10:55 PM
admin
It’s all in a day’s work for 17-year-old Nick D’Aloisio. “Yeah, this is really happening,” he said in a phone interview today to confirm he had sold his company, Summly, to Internet giantYahoo! for approximately $30 million, mostly in cash.
D’Aloisio sounded electrified — but then he always does. Two years ago the then-15-year-old created an app for the iPhone that would trawl through online articles and instantly summarize them into a single, bite-sized chunk, designed to fit the phone’s small screen. He created the genetic algorithm that runs the app after reading programming books and forums, writing the code during his summer vacation and sending mail shots to the tech press to get coverage. So keen (and green) was D’Aloisio that he sent off hundreds of persistent emails to multiple tech journalists, and that sometimes didn’t work out very well.
The app was released under the name “Trimit,” and was a slow burn. But eventually, it got the attention of Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka Shing. Li’sinvestment team at Horizons Ventures funded D’Aloisio’s company, and helped the young entrepreneur spruce up his app, re-naming it Summly and bringing on a smorgasbord of celebrity endorsers, including Ashton Kucher, Stephen Fry and Yoko Ono.
After months of toiling on his bedroom computer, D’Aloisio was soon flying between San Francisco, New York and Asia, meeting Apple‘s Jony Ive in his design studio and unashamedly embracing the “boy genius” label during a TV appearance with Piers Morgan.
D’Aloisio first met Marissa Mayer at the Digital-Life-Design conference in Munich, Germany in January 2012, during her last few months as a vice president at Google. Then late last year she met him again, this time as Yahoo!’s chief executive, to discuss the possibility of Yahoo buying Summly.
D’Aloisio said he was struck by Mayer’s “focus on mobile and beautiful technology.” The two decided that Yahoo could integrate Summly’s core summarization technology and user interface to repackage some of its pre-existing content, including finance, weather and stock updates for mobile viewing. D’Aloisio reportedly struck the deal with Yahoo’s HR head, and mergers and acquisitions exec, Jackie Reses. At the time of the sale he was still a majority shareholder.
Summly’s app will now be taken off Apple’s App Store, and D’Aloisio himself will become a full-time employee of Yahoo. He won’t have a title, but will be working with the company’s mobile team based out of his home in Wimbledon, London. Being eight hours ahead he should expect some late nights, but he doesn’t seem to mind.
“She’s focused on scale,” he said of Yahoo’s Mayer. “This is what I love. You’re going to have hundreds of millions of people at your fingertips. As a startup you’re touching hundreds of thousands. At Yahoo it’s millions. I started out to make summarization ubiquitous on the Internet and that’s my goal as a founder. I don’t know what form it will be in but we’ll certainly have a go.”
Yahoo’s vice president of mobile and emerging products, Adam Cahan, said in a blog post that Summly’s technology would “come to life throughout Yahoo’s mobile experiences,” though he did not give further details. “For publishers, the Summly technology provides a new approach to drive interest in stories and reach a generation of mobile users that want information on the go.”
Yahoo has received plenty of criticism over the last few years for dithering on its mobile strategy, but D’Aloisio denied there was a problem, claiming he had a “massive opportunity” with a company that was reinventing itself. Still, the $30 million price tag looks pretty high for a free app that has had just under one million downloads to date, and no revenue to speak of.
AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher suggests Yahoo is really paying for “the ability to put the fresh-faced D’Aloisio front and center of its noisy efforts to make consumers see Yahoo as a mobile-first company. That has been the goal of CEO Marissa Mayer… who has talked about the need for Yahoo to focus on the mobile arena above all.”
D’Aloisio said he couldn’t comment on Yahoo’s motivations, only his own. “It’s not the money that’s made me do this deal,” he said, “but the opportunity to build a big platform in technology and that’s what, as an entrepreneur, is so exciting. As a founder of a company you want to still have the leadership vision and I want to bring my technology here and Yahoo is hiring people. It’s a good time to go to this company, when they’re trying to grow and rejuvenate. That’s what excited me.”
Yahoo isn’t so much “hiring people” as it is buying them through company acquisitions. The web portal has bought a handful of mobile-first startups recently, taking on their engineering talent and technology. It bought the social-recommendation mobile app Jybe last week and the “nearby recommendation” app Alike last month. UPDATE: A Yahoo spokesman wrote in to say the company was hiring “very aggressively in mobile,” and building a “mobile hub” in New York.
D’Aloisio said he would continue juggling his school commitments and a full-time job at Yahoo, though he didn’t know if he’d be subject to Yahoo’s newwork-from-home policy. Having taken more than a year off high school, he will be going back to finish the final year-and-a-half of his A-Levels, before going on to university.
The transaction with Yahoo is expected to close in the second quarter of this year, but D’Aloisio has no plans to spend the money on anything besides a new shoulder bag. “My bag’s been broken for the last few days,” he said. Everything else will go into a trust fund, which may or may not help pay for future entrepreneurial endeavors.
“In the future I definitely want to do other companies,” he said. He also claimed to be nowhere near burn-out, and expected the next two years to be “less stressful” than the last. “This has been an amazing journey, and I want to do it all over again.”
Also on Forbes:
Nick D’Aloisio on the Forbes 30 Under 30, Games & Apps
source
please give me comments thanks
0 comments:
Post a Comment