It makes perfect sense, they've got some technology out of it, some people who understand mobile, and a nice big headline.
Worth $30m of my money? Probably not. Worth $30m of Yahoo's money? Maybe, they're not likely to have decided to spend that much on an acquihire without board approval really are they. Unless they Zuckerberg'd it and thought it was better to seek forgiveness.
The summarization tech isn't owned by Summly. It's owned by SRI International and was licensed to Summly. Maybe a large chunk of the reported $30 million was actually used to acquire that technology from SRI?
I actually didn't know about this before. I think one of the first article I read about the product was the story when the product was called TrimIt, and the company just received some investment from Li Ka Shing. For some reason, the articles[1][2][3] gave me the impression that the technology was developed by the founder (or did they switched the algorithms?)
Here's my conspiracy theory - Summly has a very nice contract with SRI that gives them full usage forever and is transferable to Yahoo. Yahoo tries to license the tech from SRI directly and realize it will cost them 20 mil a year based on their heavy usage. So instead they buy Summly for the SRI tech at a discount.
Annnd that's about the only way this makes sense to em.
There is nothing that I can see on Summly's site to suggest that they own their technology. That is, the piece of technology that creates a summary of an article does appear to be licensed from SRI.com
I suppose Yahoo will have to answer to their shareholders, just not yet. It seems to me that they have invested in the talent and the current customer base. If Yahoo really do make an impact on the mobile news market I'm sure $30m will seem like buttons.
I do agree that many other development teams would have jumped at an acquisition offer of a lot less money but they were either unknown to Yahoo or deemed not suitable for Yahoo.
There's a possibility that this publicity changes younger people's perception of Yahoo's. They'll see the BBC headline and a) will now know what Yahoo! is and b) might get motivated to write/learn code and even want to go work for a tech company (even Yahoo itself). Combined with everything else Marissa Mayer is doing, (b) might actually happen, as altruistic-seeming as it might sound.
I'm 21, probably out of the definition of 'younger person' by a while, but even I don't get it.
$30m is a lot for what I assume is an application of SRI's technology.
Still seems to me like Yahoo! is a place where engineers are handed the purse strings, a la 2005 era.
Marissa Mayer was an engineer before becoming an executive.
Was she? Her career essentially started at Google, her rise arguably being one of right place/right time.
For all of the talk about Mayer, I have literally never heard about anything actually interesting that she has done. Instead it's her 90 hour work weeks, n-shades of blue, and abrasive attitudes with others. She sounds like management through and through.
> Still seems to me like Yahoo! is a place where engineers are handed the purse strings
Exactly! :) Assuming the above is meant in a positive way, you might not have said/thought that if it wasn't for this, and other, stories recently involving Yahoo and their acquisitions.
You're assuming an lot of clever forethought on the part of Yahoo. I find it hard to believe their PR team are that cunning. It's more likely that Yahoo are desperate to rejuvenate and buying up the nearest hot startup (at whatever price it takes) is politically easier than forming an internal skunkworks to build something cool, which would be way cheaper.
Unless I missed a particular story, I haven't seen Summly or Yahoo! announce the number is $30m. A reasonable point here was that relicensing from SRI for the core functionality of this app could be a large part of the purchase price. Also, not being totally familiar with taking VC money, it sounds reasonable to me that a significant portion of the monies is going back to the investor(s?).
While I think $15m would have been fine and generous, it doesn't shock me that someone important in Yahoo! got it stuck into their head that Summly was hitting on something that would "change the way people use news", a particularly neat fit if their intention is still to be the new homepage of the internet.
Good point about "ignore the hurt feelings that our employees will have". Now a bunch of Yahoo(er?)s have this kid sitting in their Soho office with a £17m price tag on his sleeve - that's got to be a little awkward for everyone involved.
It's only awkward if you are carrying around a big ego. I've joined places just after acquisition and had co-workers who were worth millions as well. It's really not a big deal.
I was a teenager, I did no such thing.
That's borderline depressing, given how much bullshit he is spewing out. He comes from money, and give talks about shutting down and how they will lose money.
We were all teenagers once and we all had different experiences. I'm sure we all did things when we were young that we now find mortally embarrassing. Unlike most of our embarrassing moments, D'Aloisio's happens to have been written up in a Gizmodo article.
That is not "teenage" behavior. That is sociopathy. He outright lied to this reporter, then berated him with dozens of emails. Regular people, "teenagers" included, do not behave that way.
(I, as someone who is comparable in age to D'Aloisio, would never try this kind of shit, especially to someone affiliated with a major news organization; nor can I think of any of my peers who would. I honestly don't understand why people have such outrageous notions about how young people act, and have such permissive views about they ought to act. It doesn't matter how old he is, this sort of behavior is absurd.)
It's certainly not sociopathy. I can think of a number of reasons why he might have behaved that way and I've seen similar behavior from similar people in similar circumstances.
Your level of maturity is an asset which not everyone has at your age. The reason people are more permissive of poor behavior from young people is that they are still learning the ways of the world. Hopefully D'Aloisio learnt from this experience.
Wait til you are 60. Then you will start saying "With 25/30/35 hardly".
He just sold a company at the age of 17 to a huge corporation for a truck load of money. Unless he's got loans up to his ears I reckon he must be a lot smarter at business than I am.
> Wait til you are 60. Then you will start saying "With 25/30/35 hardly".
Most certainly I will laugh at my naive 30year old self. But that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to reflect about maturity levels of teenagers.
> He just sold a company at the age of 17 to a huge corporation for a truck load of money. Unless he's got loans up to his ears I reckon he must be a lot smarter at business than I am.
Well, I don't want to come off as a too negative but word is that his parents' money helped at least a little with generating Buzz. Now nothing against that - he used every possibility he had. But don't call yourself bad at business when you don't have that kind of resource available to you. With the right connections you can sell a bunch of photo filters for $1 billion nowadays. And without you have to work off your ass to become ramen profitable.
I'm pretty sure that he is not the only person accountable for the sale. I would even guess that's it is far from it. He's backed up by many people as someone said in the comments.
Can you actually sign any of these papers if you're a minor ?
Let's ignore the hurt feelings that our employees will have about making a 17 year-old a millionaire.
The price tag for this company aside, am I the only one that detects a hint of jealousy in some of the comments that seem to imply "but he's too young to be a millionaire!"?
Sometimes you just want to make sense of something that seems flabbergastingly stupid. Hell, it's Yahoo's money to burn, but it's not jealousy, it's confusion.
It would be interesting to read any sort of explanation, not that we'll get one.
But this acquisition is eerily reminiscent of about.me's and is getting a similar level of scorn from us.
Big, dead, web 1.0 company purchases virtually worthless startup for no apparent reason. Site is like almost any HN weekend project that pops up here on Mondays. Confused!
I did find that sentence a little strange myself. I didn't think jealousy from the writer, my first thought was "why should the employees be jealous?" Is it the employees of Summify, didn't they all receive a nice payment ($1m each)? And I can't imagine any of the Yahoo employees being jealous, well, perhaps, but I doubt it is the first time Yahoo have made a millionaire teenager. Even if they are, let them use it as motivation to build a valuable product of their own.
Obviously the writer means yahoo employees. Maybe not jealousy but certainly frustration. Wouldn't you feel frustrated if your company spent $30 million on what is basically the face of a hype machine especially when your company wants to integrate the hype machine's "tech" into your products even though it would probably take a few days to get similar results in house?
That's their job though. Don't forget, the face of that new hype machine is also an employee at Yahoo now. I am sure if he stays at Yahoo long enough he will also be asked to integrate other acquisitions into software he is working on.
You make a valid point about Yahoo being able to produce similar results in house but the software alone doesn't get you a client base, publicity (certainly not the same level of publicity the Summify purchase has received) and the 3 guys they have hired.
So what if he's only 17? If he has good ideas about how to take Yahoo's mobile news presence forward then the problem should disappear. Of course if he's a poor developer then other employees have the right to be frustrated but it should only be based on his competency and not what he is worth.
More to the point, I've no doubt that some Yahoo employees have likely investigated this sort of tech and built prototypes, only to get shot down by middle management.
I've no special insight at Yahoo (had a couple friends work there) but for any sufficiently large company with employees as talented as Yahoo (YUI, YQL, etc) this has surely happened. So... to have your idea/prototype/demo shot down, then later $30m spent on essentially what you'd offered the company for free... that's gotta be frustrating.
Again, pure speculation that this had happened, but I'd be surprised if no one internal to Yahoo had floated/demos something like this before. They certainly could have bought some of the hype (stephen fry, etc) during a rebrand. But... instead, they buy from outside vs using and promoting internally.
Once more - just speculation, but that's were I would suspect frustration would come from.
> investigated this sort of tech and built prototypes, only to get shot down by middle management.
Bingo.
in fairness the culture there prob prevented people from even feeling this innovative and self motivated.
I've worked in a couple of large orgs where i've told management about great little cheap ideas that just get ummed and ahhed and then forgotten (despite in 2 instances using my own free time to make a prototype).
No doubt, and that's part of the legacy of having "hey, we're a media company!" leadership from many moons ago.
There used to be an incredible mix of talent at yahoo, and they squandered a lot of that.
What's also interesting is that no one (yet? - maybe I missed it?) seemed to mention the Yahoo 'kiss of death' - how many acquisitions have they done that end up never seeing the light of day, or get shut down? Brickhouse seemed like it might be successful, but culturally that didn't seem to work out too well over time.
Having been in the position of shooting down all to often, the challenge for managers here is that often we get 100 absolutely crap ideas for every gem, yet the developers who bring them to us often are totally blinkered about which ideas are a fit for the company and/or are remotely realistic.
That makes it very easy to make calls that in retrospect might seem extremely stupid. Even more so, many of the engineers who get shot down for truly bad ideas will still insist they are good.
Getting the balance right for what you spend time on is very hard.
(That said, I did work at Yahoo until 2005, and at least "my little corner" of Yahoo did feel very bureaucratic and not very conducive to innovation even then)
Agreed. Which is why I don't pitch too many ideas anymore in my current role unless I've done some exploratory coding.
That has led to 2 different internal products and I'm presently working on something to replace a piece of commercial software that they paid almost $1 million for and doesn't work/has serious limitations. However I did it out of band because I found it interesting. I guess it comes down to put up or shut up.
Often when you come up with an idea, then go to try and do it you realise its 100x times harder than you thought
When I read things like this, I assume the software has nothing to do with the hire. This guy has shown, at an early age, that he is a real player. He has the right[1] kind of people backing him which has caused his name to be talked about in the right circles.
A major viewpoint that separates me from "when I was a kid" was the realization that the continuum of everything (talent, intellect, potential for evil, charisma, etc) exists. One judges the world by the people around oneself, but those are not limits of human capability, those are the friends one keeps. That realization took a long time to sink in.
Good on this guy. Nice play :)
1: "right" in the sense of a situation like this occurring, not in the sense of moral or intellectual superiority
As someone who isn't remotely jealous for the kid (I'm happy for him actually), let's not pretend that he is an innovator. It's a link aggregator app, no different than pulse or others. In fact, the difference from Pulse is that its inferior, because it displays far less at a time. But that is my opinion, and I'm sure a lot of older folks like it better BECAUSE it displays less.
Kid: Go for it dude, and good luck.
Yahoo: WTF?? Why not just build your own version of this?
C'mon, this can't be the first time you've noticed that "innovation" has been overused to the point of meaninglessness in tech. "Disruption" doubly so. Don't harp on this kid, he is no less innovative than 95+% of "innovation" I've heard about in the last year.
Normally I have a kneejerk reaction to someone calling someone else jealous. It always strikes me as someone projecting their own jealousy onto someone who very well may have legitimate criticism.
That having been said, it is a bit rich for Vibhu Norby to be concerned about the hurt feelings of employees by making a 17 year old a millionaire. That is an incredibly, incredibly, incredibly, narrow area of the social consequences of wealth to focus on. I have a hard time taking such a myopic point at face value.
What I read in this piece of news (though not really any article in particular) was: "Yahoo spent 30 million to attract the attention of high school kids"...
Is there anything inherently wrong with that? After High School I had my pick of tech companies and projects to join. And frankly, a good position in yahoo working with someone like Nick and Marisa Mayer seems pretty fun to me.
I feel this would be an appropriate subject for a Dilbert comic. Storyline is that someone accidentally left the dot out of $300000.00 to make it $30000000 and then everyone else went along with it for fear of looking stupid.
That movie should be required viewing for all ninth grade students. It's a more realistic depiction of the life for which they are being prepared than most of what they are fed.
It is so rare to see a reference to that wonderful, tragically short-lived show. Maybe it was just the right amount of pent-up angst, but that show spoke to me.
Can someone comment on whether this is a reasonable amount of money to pay for talented engineers and some patents? As a service, the deal doesn't make much sense...it doesn't seem that the world is hungry for ways to simplify web content, even if the technology actually worked. The most popular articles on most news sites are popular because of their in depth content or because they are slideshows of arousing photos. Summly would appear to not really affect either of those trends
Perhaps it is a signal to the marketplace, either to other startups or to investors that Yahoo! is rejuvenating itself (or at least is trying to), moreso since it is an acquisition outside of Silicon Valley.
I kind of agree with the author. Have I been engineer in Yahoo, I would ask myself question "Why is he paid so much, where we could do it in house better and spend this money on bonuses for employees?". Especially given that fact, that Summly doesn't even own this technology just licences it from SRI.
The only explanation I see, is that what Yahoo actually really bought is the great licensing deal (flat fee? exclusivity?).
Same question -- how does this individual know that their team only passed 2/5 interviews, and what the back and forth negotiations were. It seems to me they're either making this up, or they are sharing info that I'd guess is going to make Yahoo fairly annoyed.
Summly has had a ton of buzz since it was first announced and that's saying more than, oh, every single product Yahoo has come out with in the last 5 years. I think Yahoo wants to inject some of that young and naive but optimistic joojoo that the Summly founder embodies into the company. Maybe this will light a fire under some of the old guard's asses and get them to work on Yahoo side projects in their spare time.
At the risk of stating the obvious, big companies overpay for deals all the time especially when there is some perceived intangible benefit to be accrued. Alas.
...which is great - except they pulled it from the app store once the announcement was made. If it were me, I would have leveraged the headlines to grow the user-base.
To be fair, $30M could have kicked off a hell of a marketing campaign. Imagine watching 10 Super Bowl ads in a row... Talk about "everyone" knowing about something.
It's not and probably won't be confirmed but 'sources' are saying $30m with 90% in cash and 10% in stock. I can't remember which site had the sources (it might have been WSJ).
Public companies have great leeway in how they present transactions. You aren't required to divulge M&A details, and they often won't be below a certain level.
Last year's press release had quotes from Daniel Ek (Spotify) and Mary Meeker, and said:
"Summly is backed by several investors, including Horizons Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Betaworks, Brian Chesky, Hosain Rahman, Joanna Shields, Josh Kushner, Mark Pincus, Matt Mullenweg, Stephen Fry, Troy Carter, Yoko Ono and many more."
Not exactly a teen-programmer-in-mother's-basement story...
Yahoo just paid $30mm for an unknown technology and a fresh face to parade around, they would appreciate it if you didn't start poking holes in the narrative.
Actually it now looks more and more like some sort of elaborate kick-back scheme for the investors. "Your YHOO stock has sunk below the waterline, so here's something to sweeten the pot."
I actually think this kinda makes sense. That or relationship building with the investors. Plus, Yahoo! hasn't been making any new waves for quite a while. They needed to make something happen somehow to get people excited.
The founder might be brilliant and I could be wrong about this whole relationship building with investors to try and get attraction nonsense.
So you're assuming they didn't do their due diligence? That they threw $30MM at a company they knew nothing about? Has anyone in this thread gone so far as to even try the product?
Right after college I started consulting at an eCommerce company that had bought a 17 year old's website for over 1M. Had had built a gaming community site that had become very popular and they wanted the traffic.
I thought the kid was just lucky until I was in a meeting with him. His thought process basically ran circles around everyone else in the room, some twice his age. I realized then, that there are kids, KIDS!, much smarter than I'll ever hope to be in my life.
Sometimes you have to meet these people to believe they exist.
You have a very good point. Thought process and vision are what make or break a product. As close as it is to other news aggregators, there may be a perspective that the Founder has that Yahoo team doesn't.
Thought process and vision are what make or break a product.
I would put far more emphasis on execution. Lots of founders with "vision" can spin great stories to investors but can't execute quickly enough, or are unable to deviate from their original vision when the market or other evidence suggests they should.
As a counterpoint, there are real sharp people of all ages. At local meetups, I've met a couple of retirees not orignally in the programming field, (medical doctor, aerospace tech) that have picked up Linux and programming well enough, I'd hire them to build software/hardware for me if they weren't pursuing their own projects. Or the older opera singer that helped me debug code while on a flight and joked, "Programming is music for those that can't sing...". I believe she could succeed in any field, scary, scary, scary smart.
In one of my projects, two of my team mates were in their mid forties. One of them was a mother of two (pointing this out because she didn't have lots of free time to learn new stuff). She didn't know Java, but she was probably a million times smarter than the rest of the team (4 more people, all in their early to mid twenties) combined. She didn't go to college, while the rest of the team came from pretty good schools, with good grades etc. Yet, she picked up things faster than any of us.
So yeah, some people are just sharp by nature - just like some people are cute, strong etc (not saying others can't develop, but it does give the "naturals" an advantage)
It's difficult for me to comment on something that you saw while in this room when I wasn't in the room, but I'm guessing that much of that had to do with the fact that the kid had actually put in the work and did the experimentation to build this community.
How many of the people in that room could say the same? What communities (or anything else) had they built? If they had built something, did they do it on their own as opposed to being someone brought in after the company was already successful? The kid probably ran circles around everyone because he was an expert (on this subject) among managers / developers / designers and anyone else who could probably do anything but run a successful community / e-commerce site.
I think about this sort of thing as a web developer. How many web developers who build client sites have actually built a successful site? How many designers really know how to design something which can sell? If you haven't done it, then you probably have no clue. But if you have been there, then you probably wouldn't be working for someone else either.
Sometimes it's not that they are smarter it's just that they aren't constrained by current thinking, maybe even the pragmatism that comes from experience.
They might have picked this company up because its news,
"Yahoo" buys "17 wiz kid" "mobile app and company", is good advertising around the world, yahoo is now a company who buys the "latest" technology, they hired a wiz kid - they have him on board he will do crazy technology experiments - "you have no idea what he could come up with next!", and they have his technology that a company as big as yahoo would play $30m for.
It tells potential users and more importantly investors and current shareholders it is now company who buys stuff because its investing and changing for the better and maybe people should change their views about yahoo etc etc.
note: I have not used the app, still don't care about yahoo.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadWorth $30m of my money? Probably not. Worth $30m of Yahoo's money? Maybe, they're not likely to have decided to spend that much on an acquihire without board approval really are they. Unless they Zuckerberg'd it and thought it was better to seek forgiveness.
[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2011/12/13/teenage-pr... [2]: http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/15/trimit-summarizes-emails-bl... [3]: http://gigaom.com/2011/12/13/meet-the-internets-newest-boy-g...
Annnd that's about the only way this makes sense to em.
Yeah I guess that is a bit of a non-sequitur, but you can't pay to get coverage on the BBC news page (AFAICT) so it sort of works.
I do agree that many other development teams would have jumped at an acquisition offer of a lot less money but they were either unknown to Yahoo or deemed not suitable for Yahoo.
$30m is a lot for what I assume is an application of SRI's technology. Still seems to me like Yahoo! is a place where engineers are handed the purse strings, a la 2005 era.
Was she? Her career essentially started at Google, her rise arguably being one of right place/right time.
For all of the talk about Mayer, I have literally never heard about anything actually interesting that she has done. Instead it's her 90 hour work weeks, n-shades of blue, and abrasive attitudes with others. She sounds like management through and through.
Exactly! :) Assuming the above is meant in a positive way, you might not have said/thought that if it wasn't for this, and other, stories recently involving Yahoo and their acquisitions.
While I think $15m would have been fine and generous, it doesn't shock me that someone important in Yahoo! got it stuck into their head that Summly was hitting on something that would "change the way people use news", a particularly neat fit if their intention is still to be the new homepage of the internet.
(I, as someone who is comparable in age to D'Aloisio, would never try this kind of shit, especially to someone affiliated with a major news organization; nor can I think of any of my peers who would. I honestly don't understand why people have such outrageous notions about how young people act, and have such permissive views about they ought to act. It doesn't matter how old he is, this sort of behavior is absurd.)
Your level of maturity is an asset which not everyone has at your age. The reason people are more permissive of poor behavior from young people is that they are still learning the ways of the world. Hopefully D'Aloisio learnt from this experience.
He just sold a company at the age of 17 to a huge corporation for a truck load of money. Unless he's got loans up to his ears I reckon he must be a lot smarter at business than I am.
Most certainly I will laugh at my naive 30year old self. But that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to reflect about maturity levels of teenagers.
> He just sold a company at the age of 17 to a huge corporation for a truck load of money. Unless he's got loans up to his ears I reckon he must be a lot smarter at business than I am.
Well, I don't want to come off as a too negative but word is that his parents' money helped at least a little with generating Buzz. Now nothing against that - he used every possibility he had. But don't call yourself bad at business when you don't have that kind of resource available to you. With the right connections you can sell a bunch of photo filters for $1 billion nowadays. And without you have to work off your ass to become ramen profitable.
Can you actually sign any of these papers if you're a minor ?
Welcome back to the stock market being at all time highs again, with Yahoo's stock now back to the highest levels since the crash (nearly five years).
Let's ignore the hurt feelings that our employees will have about making a 17 year-old a millionaire.
The price tag for this company aside, am I the only one that detects a hint of jealousy in some of the comments that seem to imply "but he's too young to be a millionaire!"?
It would be interesting to read any sort of explanation, not that we'll get one.
But this acquisition is eerily reminiscent of about.me's and is getting a similar level of scorn from us.
Big, dead, web 1.0 company purchases virtually worthless startup for no apparent reason. Site is like almost any HN weekend project that pops up here on Mondays. Confused!
You do realize, Yahoo remains one of the most-visited sites on the Internet? It drives an enormous amount of traffic.
By our standards, Yahoo may not be an exciting or innovative company. But it's in no way dead.
You make a valid point about Yahoo being able to produce similar results in house but the software alone doesn't get you a client base, publicity (certainly not the same level of publicity the Summify purchase has received) and the 3 guys they have hired.
So what if he's only 17? If he has good ideas about how to take Yahoo's mobile news presence forward then the problem should disappear. Of course if he's a poor developer then other employees have the right to be frustrated but it should only be based on his competency and not what he is worth.
I've no special insight at Yahoo (had a couple friends work there) but for any sufficiently large company with employees as talented as Yahoo (YUI, YQL, etc) this has surely happened. So... to have your idea/prototype/demo shot down, then later $30m spent on essentially what you'd offered the company for free... that's gotta be frustrating.
Again, pure speculation that this had happened, but I'd be surprised if no one internal to Yahoo had floated/demos something like this before. They certainly could have bought some of the hype (stephen fry, etc) during a rebrand. But... instead, they buy from outside vs using and promoting internally.
Once more - just speculation, but that's were I would suspect frustration would come from.
Bingo.
in fairness the culture there prob prevented people from even feeling this innovative and self motivated.
I've worked in a couple of large orgs where i've told management about great little cheap ideas that just get ummed and ahhed and then forgotten (despite in 2 instances using my own free time to make a prototype).
There used to be an incredible mix of talent at yahoo, and they squandered a lot of that.
What's also interesting is that no one (yet? - maybe I missed it?) seemed to mention the Yahoo 'kiss of death' - how many acquisitions have they done that end up never seeing the light of day, or get shut down? Brickhouse seemed like it might be successful, but culturally that didn't seem to work out too well over time.
That makes it very easy to make calls that in retrospect might seem extremely stupid. Even more so, many of the engineers who get shot down for truly bad ideas will still insist they are good.
Getting the balance right for what you spend time on is very hard.
(That said, I did work at Yahoo until 2005, and at least "my little corner" of Yahoo did feel very bureaucratic and not very conducive to innovation even then)
That has led to 2 different internal products and I'm presently working on something to replace a piece of commercial software that they paid almost $1 million for and doesn't work/has serious limitations. However I did it out of band because I found it interesting. I guess it comes down to put up or shut up.
Often when you come up with an idea, then go to try and do it you realise its 100x times harder than you thought
A major viewpoint that separates me from "when I was a kid" was the realization that the continuum of everything (talent, intellect, potential for evil, charisma, etc) exists. One judges the world by the people around oneself, but those are not limits of human capability, those are the friends one keeps. That realization took a long time to sink in.
Good on this guy. Nice play :)
1: "right" in the sense of a situation like this occurring, not in the sense of moral or intellectual superiority
Kid: Go for it dude, and good luck.
Yahoo: WTF?? Why not just build your own version of this?
C'mon, this can't be the first time you've noticed that "innovation" has been overused to the point of meaninglessness in tech. "Disruption" doubly so. Don't harp on this kid, he is no less innovative than 95+% of "innovation" I've heard about in the last year.
That having been said, it is a bit rich for Vibhu Norby to be concerned about the hurt feelings of employees by making a 17 year old a millionaire. That is an incredibly, incredibly, incredibly, narrow area of the social consequences of wealth to focus on. I have a hard time taking such a myopic point at face value.
Isn't it just Flipboard with a slightly different UI
Bob Porter: [nods] Uh-huh.
Peter Gibbons: Wow.
E.g: http://dilbert.com/fast/2013-03-16/
This article and other state that key technology is licensed from SRI.
The only explanation I see, is that what Yahoo actually really bought is the great licensing deal (flat fee? exclusivity?).
That doesn't necessarily mean the other three failed the interviews - maybe they don't want to work for Yahoo.
Seems like a good deal to me
No-one that I've seen quoted?
Maybe it was $30M in stock?
Plus, it's not all that common for senior management to face any sort of punishment for acquisitions that go bad.
"Summly is backed by several investors, including Horizons Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Betaworks, Brian Chesky, Hosain Rahman, Joanna Shields, Josh Kushner, Mark Pincus, Matt Mullenweg, Stephen Fry, Troy Carter, Yoko Ono and many more."
Not exactly a teen-programmer-in-mother's-basement story...
Thank you
The founder might be brilliant and I could be wrong about this whole relationship building with investors to try and get attraction nonsense.
They've been making tonnes of Marissa Mayer waves. They're the New York Jets of technology.
https://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=131222&...
And here
http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-open-source-text-sum...
The best candidate is MEAD
http://www.summarization.com/mead/
I thought the kid was just lucky until I was in a meeting with him. His thought process basically ran circles around everyone else in the room, some twice his age. I realized then, that there are kids, KIDS!, much smarter than I'll ever hope to be in my life.
Sometimes you have to meet these people to believe they exist.
I would put far more emphasis on execution. Lots of founders with "vision" can spin great stories to investors but can't execute quickly enough, or are unable to deviate from their original vision when the market or other evidence suggests they should.
So yeah, some people are just sharp by nature - just like some people are cute, strong etc (not saying others can't develop, but it does give the "naturals" an advantage)
How many of the people in that room could say the same? What communities (or anything else) had they built? If they had built something, did they do it on their own as opposed to being someone brought in after the company was already successful? The kid probably ran circles around everyone because he was an expert (on this subject) among managers / developers / designers and anyone else who could probably do anything but run a successful community / e-commerce site.
I think about this sort of thing as a web developer. How many web developers who build client sites have actually built a successful site? How many designers really know how to design something which can sell? If you haven't done it, then you probably have no clue. But if you have been there, then you probably wouldn't be working for someone else either.
"Yahoo" buys "17 wiz kid" "mobile app and company", is good advertising around the world, yahoo is now a company who buys the "latest" technology, they hired a wiz kid - they have him on board he will do crazy technology experiments - "you have no idea what he could come up with next!", and they have his technology that a company as big as yahoo would play $30m for.
It tells potential users and more importantly investors and current shareholders it is now company who buys stuff because its investing and changing for the better and maybe people should change their views about yahoo etc etc.
note: I have not used the app, still don't care about yahoo.