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The Summly deal makes no sense

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Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#141

Post by granitepail »

wangarific wrote: post #64
scholia wrote: post #58

Last year's press release had quotes from Daniel Ek (Spotify) and Mary Meeker, and said: "Summly is backed by several investors, including Horizons Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Betaworks, Brian Chesky, Hosain Rahman, Joanna Shields, Josh Kushner, Mark Pincus, Matt Mullenweg, Stephen Fry, Troy Carter, Yoko Ono and many more." Not exactly a teen-programmer-in-mother's-basement story...

Yahoo just paid $30mm for an unknown technology and a fresh face to parade around, they would appreciate it if you didn't start poking holes in the narrative. Thank you

So you're assuming they didn't do their due diligence? That they threw $30MM at a company they knew nothing about? Has anyone in this thread gone so far as to even try the product?

Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#142

Post by lubujackson »

alex1 wrote: post #3
nicholassmith wrote: post #2

It makes perfect sense, they've got some technology out of it, some people who understand mobile, and a nice big headline. Worth $30m of my money? Probably not. Worth $30m of Yahoo's money? Maybe, they're not likely to have decided to spend that much on an acquihire without board approval really are they. Unless they Zuckerberg'd it and thought it was better to seek forgiveness.

The summarization tech isn't owned by Summly. It's owned by SRI International and was licensed to Summly. Maybe a large chunk of the reported $30 million was actually used to acquire that technology from SRI?

Here's my conspiracy theory - Summly has a very nice contract with SRI that gives them full usage forever and is transferable to Yahoo. Yahoo tries to license the tech from SRI directly and realize it will cost them 20 mil a year based on their heavy usage. So instead they buy Summly for the SRI tech at a discount.

Annnd that's about the only way this makes sense to em.

Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#143

Post by EwanToo »

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…

Lots of the comments below read like they're full of bitterness and jealousy to me, I suspect the comment is targeted at them rather than the original article.

Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#145

Post by mgkimsal »

easytiger wrote: post #70
mgkimsal wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More to the point, I've no doubt that some Yahoo employees have likely investigated this sort of tech and built prototypes, only to get shot down by middle management. I've no special insight at Yahoo (had a couple friends work there) but for any sufficiently large company with employees as talented as Yahoo (YUI, YQL, etc) this has surely happened. So... to have your idea/prototype/demo shot down, then later $30m sp…

> investigated this sort of tech and built prototypes, only to get shot down by middle management. Bingo. in fairness the culture there prob prevented people from even feeling this innovative and self motivated. I've worked in a couple of large orgs where i've told management about great little cheap ideas that just get ummed and ahhed and then forgotten (despite in 2 instances using my own free time to make a protot…

No doubt, and that's part of the legacy of having "hey, we're a media company!" leadership from many moons ago.

There used to be an incredible mix of talent at yahoo, and they squandered a lot of that.

What's also interesting is that no one (yet? - maybe I missed it?) seemed to mention the Yahoo 'kiss of death' - how many acquisitions have they done that end up never seeing the light of day, or get shut down? Brickhouse seemed like it might be successful, but culturally that didn't seem to work out too well over time.

Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#146

Post by patmcguire »

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…

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."

Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#147

Post by mikecane »

thiagoperes wrote: post #136

Let's say you're Yahoo: You're making a huge effort towards mobile, with no apparent success. You see a small team that built a great product, that fits mobile nicely and that has a huge user base. BTW, You have a lot of money. A 17yr old boy did something that lots of highly skilled engineers, managers, designer couldn't do, and that you pay a lot of money. If you have the chance to acquire a great product with a hu…

>>>A 17yr old boy did something that lots of highly skilled engineers, managers, designer couldn't do

Well, that might be stretching. As Comments elsewhere have pointed out, in a large corporation the very same idea might have been done and shot down internally. There might be a few people at Yahoo going, "Wait. WTF! That's what we showed them last year! And it was better!"

Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#148

Post by orangethirty »

larrik wrote: post #128
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 thought the point was that Yahoo, a public company, was throwing away 30 million for no apparent gain.

The are buying traction. That's 30 million dollars worth of it. It could make them back that much money by getting people to start using Yahoo again.

Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#149

Post by macspoofing »

minimax wrote: post #115

In 2005 Yahoo buys Delicious, a bookmarking site, for between $15MM - $30MM. Summly was acquired for a reported $30MM. Delicious had 5MM users, and let's face it how much "CS beef" goes into a bookmark sharing site. Summly claims to have 1MM downloads. The difference between Delicious' 5MM users and Summly's 1MM is a factor of five but the order of magnitude is roughly the same. Joshua Schachter is highly respected a…

Delicious in 2005 had a huge level of excitement surrounding it. It was also the beginnings of "Web 2.0" and tag-mania, and Delicious was positioned nicely. Paying $15M-$30M for Delicious in 2005 made sense. Like the OP, I don't really understand this purchase.

Re: The Summly deal makes no sense

#150

Post by corresation »

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…

That is exactly it: People whose first reaction was jealousy are now projecting jealousy onto everyone else. I'm not jealous of this individual at all (though I, like most, would love to be in the same position). But being professionals in this field we naturally do try to figure out where the money is at (trying to yield hints at how we can get some of that), and when it is irrational it confuses and potentially angers us. This ridiculous canard that we can never critique a story without being jealous is obnoxious.
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