While stories like his are interesting novelties, I feel like they are distracting and counterproductive to the startup scene at large.
Instead of focusing on what Nick D’Aloisio has actually created, perhaps looking at this "algorithmic invention, which takes long-form stories and shortens them for readers using smartphones" and digging into what makes it special, the story is all about the jackpot of millions he's lucked into.
I'd love to know more about the technical details behind Summly, or what Nick went through to create it.
This kind of lottery mentality just gives the general public the impression that there's a gold rush going on, and causes the kind of magical thinking that's similar to teenagers all hoping to become the next rock star or sports legend, or in this case, startup founder, that will make millions, focusing on the money instead of asking themselves what they want to do with their lives.
For every teenage millionaire that hits the startup jackpot, there are thousands of hard-working entrepreneurs that build for the love of building. I'm not saying Nick D'Aloisio isn't doing what he does out of genuine passion - I don't know anything about him, I expect he's very driven and geniune - but I would rather focus on the work than the jackpot.
I have observed in various walks of life that whoever is in "it" for the money ends up being, at best, moderately useful for their organization, moderately effective at growing, moderately effective at learning and ultimately moderately effective at being successful. And that's one of the more optimistic scenarios. As an ironic consequence, they also end up being only moderately successful at getting rich, that is if they even have the mental chops necessary and a healthy dose of luck.
This is like Orwell's double-think: You need to care every once in a blue moon about your well being (compensation, benefits, etc.) and then immediately forget about it and do whatever it is that you're doing for the joy of it. I have found people's sustained focus on their own well-being to be one of the best predictors of their (lack of) contribution to wherever they are in life.
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.
This lottery mentality trivializes everything and keeps people focused on the jackpot vs. building sustainable or even meaningful businesses.
It's this constant holding up of people who got lucky as some sort of cruel carrot for everyone to chase that's really started to irk me. I don't begrudge the young man his success in the slightest, but enough with turning everything into a soulless reality show.
I was listening to Marco Arment's old podcasts and he mentioned that the Tumblr CEO (Dave?) tried extremely hard to keep his age a secret for this exact reason. As soon as his age leaked to the press (19 years old) all articles about Tumblr turned into pieces about his age rather than what Tumblr was about. :(
> This kind of lottery mentality just gives the general public the impression that there's a gold rush going on, and causes the kind of magical thinking that's similar to teenagers all hoping to become the next rock star or sports legend, or in this case, startup founder, that will make millions, focusing on the money instead of asking themselves what they want to do with their lives.
Isn't it related or similar (should I say the same ?) to the notion that "every american is a potential millionaire" when discussing high-income taxes ?
But the jackpot is the work. His professionally managed "career", designed to make him look like the leader of a project, is the only reason his product became notable.
The article makes it sound like a "whiz kid loner" sort of company, but the summly.com website suggests there's a lot more to it than is implied by this article. The About page shows a pretty senior, experienced team (decades of engineering and research experience): http://summly.com/about.html
And the technology page says the algorithm is actually from SRI! http://summly.com/technology.html (SRI language technology was also behind Siri, of course.) There are various NLP researchers on their SRI team list, like Appelt, Israel, Nallapati, etc. Did Summly license the technology from SRI? Did they contract with SRI to maintain or develop the core algorithm? Who owns it?
If the valuation includes Yahoo acquiring SRI technology, IP, and some portion of those researchers' time for futher product development, plus the very nice UI and marketing for it, and maybe they want to acquihire some of the team as well, that all makes the valuation seem a bit less far-fetched than you might think from the NYT's coverage (or the negative comments on HN).
The more interesting question than the valuation, I think, is how this company went from a very young founder to all those investors, a pretty senior executive team, and getting the NLP technology.
[I once worked for a startup, Powerset, whose core NLP system was licensed from Xerox PARC; Powerset also quietly acquired an SRI spinoff and its NLP technology, and I think IP acquisition was an important motivation. When Powerset was acquired by Microsoft, I am told IP was at least a somewhat important part of the valuation. I have no idea if this is actually applicable to this situation; maybe it's an overextrapolation.]
My guess is that if what was reported is close to real, it was basically an SRI spin-out, there was a real team behind it before it even started, and they either merged with Summly or brought on D’Aloisio as 'Founder' as a marketing tactic.
Oh, and Yoko Ono was also an investor in the series A...
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.
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.
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.
Agree, the lack of self awareness on some of these douchebag comments is unreal. Glad there's at least one well wisher here.
You've already pointed out the main jarring statements but here's another - 'Yahoo! is nonsensical' for closing down the app and integrating the tech into it's own products? Right, because that's not a tried and tested acquisition strategy in tech...
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?
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.
"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?
In my honest opinion Yahoo! acquired Summly for their launch video: https://vimeo.com/52014691 It's simply so cool. Yahoo! is nowhere near that cool. The experiment now is if buying cool makes you cool.
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.
And this is the stuff that dreams are made of, other people's dreams. The dark side of this move will be dealing with his new colleagues at Yahoo, there are dragons there and I hope he has enough introspection to understand the less nice reactions he will get. That said, let's hope that he finds his passion and doesn't leave us early like Aaron did. If nothing else it is difficult to fathom the impact that will have on his psyche going forward.
this is the stuff that dreams are made of, other people's dreams
This sounds a lot like René Girard: people desire others' desire. I think it's one of the most important things to understand about human psychology. Without it, you can really run aground in a painful way.
It's worth noting how shamelessly the article's headline exploits this. How many people here are compulsively comparing themselves to what it depicts?
Wait a second - Yahoo! couldn't figure out how to algorithmically shorten a long-form story for display on mobile? It took a 17-year old and $30M to make this happen?
It's hardly a simple problem. And by buying out another successful company they get the consumer base it already has rather than spending resources and pushing their own product and risk having it fail or having to compete with the other company.
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...
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).
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
[+] [-] jaysonelliot|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ozataman|13 years ago|reply
This is like Orwell's double-think: You need to care every once in a blue moon about your well being (compensation, benefits, etc.) and then immediately forget about it and do whatever it is that you're doing for the joy of it. I have found people's sustained focus on their own well-being to be one of the best predictors of their (lack of) contribution to wherever they are in life.
[+] [-] dinkumthinkum|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unclebucknasty|13 years ago|reply
This lottery mentality trivializes everything and keeps people focused on the jackpot vs. building sustainable or even meaningful businesses.
It's this constant holding up of people who got lucky as some sort of cruel carrot for everyone to chase that's really started to irk me. I don't begrudge the young man his success in the slightest, but enough with turning everything into a soulless reality show.
[+] [-] carlsednaoui|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hkmurakami|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnchristopher|13 years ago|reply
Isn't it related or similar (should I say the same ?) to the notion that "every american is a potential millionaire" when discussing high-income taxes ?
[+] [-] trhtrsh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sfall|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] brendano|13 years ago|reply
And the technology page says the algorithm is actually from SRI! http://summly.com/technology.html (SRI language technology was also behind Siri, of course.) There are various NLP researchers on their SRI team list, like Appelt, Israel, Nallapati, etc. Did Summly license the technology from SRI? Did they contract with SRI to maintain or develop the core algorithm? Who owns it?
If the valuation includes Yahoo acquiring SRI technology, IP, and some portion of those researchers' time for futher product development, plus the very nice UI and marketing for it, and maybe they want to acquihire some of the team as well, that all makes the valuation seem a bit less far-fetched than you might think from the NYT's coverage (or the negative comments on HN).
The more interesting question than the valuation, I think, is how this company went from a very young founder to all those investors, a pretty senior executive team, and getting the NLP technology.
[I once worked for a startup, Powerset, whose core NLP system was licensed from Xerox PARC; Powerset also quietly acquired an SRI spinoff and its NLP technology, and I think IP acquisition was an important motivation. When Powerset was acquired by Microsoft, I am told IP was at least a somewhat important part of the valuation. I have no idea if this is actually applicable to this situation; maybe it's an overextrapolation.]
[+] [-] aheilbut|13 years ago|reply
Oh, and Yoko Ono was also an investor in the series A...
[+] [-] JDDunn9|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Dn_Ab|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nawitus|13 years ago|reply
Actually, he licensed the only hard part of the app.
[+] [-] luckysh0t|13 years ago|reply
You've already pointed out the main jarring statements but here's another - 'Yahoo! is nonsensical' for closing down the app and integrating the tech into it's own products? Right, because that's not a tried and tested acquisition strategy in tech...
[+] [-] _delirium|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chewxy|13 years ago|reply
http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=...
[+] [-] jordn|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mynameishere|13 years ago|reply
Is that the point? To get >30 million dollars worth of them to quit in rage?
[+] [-] HunterV|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmcdonald-ut|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gruseom|13 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] dinkumthinkum|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dakrisht|13 years ago|reply
What is going on here..
[+] [-] Houshalter|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swah|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RougeFemme|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darshan|13 years ago|reply
... he will make arrangements to test out of his classes and work from the Yahoo office in London.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jimzvz|13 years ago|reply
What are they actually doing?
[+] [-] yarou|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] biesnecker|13 years ago|reply
Poor kid.
[+] [-] brucehart|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] beerglass|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aheilbut|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keeran|13 years ago|reply
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.