17 Year Old Nick D’Aloisio Becomes A Multi-Millionaire with Summly App
Nick D’Aloisio, a 17 year old student sold his Summly app to Yahoo, Inc. for $30 million split between cash and Yahoo Stock. It is reported that while he is finishing up his high school studies he will also start working in Yahoo’s London office.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The ironic thing in this story is that Nick wasn’t even born when Yahoo was founded in 1994 and is now a multi-millionaire and has a job at Yahoo!
The Summly app (formerly known as Trimit) has been around forever in Internet years having launched in December, 2011 when Nick was the ripe old age of 15. In a nutshell the Summly app basically takes Internet information you’re interested in and breaks it down in to readable mobile device-sized chunks for you to consume easily, and to share with others socially if you’re so inclined. The brilliance in the app is that Nick’s algorithm literally “reads” the full text and turns it into human readable summaries all automatically, thus becoming a major time saver for the ever information-bombarded mobile user.
Nick was obviously the technical brains behind the success of the app because it works exactly as advertised and is taking the aggregation market by storm. He did have some business help along the way though. Nick raised his original seed money from billionaire investor Li Ka-shing and his investment company Horizons Ventures. It’s also reported that Wendi Murdoch and Ashton Kutcher were also investors in the app. This sort of reminds me of something that might occur on ABC’s Shark Tank where people come with great business ideas (and sometimes not so great ideas) and pitch to very connected multi-millionaires. If the pitch is successful, and they end up forming a partnership, they automatically receive all of the benefits of being well connected and short cut their time to success drastically. The lesson in this for up and coming entrepreneurs is to create your product or service and then network and partner with already successful people.
Sources: The New York Times, Time Business & Money, TechCrunch and Forbes
