
World's Youngest VC-Funded Entrepreneur? - velodrome
http://www.inc.com/maeghan-ouimet/worlds-youngest-vc-funded-entrepreneur.html
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citricsquid
The idea isn't particularly unique and it wasn't particularly well executed
when the first version was built but with the investment he was able to hire
some talented people and from what I've seen the application (as is available
now) is excellent, however it seems that he is now primarily their advertising
vehicle. He's being used to market the app and it's certainly working, it's
getting them huge amounts of press compared to the other companies in the same
space.

Stephen Fry is in the advertisement video for Summly, he tweeted it to his ~5
million followers: <https://twitter.com/stephenfry/status/264066858225905664>

The Summly team: <http://summly.com/about.html>

edit: oh apparently Stephen Fry is an investor, that explains the "free"
video.

edit edit: I wonder how he feels about his age being such a huge part of the
stories now, back in August 2011 he said this:

    
    
        So he kept it under wraps. "It was a conscious decision 
        to not disclose my age to Apple and the media," he says, 
        because he wanted "Trimit to be judged on its own merit, 
        and not the story of its creator being 15." 
    

From: [http://www.fastcompany.com/1772823/15-year-old-creator-
trimi...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1772823/15-year-old-creator-trimit-app-
makes-regular-old-entrepreneurs-seem-slackers)

~~~
petercooper
On the latter point, that's just playing coy. If you have an advantage that
people might criticize, you play it down while still revealing it. It's the
old "I'm not going to talk about [fact]" (but you just said it!) rhetorical
device.

~~~
Centigonal
It'd probably be obnoxious for me to mention here that the word you're looking
for is "paralipsis," so I won't.

~~~
petercooper
I have a horrible memory for these terms so I both appreciate your humor and
helpfulness ;-)

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MichaelApproved
The Summly app doesn't create summaries and I don't think algorithms will ever
create good summaries.

Nick D’Alosio deserves a ton of credit. He's smart, creative, young,
ambitious, pulled together a good team and created a great looking app but I
don't believe this will solve the problem.

Before I created Skim That[1], a human powered news summarizing website, I
looked into how Summly and other TL;DR algorithms worked to decide which
direction I wanted to go in. I concluded that, even if you create the best
algorithm that takes the best sentences from a story, you're still going to
end up with a poorly written and out of context paragraph.

Try it yourself. Read a story and try to manually find a few sentences that
best summarize it. Then, without rewriting anything, try to put those
sentences into a paragraph or two. You'll find that you end up with a
confusing summary that's difficult to read.

The amount of words Summly limited itself to (one iPhone screen worth) is
brilliant. It keeps things simple and easy to skim through but what's produced
by the service is so short that it should be called a "tease" not a "summary".

Of course, the Summly app does hit the nail on the head with a summary every
once in a while but this hit or miss style makes for a bad experience.

Summarizing algorithms aren't the automation challenge, those will _never_
work right as demonstrated by the "try it yourself" challenge above. The real
automation challenge is rewriting the important sentences in such a way that
they make sense together and provide proper context.

On Skim That, I'm trying to solve the problem by crowd sourcing the
summarizing process and asking readers to summarize a story. I've gotten a few
people to give it a shot and several of those continue to summarize stories
every once in a while. My challenge is how to get people more interested in
participating and how to get search engine traffic to a website that goes
against many SEO principals.

[1] <http://skimthat.com>

Edit: Human or machine, I think the summary race is great for readers and
helps people be more informed. I wish Nick a lot of luck and hope that one of
us solves this problem soon.

~~~
petercooper
_I concluded that, even if you create the best algorithm that takes the best
sentences from a story, you're still going to end up with a poorly written and
out of context paragraph._

Even worse, many (most?) writers are pretty bad at this too. Writing summaries
has become one of my main jobs over the past couple of years and it's still
pretty tough with a lot of source material where a full read and comprehension
is required.

Algorithms currently suck as 'one size fits all' approaches for almost
anything, including curation and summarizing, but.. it's an interesting and
narrow enough problem space that some genuine AI or natural language
processing innovations could come out of it, so as you say, it'd be great to
see it come good.

~~~
MichaelApproved
_"a full read and comprehension is required"_

Exactly! Not only that but sometimes the original author does a poor job of
writing the article and a rewrite of the content is needed just to make the
story coherent.

Natural language is interesting and SEO guys are also working on rewriting
tools so they could repackage articles as OC.

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dmix
I may be cynical but show me a 16yr old who made a business with a million
dollar in _revenue_. Then I'll be impressed.

~~~
Firehed
A friend and I did about 30k in _profit_ at age 15 in '02-'03, and it would
have been way higher if we weren't having issues with merchant accounts. I
doubt it would have gone into the millions, but easily 100k-200k.

Finding a market and executing on an opportunity isn't that difficult of a
thing to do - the trick is finding one within your grasp. This was virtual
goods, so it required almost no upfront capital and very little development
and maintenance costs. It's no massively-scalable startup, but when your goal
is just to create a profitable lifestyle business, it isn't actually that
complicated.

~~~
asselinpaul
what did you do?

~~~
Firehed
Virtual goods for Diablo II.

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iamdave
First off, good luck young man! You've built something and attracted people to
your work, and it's paying off. Additionally, you realized your own
limitations and used the resources provided to build a better product by
hiring skilled developers and engineers, that should be commended.

Now.

 _The algorithm works by selecting words from a given article to build a
summary that will perfectly fit onto the screen of your iPhone--no more
scrolling to read or waiting to load._

I have a serious problem with this. On The Verge he made the statement that
the activity of scrolling was "horrific"[1]. Why? This is mainly personal
bias-as someone who carries serious nerdboners for long-form journalism-but I
don't think the problem with news on mobiles is something you solve by shrink
wrapping content so you don't have to move your finger a few inches on an
iPhone.

IMO the problem with reading content on mobile has already been addressed by
XKCD [2].

I have no problem with D'Aloisio wanting to change media for the better, to
make it more accessible, easier to digest and syndicate written content. I do
have reservations however about algorithmically summarizing news articles
because of a perceived notion that there is something wrong with reading long
articles.

Again, this is personal opinion.

\---

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/1/3583720/summly-nick-d-
aloi...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/1/3583720/summly-nick-d-aloisio)

[2] <http://xkcd.com/869/>

------
faramarz
I like Summrly. It came in to my attention when it was featured in the
Appstore as Editor's Choice.

I have been poking around Circa for the last two week as well and I prefer
this format better.

It's more playful, more to discover. It took a little bit to get used to the
gestures, but I like it.

I like this approach more than getting pushed updates on my pre-selected news
stories (how Circa works). Problem with Circa is that you have to make a
decision right then and there. You have to decide if you care to hear about
this story in the future or not. And the result is a) i subscribe to very
little subject or b) I over subscribe to many subjects and get overwhelmed
with updates, and this dilutes my interest in all of the subject.

But that's not how we generally read the Newsaper or any content for that
matter. We often read the side lines. the news before and after, or the
surrounding industries. That's the reason why I think Circa will have a hard
time converting me to a daily user of their app. Summrly on the other hand, i
load it 5 times a day.

Anyway, Hearing that a young entrepreneur is behind this is even more
impressive. Fantastic work!

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biscarch
I love that the age for starting such endeavors is getting lower and lower. If
more and more people are exposed to the possibility of creating their own
solutions (and fostering their own interests) from a younger and younger age,
it will become the kind of culture that will change the world.

~~~
ovi256
I think it's a return to historical standards. Teenage is a construct of the
modern age, which prolonged schooling more and more, keeping young people out
of active work life, to an extent that is detrimental both to these young
people and society, IMO. Historically, a male of 15-16 was a man, he could
work and get married to a girl even younger. Now, I'm not advocating teenage
marriage, but teenage implication in work life.

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brianchu
I actually downloaded and tried out the app for myself, and I liked it. While
an algorithm cannot best a human, this app seems to do a pretty good job at
summarizing the news. I think it's feasible - a large portion of any given
news article is typically spent expanding on a few main ideas that are
typically expressed in one or two sentences. Your typical 1000 word news
article follows a predictable narrative structure.

That being said, I found the whole user flow of swiping through sections to be
terribly unintuitive and confusing.

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larrys
As an aside it would be interesting to see the legal structure of this
transaction. At that age you can't (iirc) enter into a contract, at least not
in the US.

Obviously his parents would need to be involved in this. It's possible also
that one of the big draws for the investor was the obvious publicity potential
(for the venture) of funding someone 15 yrs old vs. someone who is (ho hum)
20. This type of angle plays well in the media.

~~~
citricsquid
I believe in the UK you can be a director of a company at 16 and you can hold
shares in a company at any age. I would guess that Nick has a registered
company and the investment is in that company, which probably has his parents
involved somehow in some nominal capacity.

edit: upon investigation it would appear that Summly Limited has his mother as
a director ("MS DIANA JULIA D'ALOISIO") and he is listed as secretary
("NICHOLAS D'ALOISIO-MONTILLA") -- search for "summly" via
<http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk> and then select the option to order
information.

edit edit: so from the filing the following is true:

Summly Limited has Nick's mother as a director along with the investors, he is
a secretary.

The company has 900,000 shares. 600,000 "Ordinary" are allocated to his mother
("DIANA JULIA D'ALOISIO") 120,000 "Series A Preferred" are allocated to
GERSHWIN INTERNATIONAL LIMITED and 180,000 "Series A Preferred" are allocated
to TWINHILLS LIMITED.

So it _seems_ that Nick has no actual stake in the company and is using his
mother as the proxy for his ownership.

edit edit edit: Something might be worth noting, the site lists "Summly Inc"
as the company responsible for Summly, not Summly Limited.

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tsurantino
While it's good that building technology is becoming so much more accessible
at a young age, you can see the ramifications and consequences of funding this
early when the entrepreneur in question says that he doesn't really know how
to build this into a company and, more importantly, he has other ideas that he
will probably much rather pursue.

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dmor
This is awesome, I am surprised someone this young hasn't received VC funding
previously. Whatever you think of the idea it isn't important, the person is
important and he is one to watch. Ideas change all the time, and if this
doesn't work he will have to change it. If it does work then all the negative
commenters can eat their words.

~~~
MichaelApproved
I bet younger people have been "funded" before but there should be a clear
definition to "VC funding" that guides this race.

What I mean is that it's easy for friends and family to "fund" a child's
project but that isn't a fair comparison to what Nick has done.

I'd suggest something like $250,000 from VC that isn't a friend or family
member. That would still qualify Nick's earlier round of funding and give us
something to rank others in this race to the youngest.

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vadimoss
having other ideas doesn't disqualify him from being a successful
entrepreneur. successful companies were built by a team, not a single person.
as long as the kid is able to gather bright people around he will sell this
eventually to facebook for $1b. it looks like some smart and much older folks
agreed on that. otherwise they wouldn't have invested.

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littlegiantcap
I wonder if there's issues with his age and owning a business? Can anyone
speak to this? Would his parents have to be involved?

~~~
petercooper
As a self employed sole trader, he could be any age (but it would be rather
difficult to take funding). To be a director of a corporation, he'd need to be
16 now (although prior to 2006 it was any age, with provisos).

British people become relatively emancipated at 16. You can leave school (I
did!), go to work, join the army, smoke, have sex (sadly, I didn't), and do
many things. Just not vote, drive, drink, and a few other things.

