding. At the time the summarisation technology was highly unsophisticated. It appears that's now improved by using a combination of machine learning and natural language processing but I'm yet to hear a strong case that this tech is particularly innovative or protected from being reproduced elsewhere.
By killing the app, they're losing all the users up to this point and all the potential customers that would check it out after hearing this story. These people don't particular care for the summarisation algorithm, they're not going to be searching for yahoo's own version of the app in a months time.
Yahoo's either being stupid or know something we don't.
Nice to see he got the last laugh. It's inspiring to think that his company went from a joke to some people to a $30MM acquisition in a little over 2 years.
> now I'm going to have to go without food for the next month.
His dad works at Morgan Stanley and his mom's a lawyer. Sure...
I guess the bottom line is that as long as you get the end goal the muck of how you got there is quickly forgotten.
Poor kid.
Seems straight forward to me - his prototype generated interest and investment (nepotistic or otherwise), he paid SRI to develop real technology behind the product, Yahoo bought that technology.
Also, did he write this app himself? Watching the video/ad he made with Stephen Fry, it seems like it was one hell of a lot of work... I frankly find it hard to believe he created that all himself by hand at age 15. (Or did I miss something?)
Personally, I think this kid will be fine majoring in Philosophy because, well, he has other skills to carry him through =) (I still wouldn't go back and change my education one bit)
Regarding philosophy: in the UK, graduates of the "Politics, Philosophy and Economics" course at Oxford are pretty much running the show.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11136511
Is that the point? To get >30 million dollars worth of them to quit in rage?
You have a company that's trying to attract talent, but they pay market wages for you and me and anyone else. Then there are stories like this, where they outright throw money at some people whether it be to generate a huge story or to acquire a team and research contracts that weren't a part of the hyped story. Employees look at this and get jealous and rightfully so -- they are probably not super-long-timers with valuable equity. Why would they stick with a company that's throwing money around for things that don't appear to have a coherent vision nor that will likely improve the company overall?
It feels like the no-telecommuting decision might've been short sighted in the same way. Sure, there might've been bad apples abusing the system, but to outright ban the practice would put a very bad taste in my mouth as an employee.
I'm now quite curious about the morale at Yahoo.
And the technology page says the algorithm is actually from SRI! http://summly.com/technology.html (SRI language technology was also behind Siri, of course.) There are various NLP researchers on their SRI team list, like Appelt, Israel, Nallapati, etc. Did Summly license the technology from SRI? Did they contract with SRI to maintain or develop the core algorithm? Who owns it?
If the valuation includes Yahoo acquiring SRI technology, IP, and some portion of those researchers' time for futher product development, plus the very nice UI and marketing for it, and maybe they want to acquihire some of the team as well, that all makes the valuation seem a bit less far-fetched than you might think from the NYT's coverage (or the negative comments on HN).
The more interesting question than the valuation, I think, is how this company went from a very young founder to all those investors, a pretty senior executive team, and getting the NLP technology.
[I once worked for a startup, Powerset, whose core NLP system was licensed from Xerox PARC; Powerset also quietly acquired an SRI spinoff and its NLP technology, and I think IP acquisition was an important motivation. When Powerset was acquired by Microsoft, I am told IP was at least a somewhat important part of the valuation. I have no idea if this is actually applicable to this situation; maybe it's an overextrapolation.]
Oh, and Yoko Ono was also an investor in the series A...
What is going on here..
As far as taking that much to build a system like that, definitely. It's a natural language problem. The computer not only has to process natural language, which is a hard enough problem on it's own, but then decide what parts are "important" or not. And then this has to be scaled up to process hundreds or thousands of articles simultaneously, each within a few seconds or less.