9 ms·

For some who need perspective: Right now, somewhere in the world, a child is being born into an uberly rich family. That child will grow up to inherit millions

• larrik 14y ago
  I thought the point was that Yahoo, a public company, was throwing away 30 million for no apparent gain.
  • cygwin98 14y ago
    That's the part I don't understand capitalism: on one hand, big corps try to save every dime by downsizing and outsourcing, and on the other hand, they pour money like this.
    • mike_herrera 14y ago
      It's a control issue under the guise of a cost-saving effort. Contractors and vendors are easier to hire and fire compared to employees. Generous advances in worker productivity mean that the same permanent internal workforce is no longer required.
    • obviouslygreen 14y ago
      That's not capitalism, it's poor valuation, managerial inefficiency/stupidity, and fad/reaction behavior (among other things, I'm sure). It's counterintuitive, counterproductive, a massive waste, contrary to the penny-pinching you mention, and obtuse. It's also just kind of how people are. You can't reasonably expect a large corporation -- which is just a big group of people who are all trying to make decisions and getting in each other's way -- to be able to make logical choices when they're subject to every large stakeholder's whim and every bit of incompetence that happens everywhere along the line. Is it happening in a capitalist setting here? Yes. But it happens in all settings all over the world, so to suggest it's unique to this system ignores the actual nature of the issue (which is the Human Condition).
      • Florin_Andrei 14y ago
        Just be careful to not fall into the "if it's good, it's Capitalism, if it's bad, it's human nature" fallacy.
    • roc 14y ago
      It's all just incentives. The downsizing and outsourcing is driven by incentives to remove cost from the balance sheet. If there's no incentive to do so wisely, if there's no disincentive against doing so poorly, people will inevitably make bad 'outsourcing' deals, just to have made them. Quality might take a hit, direct billings might skyrocket, products might have to be scrapped, etc. But if you don't fix the incentives, it will happen over and over. Similarly, if you incentivize a person to make deals, if they have a stronger incentive to make deals than to make good deals (e.g. if they have no effective disincentive against making bad deals) bad deals will get made.
  • orangethirty 14y ago
    The are buying traction. That's 30 million dollars worth of it. It could make them back that much money by getting people to start using Yahoo again.
    • homosaur 14y ago
      I have no faith whatsoever that Yahoo will productize or promote anything they create and there's no real evidence that anyone else should think that either.
    • larrik 14y ago
      Maybe. But: 1- Is the traction convertible to any Yahoo properties? 2- Are the 1 million "downloads" legitimate interested users? Do any of them still use the app? 3- Did the "traction" come from paying firms to get them to the top of app store(s)? I assume Yahoo knows more about this stuff than I do, and I'm not a Yahoo shareholder. Still, I didn't get the impression that the article was just complaining about rich teenagers.
    • Zimahl 14y ago
      What happened to the good ole days when a huge corporation would just implement the app on their own and cut out the need for an aquisition? For $30 million, even an order of magnitude less, I think a lot of us could put together a team good enough to implement the Summly app. That's what's being questioned by the blog post.
    • ojbyrne 14y ago
      According to Alexa, yahoo is the 4th most visited website in the world. They have innumerable ways to generate traffic. "Traction" implies a company that is not being visited at all trying to get a jump start, and is just not accurate.
      • JumpCrisscross 14y ago
        Not all traction is created equal. I'm not sure how simply Yahoo could convert its users, who tend to be more conservative, to mobile. Technical parity is a bad way to price a company, i.e. the value of Summly cannot be approximated by what it would take to replicate the technology in-house.
  • gavanwoolery 14y ago
    Actually this is a very common scheme in Silicon Valley -- public companies "throwing away" money on relatively worthless startups. It is a good way to siphon money out of the stock market and into the pockets of VCs and founders -- and I would not be surprised if the person who pushes the acquisition gets a cut of the money too, or other "favors" in the future. The company knows its going to can the product and the founders will leave after their stock vests -- why else would it make the acquisition?
    • larrik 14y ago
      That's a perspective that hadn't occurred to me (I'm not actually in startups or Silicon Valley). Sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it's believable. It does not, however, mean shareholders can't/shouldn't complain about throwing money away, though.
      • gavanwoolery 14y ago
        Yep, it sounds like a conspiracy to me as well. :) The one thing that I have learned about corruption is that at least small instances of it occur everywhere, even if its not "the norm." Wherever there is way to make money, people might very well be doing it. And yes you are right although I tried to imply that shareholders were the ones being screwed - this is obviously unfair to shareholders, whether the transaction is corrupt or not.
      • bitcartel 14y ago
        I'm sure Yahoo employees are asking questions too. $30 million could be spent on building daycare for all Yahoo mums and dads who can no longer work from home.
    • Evbn 14y ago
      Seeing these acquisitions, it always seemed like that what's very often happening is the folks who make the Buy decisions (NOT the owners of the buying company) are basically stealing from then owners to hand money to their friends) Or, when the bizdev team is told to spend a billion dollars this year, (1) is is easier for them to like in extra money into each deal than to find more smaller deal, and (2) they don't get bonuses for only spending 500million and saying there is nothing else worth buying.
• chatmasta 14y ago
  Where did the article make any mention of jealousy or bitterness (other than the "hurt feelings" of Yahoo's engineers)? The article describes the stupidity of this acquisition from a business perspective. The fact that your comment has received the most upvotes indicates that people generally agree with your sentiment that nobody should be bitter or jealous. Yet nobody is suggesting any bitterness or jealousy... So who exactly is this directed at? Hey HN... I think you're "projecting." :)
  • EwanToo 14y ago
    Lots of the comments below read like they're full of bitterness and jealousy to me, I suspect the comment is targeted at them rather than the original article.
  • corresation 14y ago
    That is exactly it: People whose first reaction was jealousy are now projecting jealousy onto everyone else. I'm not jealous of this individual at all (though I, like most, would love to be in the same position). But being professionals in this field we naturally do try to figure out where the money is at (trying to yield hints at how we can get some of that), and when it is irrational it confuses and potentially angers us. This ridiculous canard that we can never critique a story without being jealous is obnoxious.
  • res0nat0r 14y ago
    Simply because of the fact that in the first sentence that it mentions that he is 17 years old. Companies get acquired all of the time every day, but those don't warrant posts on HN mentioning how young the employees are. Hence the jealousy.
    • jetti 14y ago
      Because there is a fact mentioned that is out of the ordinary compared to other acquisitions, that makes it jealousy?
  • gavanwoolery 14y ago
    I think you should have the top comment - but I am willing to admit I'm jealous anyway. :) Jealous, but thankful that I was never made a millionaire at age 17...because that 17 year old will no longer get to see what the real world is like.
• bradleyland 14y ago
  I agree that all of the events you've listed are probably happening somewhere in the world, but I disagree that we should all just accept this as "the world we live in" and carry on. Look back across history and consider what would have happened if at any point, the people on the losing end of any deal were to simply keep their heads down and keep working. It's worth talking about. It's worth criticizing. It may not be worth obsessing over, but it is worth some portion of our attention.
  • Evbn 14y ago
    It is only worth attention if that attention becomes productive action. So yeah, criticize, only if you think someone influential is listening.
    • smacktoward 14y ago
      A mass of dissatisfied citizens can become quite influential all on their own.
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
• chime 14y ago
  > I get down about how unfair that is from time to time, but there's nothing you can really do about it, other than focus on your work. Fairness is a fictional manmade concept. That we expect some sort of fairness in life is solely due to our social contract. It's not fair to me that someone steals my car and thus we have systems in place to address that. However, nothing in our laws, norms, ethics, or philosophy says that people must get everything they deserve and no more or no less. Hence the concept of fairness does not apply to kids of billionaires or friends of politically connected.
  • brvs 14y ago
    I think you meant "my concept of fairness". Because other peoples' concepts of fairness certainly do consider the ultra-rich.
    • chime 14y ago
      That was my overall point. Fairness is manmade. We decide what's fair and not and certainly your concept is different from mine. Nature doesn't care. Markets don't care. Systems don't care. All we can do as humans is impose our view of fairness on others by legal means or social norms. Most of us agree killing is bad and unfair to the person who got killed and their family/friends, so we legislate against that. While many might feel that kids of rich people have an unfair advantage, we haven't as a collective decided to do anything to put that to an end. We have made it a bit easier for non-rich kids to get some of the benefits that rich kids get like daily meals, access to education etc. but the gap is far too wide to bridge for everyone. You can certainly try to design a social structure where nobody is rich or nobody gets preferential treatment but those haven't worked well so far for numerous other reasons. In a capitalistic, democratic/republic society, we haven't legislated the unfairness of being born rich, mostly because most of us don't think it is unfair enough to be illegal. In fact, most of us would think it is fair when looking at it from the parents' point of view. If you work hard and make a lot of money, why shouldn't your kids have it better than you did? What I was trying to say to the parent was that fairness is not a concrete standard, especially when it comes to things many of us can disagree on.
  • lilsunnybee 14y ago
• jamesaguilar 14y ago
  > unfair It's laughable that a programmer would worry about how unfair the industry is on the top end. Do you get how lucky we are compared even to other engineers? To say nothing of service workers who work much harder for much less.
  • vidarh 14y ago
    Every now and again, if I feel I need more money, I take a look at http://www.globalrichlist.com/ http://www.globalrichlist.com/ and plop in my current salary. Though the numbers are probably a bit dated by now, it's quite sobering.
    • vitalique 14y ago
      Well, every now and again, I come across this type of salary comparison charts, and realize that out of context they make no sense at all. And with some context - hmmm.. Nope, not much sense either.
      • vidarh 14y ago
        I don't know what you're trying to say. If you are trying to imply that someone on a developer salary in Europe or the US are not well off by global standards, you're out of your mind.
        • vitalique 14y ago
          I mean just what I wrote: these lists and charts comparing everyone to everything make little to no sense without context. Global standards in the vacuum make no sense. And in the case of global salary charts - well, comparing apples to oranges doesn't even come close. But, as much as I hate generalizations, I'll try to clarify my point. So: usually, above certain, and rather low level, your happiness doesn't scale linearly with the your wealth expressed in money, and the farther you are in the "rich" percentile, the more so. This charts tend to imply that wealth should (well, that it has to!) be distributed uniformly, when it isn't, and has never been, and I'm pretty sure will never be. Now, let's suppose you make $15k/yr. (By the way, how's that for your estimate of a European salary? See why I said I hate generalizations?) This site says you're in the top 13% richest people in the world. Immediately, a ton of questions arises: OK, top 13% - what of it? Was it practical to take everyone in the world into consideration? Why and how should this (unverified) information change your feelings about your well-being? Is the current wealth distribution, as represented by the chart, really not OK? Will the knowledge about being in the top 13% help you pay your bills? Should you, now knowing that you are ahead of 87% of population, start to think about redistribution of your wealth and transferring it to those behind you? Should you not be pissed off by those guys higher than you? What if you'd find yourself in the lower 50%? Should you get depressed, or get to work, reaching the 50% mark and then stopping, or what? I could go on and on, but the point I'm trying to make here is that all those questions can be answered in a dozen or so ways, exact number depending on your will to participate in rhetoric battles, and that's why I just can't figure out how this chart can be of any use. There's probably some statistical value in it to me, but almost none practical value. I hope you now see what I was trying to say in the GP comment. Lastly, and moving from the comparison chart itself to the idea that it's used to be backing up here: I dislike cheap attempts to make people participate in some charity out of induced guilt, and I dislike portraying of being wealthy (whatever that means) as a kind of being unclean with money and obliged to share as a tool of said shame/guilt feeling inducing. I don't think charity should work this way and I think this instills the wrong views of the basic principles of economical and social responsibility in the readers and just exploits the guilt feeling. TL;DR: Do you need money? You should probably stop contemplating 'global salary comparison charts' of questionable real world value, and instead get your statistics straight and start working on your skills/paycheck/whatever keeps you wealthy. Do you want to participate in the charities? Stop getting anxious and building guilt inside you for no reason, get informed (really, get your statistics straight already) and get involved.
• newbie12 14y ago
  Bitter and jealous is no way to go through life. All of these guys executed on their project or have specialized knowledge. The pie is not zero-sum, and we live in the greatest, most fair time in human history.
  • Evbn 14y ago
    Parent is claiming that this is not true, that they got rewarded for being gifted a controlling interest in others' productivity.
  • pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    >the greatest, most fair time in human history // I think that's far from truthful. The fairest time would be before [mass] land ownership, when anyone could stay with their tribal group or, should they choose, set off on their own and find land a-plenty to hunt/develop/farm as they see fit. Hard times, sure; but that sort of situation seems most fair to me.
• patmcguire 14y ago
  It's going to be strange 80 years from now when Web 2.0 billionaires are old money. "Oh, I don't have to work. Grandfather made a Facebook game."
  • Evbn 14y ago
    One hopes selfishness and legacy, and in some cases, idealism, overcome genetics, and those billionaires give their money to others instead of their spawn.
    • maxbrown 14y ago
      http://givingpledge.org/ http://givingpledge.org/ being the relevant reference here.
• dougk16 14y ago
  Right now, somewhere in the world, there is a person who has an empty bank account (or no bank account!), and is perfectly content.
• dominotw 14y ago
  Right now, Taylor Swift song is stuck in my head. Thanks man.
• hackernewbie 14y ago
  Extreme levels of correct, I myself am incredibly bitter/jealous/you-name-it. However, I get a tugging sensation that it's almost all PR-minded.
• beachstartup 14y ago
  This is good perspective and i think it's good to keep this in mind, but let's not forget the other end of the spectrum: Right now, somewhere in the world, a child is being born in a farm house with a dirt floor. That child will grow up to die in a civil war before age 14. Right now, somewhere in the world, there are people waiting in line to get food from a charity. Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is suffering from a disease because they can't afford the cure. Right now, somewhere in the world, a man goes to work carrying bricks for 10 hours a day to feed his 3 children. Right now, somewhere in the world, a woman rides her bike to work in polluted air at 6am, to a factory job where she will work 12 hours a day putting together tablets that all the "unlucky people who have to work" trying to be dot com millionaires will buy one day on a whim and then discard less than 6 months later. And this is good, because she has a job. The real interesting thing is these people generally don't complain much, not nearly as much as we do.
  • Zimahl 14y ago
    The bell curve is a harsh mistress.
    • andreasvc 14y ago
      Poverty is not normally distributed on a bell curve, more like a power law distribution; cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
      • deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
  • pm90 14y ago
    Actually, I've come to believe that complaining is an inherent aspect of human nature. Everybody complains; its just that you don't hear much from the above-mentioned as they do not write blogs which make the frontpage on Reddit or HN (let alone popular media) and/or are not part of your immediate circle of friends (to whom we usually air our grievances)
  • 14y ago
• phillmv 14y ago
  >I get down about how unfair that is from time to time, but there's nothing you can really do about it, other than focus on your work. I regret upvoting you prior to finishing your post. This is bullshit. Of course we can do something about it. We're members of a society, and if we collectively think something is bullshit, we can do something about it. I'm tired of people looking at these absurd inequities and shrugging and putting their head down and hoping maybe they'll get lucky too. In the meanwhile, these people at the top are ensuring that only people like them can continue to succeed. Let's tax everyone who didn't earn their wealth. Let's put an end to dumb gambles that only reward people born at the top.
  • nsxwolf 14y ago
    I'm confused. Are you saying this kid should have his $30M (or whatever he gets out of the deal) taken away from him, because you perceive he didn't earn it?
    • phillmv 14y ago
      No. I'm saying is maybe increase high end income taxes, maybe look into the viability of higher capital gains taxes, maybe find and create some kind of disincentive for companies to be bailing out VCs. Find some way to even the playing field. I'm sorry, but you don't need to have come from Stanford to be smart enough to work at Yahoo! or Google or etc.
      • nsxwolf 14y ago
        ... and the funds collected are distributed in the form of bonuses to programmers who are perceived to have worked harder?
      • Domenic_S 14y ago
        Ah, the 'regulation is the answer' argument. > I'm sorry, but you don't need to have come from Stanford to be smart enough to work at Yahoo! or Google or etc It's like every other human relationship, the more you have to offer the higher your standards can be. Google can afford to hire only top CS people (or accomplished non-traditional ones) because they're Google. Yahoo!... I don't think that's going to work out so well. The market will take care of it soon enough.
• rohanpai 14y ago
  As a 17 year old I think this is awesome and stupid (at the same time). It's pretty eye opening that if a 17 year old can make an app and get bought for a lot of money, it's possible for anyone to. As awesome as it is for the guy, this doesn't change the fact that a Summly got paid so much for a 2 employees and a founder. I mean the app hardly had traction and $30 million can you get you a nice army of talented mobile developers with signing bonus'. $30M really isn't justified in this case. Congrats to the summly team, but it's also really sad how desperate and pathetic Yahoo is.
• mcantelon 14y ago
  >I took the entire post as one rooted in envy and bitterness I took it as looking objectively at the deal, something that no mainstream press coverage of the Summly aquisition I've seen does.
• jiggy2011 14y ago
  I agree, however it is important to consider how we pick the people we choose to hold up as examples and who we are holding them up to. With the traditional bigCo job market in the tank there is a push right now to get young people interested in entrepreneurship so stories like these make excellent narrative supporting that. So you hear stuff like "bootstrap your company!" , "Be your own boss!" , "Be a risk taker!" and this message is being pushed to everyone, including those on the lower rungs of society. I know a few people who bootstrapped reasonably successful businesses and have been asked to give talks on how anybody can do it and how they started with no investment and nothing more than $50 in their bank account etc. Problem is that most of these guys had backgrounds that allowed for risk taking. They had families who were not necessarily uber wealthy but were quite happy to subsidise them for often over a year for things like living expenses and keeping their car on the road. The narratives often don't mention these sorts of factors.
• ChuckMcM 14y ago
  Well said. And I agree, sometimes when people don't realize it they are jealous and hurt. A guy I knew who was, in my experience working with him, a complete loser [1] was fired and got a job at another company and that company went public during the dot com boom and made him several million dollars. Meanwhile my company, and I personally, made no such million dollar moves. And it made me jealous and angry and I could have easily written this exact same article about how clueless that company was for hiring the loser, but the emotion was from my hurt. It took a while to get over that [2]. Yahoo may be clueless here, but we really can't say that until we see if they get $30M in value out of the deal or not. So really all we can say is that we cannot see how they came up with that valuation. Then watch what they do to see where it goes looking for insights into their thinking. [1] I recognize that "loser" is relative to the job they were asked to do, as opposed to the individual. At the time I was much less forgiving of people who weren't in jobs they fit (or didn't fit) with. [2] I am still incredulous but I don't get angry and jealous over it any more.
• seivan 14y ago
  Bullshit, the scrutiny is here because of Yahoo paying 30m for some shit app. That's it. Age is irrelevant. Can the shareholders do anything about this? It seems incredibly stupid.
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• pron 14y ago
  While this has little to do with the original post (which is about the logic behind Yahoo's decision, on which I have absolutely no opinion one way or another), I think it's extremely important to adress what you're saying. You write "I get down about how unfair that is from time to time, but there's nothing you can really do about it, other than focus on your work". This is not only patently false, it is dangerously so. It is the thinking of the downtrodden man who accepts the hegemony's perspective on things, namely, that this is the natural order of things, and all you can do is work. True, the world is unfair and it will remain so. But much of its unfairness is not a result of cruel nature, but as a result of our political actions. And I won't even go into what actions we should take to adress the issues you've raised, only to say that we should, and must act to change society, and that there's quite a lot we can do. We are not sheep.
• hojoff79 14y ago
  Right place right time seems to be your shot at all these people, most of life is about that!
• hojoff79 14y ago
  Right place right time seems to sum up all these people, and most of life is about that! But the only way to fight it is work your ass off and put yourself in a position to be at the right place at the right time (give yourself a platform for an investor to find you for a high acqui-hire price cough cough what happened here). For the many people who complain all the time on this site and critique but have never started / built or done anything except complain, you have no ground to stand on. Sitting on your computer complaining has (almost) never put someone in a right place, right time opportunity (except when blogs were first invented)