He Has Millions and a New Job at Yahoo. Soon, He’ll Be 18
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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 suspect the story behind this is simply "upper-class child with family connections finds success."
I am also very curious about this so called "algorithm". For all I know, it could be a very well made genuine admin interface plugged into multiple turks. That is what I would have done.
Each line is a separate email. http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-deve...
What an elevator pitch! If this Yahoo! thing doesn't pan out....
This story seems to boil down to an individual that created a moderately-functioning app who's success was enabled by his family connections and amplified by a media industry voracious for this kind of shit.
One common strain I see with child prodigies, or whatever you want to call them, is that their accomplishments are often greatly exaggerated and they usually don't end up contributing as much as many who make great contributions later in life (few famous historical scientists and artists, with the exception perhaps of Mozart, were what we would consider child prodigies, and many were quite the opposite). I don't know if it's caused by resting on their laurels, burning out, or them just not being as good as they claimed, but it doesn't seem like a healthy model at all.
Summly in particular doesn't come across as being all that complicated - genetic analysis of text is a well-researched and thoroughly trodden part of applied complexity theory - but rather a smart business move made by investors and businessmen mostly behind the scenes. D’Aloisio comes across more as a poster boy than anything - he's put up as this child prodigy, but I've never read or heard anything particularly new, profound, or even that interesting from him.
Plenty of artists: Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, Bizet, Bieber (all right, maybe not the last one) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_music_prodigies
Others: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_child_prodigies
And, Chopin's later work is indeed much more mature -- compare the difference for example between the Nocturne in E minor which he wrote when he was 19, and Nocturne in C-Minor, No 21, which he wrote shortly before his death. The difference is pretty stark -- and even non-musicians can sort of detect the growth. I can say likewise for most composers, their craft honed with time -- it's difficult for me to think of any composer who composed something tremendous in the very beginning just out of nowhere -- that kind of stuff doesn't happen.
Just a wild guess, but maybe all the "intelligence" of the app is courtesy SRI, which has proven expertise in the machine learning & natural language processing fields.
1. http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/01/summly-app-nick-daloisio-vi...
Now, for the rest of us: we've got some bootstraps to pull, because we can achieve success too, if we work hard enough (yes, that's sarcasm, not purple koolaid)
The class system is alive and well in the USA too. Less easily recognized perhaps, as the myth of the American Dream(sm) with its "look at these successful underdogs" is the perfect misdirection. Dig a little deeper and you'll most hugely successful startups came from money (i.e. "friends and family" rounds under rule 506).
If it's a factor, then it's perfectly valid. All this talk about "it's your own failure" only serves to stop anybody from attempting to change the overall class thing (not by his individual, outlier, success: systemically).
I don't see many rich black entrepreneurs coming from Mississippi or Alabama, for example. Or from "white trash" trailer parks. Or the latino California population.
Mostly upper and higher middle class white and asian families with mucho dinero.
Do you see anything different?
Let's take the top 100 successful startup founders of the last 10 years and check their backgrounds.
Isn't that basically the definition of upper class in any practical terms?
The parent of your comment is exactly the other prong of the faux meritocracy argument. One side is this story about the 15 year old kid who "made it". That's the carrot. The other side is, "yeah, if you don't make it, its your own fault. Just work harder, smarter, etc." That's the stick.
So, the implication is that we are living in a meritocracy. If you happen to be astute enough to point out how ridiculous that is on its face, then the response is that you're whining and you should be able to overcome anyway. Nothing needs to be addressed in the system and nevermind that the game is rigged. You just need to be less of a loser.
It's not an especially useful definition anyway, if your family has a lot of money it doesn't make much practical difference whether they got that via inheritance or via starting facebook you will get similar advantages either way.
"Practical difference" What are you talking about? Rich is rich. Upper class is upper class. Traditionally / historically being upper class has implied money. Having money has never implied upper class.
It's a very English definition.
The number of downvotes and poor quality of debate has been really quite shocking.
Yes of course it is, I think anyone in the UK would know that. But do you imagine you're making a contrast here? The class system is alive and well in most places. Do you know what Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have in common? They all grew up well to do.
Ding ding ding! That's my real issue with stories like this. They don't explain how these young geniuses got capitol to build their ideas or how they were able to market them to people with influence or how they are able to convince influencers like Marissa Meyer to fork over $30 million.
Not hating on the kid, but without proper explanation of those three aforementioned things, there's no real story here.
I'd say the Yahoo! acquisition was more about the buzz and marketing this would create and less about the technology. I imagine they could have just had their own engineers make a similar app quite quickly and for considerably less money.
Yahoo said in a statement that while the Summly app would be shut down, “we will acquire the technology and you’ll see it come to life throughout Yahoo’s mobile experiences soon.”
That then makes me wonder what Yahoo gets out of the deal if indeed the algorithm behind the application is mostly patented, especially at such an overpriced valuation. Or if SRI did the R&D and what's being left out here is that his family/friends paid tens of millions for the research to build the algorithm, then this barely covers the cost? And if they did the R&D, then one wonders what this kid has really done (did he build the rest himself, or hire engineers?)
Personally, this feels like Yahoo buying a story about how it's acquiring "big, successful, talent." It's hard to understand at all what's going on here.
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.
Now, if you run a startup that makes no revenue, or even loses huge amounts of money, your value is a multiplier of the profit you could theoretically in a crack dream make.
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.
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 ?
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.]
Oh, and Yoko Ono was also an investor in the series A...
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
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.
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 =)
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.
That included learning how the POP3 and SMTP protocols worked to write email clients and obviously socket programming.
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.
Yes, with 3 years of programming experience your code won't be too polished/elegant but it will be sufficient to make the application work. (Especially if you can use some 3rd party frameworks like the kid in this article possibly did.)
He had been programming since 12. At 15 he had an idea, he developed trimit[1] and it was mildly successful. Due to his age he got press, then an investor[2] became interested in him and the product, they stuck in a few hundred thousand. The product evolved into a service for content generation and made deals with News Corp and a few other big publishers. More investors got involved, they put together an executive team[3] from industry veterans and then built an app (with Nick involved). They launched, got press because of Nicks age and because they'd got a few celebrities invested / endorsing the app. Then they sold.
The original app certainly wasn't what is launched today and I doubt Nick is laying claim to the current iteration of the app but he did build the initial application and had involved in the current version, which is more than enough to rank him higher than people who had parents buy them into success. Zuckerberg built the initial Facebook but it certainly isn't most of his code running now, same deal here.
[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/1772823/15-year-old-creator-trimi...
I am certain that any founder of any startup that has grown at least moderately would not consider the core application "his algorithm", and most certainly would not acknowledge such publicly. I highly doubt Zuckerberg would say that Facebook (as it is now) is his code.
But even with more knowledge of what's happened, I think my sentiment stands. If you can't easily afford to build/fund a team, getting a project to a point that you can convince people to contribute in some way without relying on affluence or age-based hype-potential is significantly more impressive.
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...
Actually, he licensed the only hard part of the app.
They must have decided it was easier to extend summly than to build it organically.
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.
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.
See: broadcast.com ($5.7B), delicious ($20MM), MyBlogLog, then some Middle Eastern social network Maktoob ($167MM) that then disappeared soon after.
FWIW though, I was a huge fan at the time and it went majorly downhill after it was sold to Yahoo. I don't know how it is with the new owners, because I moved away.
Had diigo been unsatisfying for me, I would have likely moved to pinboard which is I think quite popular in the HN crowd.
And it's far from "completely unsubstantiated." Summly was objectively not very good, and the developer appears to have more family connections than he does raw engineering talent.
Yahoo! has tons of talented engineers working for them who could have easily put together another shoddy summarization app (except Yahoo! isn't even using the app--they're shutting it down). Why would they dish out (reportedly) $30 million for a kid who hasn't even graduated from high school?
To answer your last question: 1) As far as I know that kid did not hold any high-ranking role at the company anymore; the talent probably lay elsewhere. 2) There are many reasons and unless your name begins with Marissa and ends with Mayer, you cannot know for sure.
I very much think they bought themselves a boy wonder so they could show him off to the press. I doubt the company actually needs him or his product in any direct sense.
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.
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.
Is that the point? To get >30 million dollars worth of them to quit in rage?
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.
They do the best (and most imitated) promotional work for tech companies going.
Think of the in-crowd in high school, they looked great, but one wouldn't come close to calling them unique.
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?
sigh
Me. I can't help myself.
What is going on here..
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.
... he will make arrangements to test out of his classes and work from the Yahoo office in London.
What are they actually doing?
Poor kid.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
EDIT: I just watched the launch video, and apparently Summly uses a genetic algorithm. I doubt that Mac OS X does.
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 !
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?)
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)
Regarding philosophy: in the UK, graduates of the "Politics, Philosophy and Economics" course at Oxford are pretty much running the show.
:)