Everyone now knows about this app. For $30000000 they pulled off the best marketing campaign ever.
They're shutting it down.
The Summly deal makes no sense
61–70 of 260 posts
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#62I feel this would be an appropriate subject for a Dilbert comic. Storyline is that someone accidentally left the dot out of $300000.00 to make it $30000000 and then everyone else went along with it for fear of looking stupid.
A decimal point? I always mess up some mundane detail!
Peter Gibbons: So you guys are gonna fire Mike and Samir, and you're gonna give me more money?
Bob Porter: [nods] Uh-huh.
Peter Gibbons: Wow.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did find that sentence a little strange myself. I didn't think jealousy from the writer, my first thought was "why should the employees be jealous?" Is it the employees of Summify, didn't they all receive a nice payment ($1m each)? And I can't imagine any of the Yahoo employees being jealous, well, perhaps, but I doubt it is the first time Yahoo have made a millionaire teenager. Even if they are, let them use it as…
Obviously the writer means yahoo employees. Maybe not jealousy but certainly frustration. Wouldn't you feel frustrated if your company spent $30 million on what is basically the face of a hype machine especially when your company wants to integrate the hype machine's "tech" into your products even though it would probably take a few days to get similar results in house?
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 spent on essentially what you'd offered the company for free... that's gotta be frustrating.
Again, pure speculation that this had happened, but I'd be surprised if no one internal to Yahoo had floated/demos something like this before. They certainly could have bought some of the hype (stephen fry, etc) during a rebrand. But... instead, they buy from outside vs using and promoting internally.
Once more - just speculation, but that's were I would suspect frustration would come from.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#64Last 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
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#65From the article, Let's ignore the hurt feelings that our employees will have about making a 17 year-old a millionaire. The price tag for this company aside, am I the only one that detects a hint of jealousy in some of the comments that seem to imply "but he's too young to be a millionaire!"?
I read the entire thing as someone being jealous and trying to explain that away by picking at the deal.
Sometimes you just want to make sense of something that seems flabbergastingly stupid. Hell, it's Yahoo's money to burn, but it's not jealousy, it's confusion.
It would be interesting to read any sort of explanation, not that we'll get one.
But this acquisition is eerily reminiscent of about.me's and is getting a similar level of scorn from us.
Big, dead, web 1.0 company purchases virtually worthless startup for no apparent reason. Site is like almost any HN weekend project that pops up here on Mondays. Confused!
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#66Any open source equivalents to Summly's "pure rocket science" summarization technology?
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
With 17? Hardly.
Wait til you are 60. Then you will start saying "With 25/30/35 hardly". He just sold a company at the age of 17 to a huge corporation for a truck load of money. Unless he's got loans up to his ears I reckon he must be a lot smarter at business than I am.
I'm pretty sure that he is not the only person accountable for the sale. I would even guess that's it is far from it. He's backed up by many people as someone said in the comments.
Can you actually sign any of these papers if you're a minor ?
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#68I feel this would be an appropriate subject for a Dilbert comic. Storyline is that someone accidentally left the dot out of $300000.00 to make it $30000000 and then everyone else went along with it for fear of looking stupid.
Or Project Jaberwocky from Better Off Ted.
It is so rare to see a reference to that wonderful, tragically short-lived show. Maybe it was just the right amount of pent-up angst, but that show spoke to me.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read the entire thing as someone being jealous and trying to explain that away by picking at the deal.
Sometimes you just want to make sense of something that seems flabbergastingly stupid. Hell, it's Yahoo's money to burn, but it's not jealousy, it's confusion. It would be interesting to read any sort of explanation, not that we'll get one. But this acquisition is eerily reminiscent of about.me's and is getting a similar level of scorn from us. Big, dead, web 1.0 company purchases virtually worthless startup for no a…
Heck, I read HN and had no idea about Summly, went trough my radar.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obviously the writer means yahoo employees. Maybe not jealousy but certainly frustration. Wouldn't you feel frustrated if your company spent $30 million on what is basically the face of a hype machine especially when your company wants to integrate the hype machine's "tech" into your products even though it would probably take a few days to get similar results in house?
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 prototype).