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The Summly deal makes no sense

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Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#201

Post by mcantelon »

kyro wrote: post #123

For some who need perspective: Right now, somewhere in the world, a child is being born into an uberly rich family. That child will grow up to inherit millions for absolutely no work. He'll live the good life full of yachts and private jets. Right now, somewhere in the world, there is a party happening full of gorgeous wealthy people who need not lift a finger to attain the luxuries that they have. Their success is o…

>I took the entire post as one rooted in envy and bitterness

I took it as looking objectively at the deal, something that no mainstream press coverage of the Summly aquisition I've seen does.

Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#202

Post by res0nat0r »

chatmasta wrote: post #129
kyro wrote: post #123

For some who need perspective: Right now, somewhere in the world, a child is being born into an uberly rich family. That child will grow up to inherit millions for absolutely no work. He'll live the good life full of yachts and private jets. Right now, somewhere in the world, there is a party happening full of gorgeous wealthy people who need not lift a finger to attain the luxuries that they have. Their success is o…

Where did the article make any mention of jealousy or bitterness (other than the "hurt feelings" of Yahoo's engineers)? The article describes the stupidity of this acquisition from a business perspective. The fact that your comment has received the most upvotes indicates that people generally agree with your sentiment that nobody should be bitter or jealous. Yet nobody is suggesting any bitterness or jealousy... So w…

Simply because of the fact that in the first sentence that it mentions that he is 17 years old. Companies get acquired all of the time every day, but those don't warrant posts on HN mentioning how young the employees are. Hence the jealousy.

Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#203

Post by phillmv »

nsxwolf wrote: post #195
phillmv wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I get down about how unfair that is from time to time, but there's nothing you can really do about it, other than focus on your work. I regret upvoting you prior to finishing your post. This is bullshit. Of course we can do something about it. We're members of a society, and if we collectively think something is bullshit, we can do something about it. I'm tired of people looking at these absurd inequities and shrugg…

I'm confused. Are you saying this kid should have his $30M (or whatever he gets out of the deal) taken away from him, because you perceive he didn't earn it?

No.

I'm saying is maybe increase high end income taxes, maybe look into the viability of higher capital gains taxes, maybe find and create some kind of disincentive for companies to be bailing out VCs.

Find some way to even the playing field. I'm sorry, but you don't need to have come from Stanford to be smart enough to work at Yahoo! or Google or etc.

Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#204

Post by jiggy2011 »

kyro wrote: post #123

For some who need perspective: Right now, somewhere in the world, a child is being born into an uberly rich family. That child will grow up to inherit millions for absolutely no work. He'll live the good life full of yachts and private jets. Right now, somewhere in the world, there is a party happening full of gorgeous wealthy people who need not lift a finger to attain the luxuries that they have. Their success is o…

I agree, however it is important to consider how we pick the people we choose to hold up as examples and who we are holding them up to.

With the traditional bigCo job market in the tank there is a push right now to get young people interested in entrepreneurship so stories like these make excellent narrative supporting that.

So you hear stuff like "bootstrap your company!" , "Be your own boss!" , "Be a risk taker!" and this message is being pushed to everyone, including those on the lower rungs of society.

I know a few people who bootstrapped reasonably successful businesses and have been asked to give talks on how anybody can do it and how they started with no investment and nothing more than $50 in their bank account etc.

Problem is that most of these guys had backgrounds that allowed for risk taking. They had families who were not necessarily uber wealthy but were quite happy to subsidise them for often over a year for things like living expenses and keeping their car on the road. The narratives often don't mention these sorts of factors.

Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#205

Post by jetti »

res0nat0r wrote: post #202
chatmasta wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did the article make any mention of jealousy or bitterness (other than the "hurt feelings" of Yahoo's engineers)? The article describes the stupidity of this acquisition from a business perspective. The fact that your comment has received the most upvotes indicates that people generally agree with your sentiment that nobody should be bitter or jealous. Yet nobody is suggesting any bitterness or jealousy... So w…

Simply because of the fact that in the first sentence that it mentions that he is 17 years old. Companies get acquired all of the time every day, but those don't warrant posts on HN mentioning how young the employees are. Hence the jealousy.

Because there is a fact mentioned that is out of the ordinary compared to other acquisitions, that makes it jealousy?

Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#206

Post by pbreit »

gavanwoolery wrote: post #157
larrik wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the point was that Yahoo, a public company, was throwing away 30 million for no apparent gain.

Actually this is a very common scheme in Silicon Valley -- public companies "throwing away" money on relatively worthless startups. It is a good way to siphon money out of the stock market and into the pockets of VCs and founders -- and I would not be surprised if the person who pushes the acquisition gets a cut of the money too, or other "favors" in the future. The company knows its going to can the product and the…

It might be something like that but with less malice. First, Summly and the entrepreneur are far from worthless. But to your point, a bunch of decent angel investors just got a pretty nice check from Yahoo. The "deal guy" builds some reputation but unlikely benefits monetarily in any nefarious way.

I think the OP sentiment and many comments here are mostly classic HN resentment of success.

Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#207

Post by pbhjpbhj »

newbie12 wrote: post #138
kyro wrote: post #123

For some who need perspective: Right now, somewhere in the world, a child is being born into an uberly rich family. That child will grow up to inherit millions for absolutely no work. He'll live the good life full of yachts and private jets. Right now, somewhere in the world, there is a party happening full of gorgeous wealthy people who need not lift a finger to attain the luxuries that they have. Their success is o…

Bitter and jealous is no way to go through life. All of these guys executed on their project or have specialized knowledge. The pie is not zero-sum, and we live in the greatest, most fair time in human history.

>the greatest, most fair time in human history //

I think that's far from truthful.

The fairest time would be before [mass] land ownership, when anyone could stay with their tribal group or, should they choose, set off on their own and find land a-plenty to hunt/develop/farm as they see fit.

Hard times, sure; but that sort of situation seems most fair to me.

Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#208

Post by cududa »

L0j1k wrote: post #15

What I read in this piece of news (though not really any article in particular) was: "Yahoo spent 30 million to attract the attention of high school kids"...

Is there anything inherently wrong with that? After High School I had my pick of tech companies and projects to join. And frankly, a good position in yahoo working with someone like Nick and Marisa Mayer seems pretty fun to me.

Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#209

Post by rhizome »

itsprofitbaron wrote: post #155

Normally whenever an acquisition happens, I avoid these types of posts on HN because there are often people in the comments (and even in the posts themselves) calling out the acquired company saying “I could have done this” or “Acquirer could have built Acquired Company in a day” but, this one deserves a reply. The reason why this deserves a reply is that the OP’s post does not really contain any facts rather, it con…

"Exit to Yahoo" has a certain "Human Centipede" imagery to it.

Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#210

Post by maxbrown »

Evbn wrote: post #167
patmcguire wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to be strange 80 years from now when Web 2.0 billionaires are old money. "Oh, I don't have to work. Grandfather made a Facebook game."

One hopes selfishness and legacy, and in some cases, idealism, overcome genetics, and those billionaires give their money to others instead of their spawn.

http://givingpledge.org/ being the relevant reference here.
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