20 ms·

He Has Millions and a New Job at Yahoo. Soon, He’ll Be 18

167 points by hudibras 14y ago

_delirium 14y ago
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?
- niggler 14y ago
  "are they buying themselves up to the par they should've already been at?" They must have decided it was easier to extend summly than to build it organically.
- weareconvo 14y ago
  Maybe they were buying a news story.
  - jjoonathan 14y ago
    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.
    - argonaut 14y ago
      Stop over-analyzing things. Saying Yahoo made this acquisition for the sake of publicity is an extraordinary claim which is completely unsubstantiated.
      - jjoonathan 14y ago
        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.
        alaskamiller 14y ago
        Yahoo has a long history of throwing a metric ton of money at shiny things. This doesn't make Yahoo any cooler. See: broadcast.com ($5.7B), delicious ($20MM), MyBlogLog, then some Middle Eastern social network Maktoob ($167MM) that then disappeared soon after.
        petercooper 14y ago
        To be fair, Delicious was a bargain that was hugely loved and heavily used by its userbase. The rest, however..
        clebio 14y ago
- ryanlchan 14y ago
  I'm betting it's about talent acquisition. 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.
  - robryan 14y ago
    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.
gailees 14y ago
Kid is wicked smart...will be interesting to see where he goes from here.
chewxy 14y ago
Google redirect for NYT: http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDcQqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2013%2F03%2F26%2Fbusiness%2Fmedia%2Fnick-daloisio-17-sells-summly-app-to-yahoo.html http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=...
RougeFemme 14y ago
Will he have to move from London to California or will he be allowed to telecommute?
- darshan 14y ago
  From the article: ... he will make arrangements to test out of his classes and work from the Yahoo office in London.
- deleted 14y ago
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HunterV 14y ago
In my honest opinion Yahoo! acquired Summly for their launch video: https://vimeo.com/52014691 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.
- jimray 14y ago
  Made by Sandwich Video http://sandwichvideo.com http://sandwichvideo.com They do the best (and most imitated) promotional work for tech companies going.
- trhtrsh 14y ago
  Is it cool to have the exact same "indie" ad that every other tech company has? (http://sandwichvideo.com/ http://sandwichvideo.com/)
  - HunterV 14y ago
    I mean, I hate to say it, but yes? "Being Cool" at its core is mass imitation of good design. Think of the in-crowd in high school, they looked great, but one wouldn't come close to calling them unique.
splicer 14y ago
I wonder how similar his algorithm is to that of Mac OS X: http://www.tuaw.com/2008/11/19/mac-101-shorten-text-using-the-summarize-service/ http://www.tuaw.com/2008/11/19/mac-101-shorten-text-using-th... EDIT: I just watched the launch video, and apparently Summly uses a genetic algorithm. I doubt that Mac OS X does.
- deleted 14y ago
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JDDunn9 14y ago
So a kid that came from money, got lucky and sold his app for more than it's worth. I hate these types of garbage articles the media propagates. 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
- niggler 14y ago
  "So a kid that came from money, got lucky" 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.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
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.
- dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  I'm not worried about him; I think he will fine. :) I'm not sure what brilliant management (sarcasm) over at Yahoo! are thinking though.
- gruseom 14y ago
  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?
  - jjoonathan 14y ago
    > How many people here are compulsively comparing themselves to what it depicts? sigh Me. I can't help myself.
    - gruseom 14y ago
      I don't think one gets rid of it per se. One learns to understand and recognize it in oneself, and that causes the inflammation gradually to diminish.
jmcdonald-ut 14y ago
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.
jaysonelliot 14y ago
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.
- dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  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.
  - jaysonelliot 14y ago
    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 http://vimeo.com/52014691 I suspect the story behind this is simply "upper-class child with family connections finds success."
    - seivan 14y ago
GoranM 14y ago
Let's all cling to the fact that he "comes from money", so that we can cope with our impending feelings of inadequacy. :)
- qompiler 14y ago
  It's a fact you can't ignore though.
deleted 14y ago
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qwertzlcoatl 14y ago
I can't read this article. I have to pay 99 cents for the first four weeks first.
- deleted 14y ago
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jordn 14y ago
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.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  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.
  - jordn 14y ago
    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.
brucehart 14y ago
I read another article about this acquisition that linked to this Gizmodo article from 2010 that was openly mocking him after naming his app "worst app of the week": http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-developer-cry http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-deve... 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.
- nilkn 14y ago
  To be fair, it seems they mocked him for a reason. He dropped lines like this: > 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...
- deleted 14y ago
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- HunterV 14y ago
  No way! That's him? I remember that article from way back. 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.
nabaraj 14y ago
I remember watching his interview on Techcrunch back in the days. He is a great guy and is really talented. Congratulations to him.
biesnecker 14y ago
"... and a new job at Yahoo." Poor kid.
yarou 14y ago
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.
keeran 14y ago
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.
aroman 14y ago
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?)
- incongruity 14y ago
  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)
- rdouble 14y ago
  Why bother with a CS degree if you've already written software successfully and cashed out? 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 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11136511
- bones6 14y ago
  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?
mynameishere 14y ago
"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?
- just2n 14y ago
  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. I'm now quite curious about the morale at Yahoo.
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brendano 14y ago
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 http://summly.com/about.html And the technology page says the algorithm is actually from SRI! http://summly.com/technology.html 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.]
- aheilbut 14y ago
  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...
aheilbut 14y ago
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.
dakrisht 14y ago
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? What is going on here..
- Houshalter 14y ago
  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.
  - yen223 14y ago
    But is it really a $30,000,000 problem?
    - smartwater 14y ago
      It could be. A substantial amount of time and effort is required to even start to answer that question.
    - Houshalter 14y ago
      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.
- swah 14y ago
  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...
drawkbox 14y ago
Everything else aside, straight to the core of the product/app, the production, execution, marketing/branding and front is beautiful and well done. From the app to the site to the marketing. A machine that well oiled, no matter who is the public face, should be applauded. The fact they have a real R&D firm providing the tech even more so. This machine may produce some great things and may inspire others. Persistence and production/quality paid off.
- ozataman 14y ago
  I think it is remarkable that they've assembled a very qualified (looking) executive team to make all of this happen. That is arguably the most "unlikely" bit of the endeavor, especially given the founder's age.
  - taude 14y ago
    I agree. Who cares about the "solo engineering kid aspect" of this. More impressed about the ability to build a company around this.
beerglass 14y ago
Yesterday, Yahoo! was the poster child of Internet... now it is acquiring a company founded by someone who wasn't even born when Yahoo was founded in 1994. How time flies...
toutouastro 14y ago
when I see stuff like that I think I am too old to do anything with my life.I am 17.
- dylanhassinger 14y ago
  could be worse. I'm almost 34.
- clebio 14y ago
  you could always volunteer at a soup kitchen, or work the compost at a community garden.
- alenart 14y ago
  I could play "Master of Puppets" on my guitar when I was 17. But just the rhythm guitar part. That was a big accomplishment. Seeing this, I now feel like a failure.
Dn_Ab 14y ago
Okay. So based on reading the comments I can surmise that this is just a wealthy kid who wrote an overly hyped trivial app, got his banker/attorney parents to pay celebrities to appear in his cliched demo video and due to the pull of his parents, was able to convince Yahoo to buy his company. Him being a good actor was also a big help. Plus Yahoo needs to appear hip, what better way than acquiring a startup with a nice indie video? Written this way, it all seems over the top and gives a strong impression of sour grapes, yet the above is a faithful summarization of this thread. It saddens me. Here is a more balanced view. He is well off and has parents that are able to help him pursue his goals to enviable (as this thread can attest to) standards. You cannot begrudge them what you would yourself do given the chance. He has this opportunity and he used it to multiply his advantage. It is not fair that he has this advantage and multiply not fair that he went geometric on it, but at least he did not waste it. How many kids his age, rich (or not) are writing interesting programs, leveraging connections and successfully cashing out? He certainly could have done worse than get a startup acquired by Yahoo. And If he did in fact merely sell them a plot of moon real estate then that too is impressive. Hustling? Hacking non mechanical systems? I don't like that he lied in that email but I'm not going to form an opinion without knowing him. Certainly, he is a very lucky rich kid with a posh accent but most of you are also taking for granted how lucky you are yourselves. He wrote an application that does extractive summarization. They are not trivial to write but can, with a day or so of work get to something that is objectively no worse than any other. This is because summaries are hard to judge. You will spend most of your [indefinite] time polishing sharp corner cases. At some point you hit a ceiling because any more effort requires a use of semantics and grammar that might as well be spent on abstract summarization. But now you are verging on AI completeness. Anyhoo, he gave his not so run of the mill app a shiny coat of paint then used the initial storm of ridiculous hype from his well financed cliched video to attract trained talent. He, with his parent's help was able to work out a deal and sell Yahoo a skilled team that had possibly interesting IP? IP that they might not have had the resources to monetize but possibly better placed resources wise to explore at Yahoo. Trade off being the large chance that they will be thoroughly digested by incompetent management. Whatever way they win. Well played rich kid =)
- just2n 14y ago
  For me, at least, the rich kid part casts doubt over everything, including things we typically take for granted in stories about startups. Did he actually write the software, or did he leverage his wealth to have others build it? The fact that he started "coding" at 12 and then built something at 15, then had it finely polished at 17 seems a bit odd. That's not even enough time to properly learn the basics of engineering, let alone research heavily into such a heady field that requires an enormous amount of base knowledge to begin with. It's not really clear here. Your average story about a garage or basement-based hacker coming up with an independent app or game that is ground breaking and/or makes millions is more impressive because the person didn't have the means to hire talent to build the idea, meaning they had to do it themselves or convince others that the idea was good enough to invest in (either with their money or with their time in exchange for equity). Substitute money for the talent and hard work in that scenario and it's like coasting downhill. Just about anything considered reasonable is fairly straightforward to get done. It makes everything seem a lot less impressive. Building Facebook with $10,000,000,000 in the bank wouldn't be impressive because it wasn't something you hacked up in a few weekends, instead you'd come up with ideas and throw money at people until a product appeared. I mean we certainly don't have that sense of awe when Google or Microsoft announces a new project every now and then. It feels like that's what this article is trying to build -- sensationalizing the person, his age, etc to make it feel more awe-inducing, when the reality might just be that it's just not that impressive at all.
metaphorm 14y ago
spare me from the preening of wunderkinds
tuxguy 14y ago
Techcrunch interview : http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/01/summly-app-nick-daloisio-video-interview/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/01/summly-app-nick-daloisio-vi... I was just blown away by Nick's clarity of the core idea, the product & he really seems to know what he is talking about & he is only 17. What a badass !
jbrooksuk 14y ago
I guess this is better than his parents forcing him to follow in one of their footsteps, they invest tens of thousands in him and he walks away with around $30mil, good investment if you ask me.
jimzvz 14y ago
Any faith I have in yahoo's recovery is definitely fading. They are either guilty of buying hype marketing about technology (which demonstrates that yahoo has no interest in actual innovation) or buying technology that doesn't work very well (which shows that they do not know how to use their money effectively). What are they actually doing?
kayoone 14y ago
Just saw this story on german TV... These guys sure know how to create some hype...
rcknr 14y ago
Eugene Ciurana's, author of "Developing with Google App Engine", works there in CTO role and I bet he's one of those two engineers selected by Yahoo. His Linkedin profile [1] provides an insight on the technical stack of Summly as well as gives you an idea of the size of the development team. 1. http://www.linkedin.com/in/ciurana http://www.linkedin.com/in/ciurana
BaconJuice 14y ago
Where can I learn more about this "Genetic algorithm"?
adamio 14y ago
If this is such a problem, why aren't news sites delivering executive summary like articles for mobile customers? A 400 character summary written by the article's author would be easier and more accurate than this.

167 points by hudibras 14y ago

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?

niggler 14y ago
"are they buying themselves up to the par they should've already been at?" They must have decided it was easier to extend summly than to build it organically.
weareconvo 14y ago
Maybe they were buying a news story.
- jjoonathan 14y ago
  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.
  - argonaut 14y ago
    Stop over-analyzing things. Saying Yahoo made this acquisition for the sake of publicity is an extraordinary claim which is completely unsubstantiated.
    - jjoonathan 14y ago
      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.
      - alaskamiller 14y ago
        Yahoo has a long history of throwing a metric ton of money at shiny things. This doesn't make Yahoo any cooler. See: broadcast.com ($5.7B), delicious ($20MM), MyBlogLog, then some Middle Eastern social network Maktoob ($167MM) that then disappeared soon after.
        petercooper 14y ago
        To be fair, Delicious was a bargain that was hugely loved and heavily used by its userbase. The rest, however..
        clebio 14y ago
ryanlchan 14y ago
I'm betting it's about talent acquisition. 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.
- robryan 14y ago
  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.

gailees 14y ago

Kid is wicked smart...will be interesting to see where he goes from here.

chewxy 14y ago

Google redirect for NYT: http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDcQqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2013%2F03%2F26%2Fbusiness%2Fmedia%2Fnick-daloisio-17-sells-summly-app-to-yahoo.html http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=...

RougeFemme 14y ago

Will he have to move from London to California or will he be allowed to telecommute?

darshan 14y ago
From the article: ... he will make arrangements to test out of his classes and work from the Yahoo office in London.
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HunterV 14y ago

In my honest opinion Yahoo! acquired Summly for their launch video: https://vimeo.com/52014691 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.

jimray 14y ago
Made by Sandwich Video http://sandwichvideo.com http://sandwichvideo.com They do the best (and most imitated) promotional work for tech companies going.
trhtrsh 14y ago
Is it cool to have the exact same "indie" ad that every other tech company has? (http://sandwichvideo.com/ http://sandwichvideo.com/)
- HunterV 14y ago
  I mean, I hate to say it, but yes? "Being Cool" at its core is mass imitation of good design. Think of the in-crowd in high school, they looked great, but one wouldn't come close to calling them unique.

splicer 14y ago

I wonder how similar his algorithm is to that of Mac OS X: http://www.tuaw.com/2008/11/19/mac-101-shorten-text-using-the-summarize-service/ http://www.tuaw.com/2008/11/19/mac-101-shorten-text-using-th... EDIT: I just watched the launch video, and apparently Summly uses a genetic algorithm. I doubt that Mac OS X does.

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JDDunn9 14y ago

So a kid that came from money, got lucky and sold his app for more than it's worth. I hate these types of garbage articles the media propagates. 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

niggler 14y ago
"So a kid that came from money, got lucky" 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.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

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.

dinkumthinkum 14y ago
I'm not worried about him; I think he will fine. :) I'm not sure what brilliant management (sarcasm) over at Yahoo! are thinking though.
gruseom 14y ago
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?
- jjoonathan 14y ago
  > How many people here are compulsively comparing themselves to what it depicts? sigh Me. I can't help myself.
  - gruseom 14y ago
    I don't think one gets rid of it per se. One learns to understand and recognize it in oneself, and that causes the inflammation gradually to diminish.

jmcdonald-ut 14y ago

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.

jaysonelliot 14y ago

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.

dinkumthinkum 14y ago
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.
- jaysonelliot 14y ago
  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 http://vimeo.com/52014691 I suspect the story behind this is simply "upper-class child with family connections finds success."
  - seivan 14y ago

GoranM 14y ago

Let's all cling to the fact that he "comes from money", so that we can cope with our impending feelings of inadequacy. :)

qompiler 14y ago
It's a fact you can't ignore though.

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qwertzlcoatl 14y ago

I can't read this article. I have to pay 99 cents for the first four weeks first.

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jordn 14y ago

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.

sliverstorm 14y ago
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.
- jordn 14y ago
  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.

brucehart 14y ago

I read another article about this acquisition that linked to this Gizmodo article from 2010 that was openly mocking him after naming his app "worst app of the week": http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-developer-cry http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-deve... 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.

nilkn 14y ago
To be fair, it seems they mocked him for a reason. He dropped lines like this: > 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...
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HunterV 14y ago
No way! That's him? I remember that article from way back. 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.

nabaraj 14y ago

I remember watching his interview on Techcrunch back in the days. He is a great guy and is really talented. Congratulations to him.

biesnecker 14y ago

"... and a new job at Yahoo." Poor kid.

yarou 14y ago

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.

keeran 14y ago

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.

aroman 14y ago

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?)

incongruity 14y ago
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)
rdouble 14y ago
Why bother with a CS degree if you've already written software successfully and cashed out? 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 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11136511
bones6 14y ago
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?

mynameishere 14y ago

"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?

just2n 14y ago
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. I'm now quite curious about the morale at Yahoo.

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brendano 14y ago

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 http://summly.com/about.html And the technology page says the algorithm is actually from SRI! http://summly.com/technology.html 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.]

aheilbut 14y ago
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...

aheilbut 14y ago

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.

dakrisht 14y ago

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? What is going on here..

Houshalter 14y ago
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.
- yen223 14y ago
  But is it really a $30,000,000 problem?
  - smartwater 14y ago
    It could be. A substantial amount of time and effort is required to even start to answer that question.
  - Houshalter 14y ago
    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.
swah 14y ago
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...

drawkbox 14y ago

Everything else aside, straight to the core of the product/app, the production, execution, marketing/branding and front is beautiful and well done. From the app to the site to the marketing. A machine that well oiled, no matter who is the public face, should be applauded. The fact they have a real R&D firm providing the tech even more so. This machine may produce some great things and may inspire others. Persistence and production/quality paid off.

ozataman 14y ago
I think it is remarkable that they've assembled a very qualified (looking) executive team to make all of this happen. That is arguably the most "unlikely" bit of the endeavor, especially given the founder's age.
- taude 14y ago
  I agree. Who cares about the "solo engineering kid aspect" of this. More impressed about the ability to build a company around this.

beerglass 14y ago

Yesterday, Yahoo! was the poster child of Internet... now it is acquiring a company founded by someone who wasn't even born when Yahoo was founded in 1994. How time flies...

toutouastro 14y ago

when I see stuff like that I think I am too old to do anything with my life.I am 17.

dylanhassinger 14y ago
could be worse. I'm almost 34.
clebio 14y ago
you could always volunteer at a soup kitchen, or work the compost at a community garden.
alenart 14y ago
I could play "Master of Puppets" on my guitar when I was 17. But just the rhythm guitar part. That was a big accomplishment. Seeing this, I now feel like a failure.

Dn_Ab 14y ago

Okay. So based on reading the comments I can surmise that this is just a wealthy kid who wrote an overly hyped trivial app, got his banker/attorney parents to pay celebrities to appear in his cliched demo video and due to the pull of his parents, was able to convince Yahoo to buy his company. Him being a good actor was also a big help. Plus Yahoo needs to appear hip, what better way than acquiring a startup with a nice indie video? Written this way, it all seems over the top and gives a strong impression of sour grapes, yet the above is a faithful summarization of this thread. It saddens me. Here is a more balanced view. He is well off and has parents that are able to help him pursue his goals to enviable (as this thread can attest to) standards. You cannot begrudge them what you would yourself do given the chance. He has this opportunity and he used it to multiply his advantage. It is not fair that he has this advantage and multiply not fair that he went geometric on it, but at least he did not waste it. How many kids his age, rich (or not) are writing interesting programs, leveraging connections and successfully cashing out? He certainly could have done worse than get a startup acquired by Yahoo. And If he did in fact merely sell them a plot of moon real estate then that too is impressive. Hustling? Hacking non mechanical systems? I don't like that he lied in that email but I'm not going to form an opinion without knowing him. Certainly, he is a very lucky rich kid with a posh accent but most of you are also taking for granted how lucky you are yourselves. He wrote an application that does extractive summarization. They are not trivial to write but can, with a day or so of work get to something that is objectively no worse than any other. This is because summaries are hard to judge. You will spend most of your [indefinite] time polishing sharp corner cases. At some point you hit a ceiling because any more effort requires a use of semantics and grammar that might as well be spent on abstract summarization. But now you are verging on AI completeness. Anyhoo, he gave his not so run of the mill app a shiny coat of paint then used the initial storm of ridiculous hype from his well financed cliched video to attract trained talent. He, with his parent's help was able to work out a deal and sell Yahoo a skilled team that had possibly interesting IP? IP that they might not have had the resources to monetize but possibly better placed resources wise to explore at Yahoo. Trade off being the large chance that they will be thoroughly digested by incompetent management. Whatever way they win. Well played rich kid =)

just2n 14y ago
For me, at least, the rich kid part casts doubt over everything, including things we typically take for granted in stories about startups. Did he actually write the software, or did he leverage his wealth to have others build it? The fact that he started "coding" at 12 and then built something at 15, then had it finely polished at 17 seems a bit odd. That's not even enough time to properly learn the basics of engineering, let alone research heavily into such a heady field that requires an enormous amount of base knowledge to begin with. It's not really clear here. Your average story about a garage or basement-based hacker coming up with an independent app or game that is ground breaking and/or makes millions is more impressive because the person didn't have the means to hire talent to build the idea, meaning they had to do it themselves or convince others that the idea was good enough to invest in (either with their money or with their time in exchange for equity). Substitute money for the talent and hard work in that scenario and it's like coasting downhill. Just about anything considered reasonable is fairly straightforward to get done. It makes everything seem a lot less impressive. Building Facebook with $10,000,000,000 in the bank wouldn't be impressive because it wasn't something you hacked up in a few weekends, instead you'd come up with ideas and throw money at people until a product appeared. I mean we certainly don't have that sense of awe when Google or Microsoft announces a new project every now and then. It feels like that's what this article is trying to build -- sensationalizing the person, his age, etc to make it feel more awe-inducing, when the reality might just be that it's just not that impressive at all.

metaphorm 14y ago

spare me from the preening of wunderkinds

tuxguy 14y ago

Techcrunch interview : http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/01/summly-app-nick-daloisio-video-interview/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/01/summly-app-nick-daloisio-vi... I was just blown away by Nick's clarity of the core idea, the product & he really seems to know what he is talking about & he is only 17. What a badass !

jbrooksuk 14y ago

I guess this is better than his parents forcing him to follow in one of their footsteps, they invest tens of thousands in him and he walks away with around $30mil, good investment if you ask me.

jimzvz 14y ago

Any faith I have in yahoo's recovery is definitely fading. They are either guilty of buying hype marketing about technology (which demonstrates that yahoo has no interest in actual innovation) or buying technology that doesn't work very well (which shows that they do not know how to use their money effectively). What are they actually doing?

kayoone 14y ago

Just saw this story on german TV... These guys sure know how to create some hype...

rcknr 14y ago

Eugene Ciurana's, author of "Developing with Google App Engine", works there in CTO role and I bet he's one of those two engineers selected by Yahoo. His Linkedin profile [1] provides an insight on the technical stack of Summly as well as gives you an idea of the size of the development team. 1. http://www.linkedin.com/in/ciurana http://www.linkedin.com/in/ciurana

BaconJuice 14y ago

Where can I learn more about this "Genetic algorithm"?

adamio 14y ago

If this is such a problem, why aren't news sites delivering executive summary like articles for mobile customers? A 400 character summary written by the article's author would be easier and more accurate than this.