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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 p

by 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.
- berkut 14y ago
  I disagree - I starting learning C++ at 14, and I had shareware apps for Windows I was making a fair amount of money with by the time I was 17 back in the late 90s... That included learning how the POP3 and SMTP protocols worked to write email clients and obviously socket programming.
  - just2n 14y ago
    I started learning C at 11 and at 13-14 had software developed that assisted in reverse engineering and debugging of applications. These days that knowledge seems fairly trivial to me, and it isn't fundamentally complicated. Now with more understanding of theory and algorithms, it would be a lot easier to build much more useful tools like something that is as simple as dataflow analysis -- something I couldn't have fathomed at 14. Or binary instrumentation. Similarly, I had done socket work and reversing proprietary protocols, and I didn't consider any of that groundbreaking (nor was it substantially marketable). To walk into a field like AI and summarization which isn't infantile and outdo Ph.D. level experts at their own theory -- that's something you didn't do, nor did Nick, nor does anyone. It just doesn't happen, and hasn't in any subject with a similar depth of specialization as far as I'm aware. Not to say one can't make useful things and/or learn a lot very rapidly. I tend to understand the young, inexperienced people building games that sell well due to the frameworks available. And I understand how shareware could sell decently in a market that's widely open with lots of low-hanging fruit. But this situation is very different. That he built an application that grabbed parts of text and produced a shortened version by making some very rudimentary guesses about what's important perhaps. What's described -- not a chance.

by Dn_Ab 14y ago

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.

berkut 14y ago
I disagree - I starting learning C++ at 14, and I had shareware apps for Windows I was making a fair amount of money with by the time I was 17 back in the late 90s... That included learning how the POP3 and SMTP protocols worked to write email clients and obviously socket programming.
- just2n 14y ago
  I started learning C at 11 and at 13-14 had software developed that assisted in reverse engineering and debugging of applications. These days that knowledge seems fairly trivial to me, and it isn't fundamentally complicated. Now with more understanding of theory and algorithms, it would be a lot easier to build much more useful tools like something that is as simple as dataflow analysis -- something I couldn't have fathomed at 14. Or binary instrumentation. Similarly, I had done socket work and reversing proprietary protocols, and I didn't consider any of that groundbreaking (nor was it substantially marketable). To walk into a field like AI and summarization which isn't infantile and outdo Ph.D. level experts at their own theory -- that's something you didn't do, nor did Nick, nor does anyone. It just doesn't happen, and hasn't in any subject with a similar depth of specialization as far as I'm aware. Not to say one can't make useful things and/or learn a lot very rapidly. I tend to understand the young, inexperienced people building games that sell well due to the frameworks available. And I understand how shareware could sell decently in a market that's widely open with lots of low-hanging fruit. But this situation is very different. That he built an application that grabbed parts of text and produced a shortened version by making some very rudimentary guesses about what's important perhaps. What's described -- not a chance.