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The moral of this story? Invest in the opposite of what Forbes says will go do.
Right after college I started consulting at an eCommerce company that had bought a 17 year old's website for over 1M. Had had built a gaming community site that had become very popular and they wanted the traffic. I thought the kid was just lucky until I was in a meeting with him. His thought process basically ran circles around everyone else in the room, some twice his age. I realized then, that there are kids, KIDS…
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What sort of signal though? Other than the mainstream media, pretty much anyone else with at least a clue seems to be confused by this acquisition.
well how much does it cost to get your company name on the front page of every tech site without allowing a massive data breach
I 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.
In other words, it's not repeatable. This is nothing new. It happens all the time.
From 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!"?
That having been said, it is a bit rich for Vibhu Norby to be concerned about the hurt feelings of employees by making a 17 year old a millionaire. That is an incredibly, incredibly, incredibly, narrow area of the social consequences of wealth to focus on. I have a hard time taking such a myopic point at face value.
What baffles me most though, is that Yahoo would conduct a CS type interview to the employees, failing some of them in the process (if that bit is true). I have over 16 years of real hard world experience and I would never dream of passing a CS type exam. Is that really a gauge of excellence?
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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
Actually it now looks more and more like some sort of elaborate kick-back scheme for the investors. "Your YHOO stock has sunk below the waterline, so here's something to sweeten the pot."
The founder might be brilliant and I could be wrong about this whole relationship building with investors to try and get attraction nonsense.
I once heard Joshua Schachter describe this kind of acquisition by a public company as "somebody in corp-dev falls in love with your product and has to have it." In other words, it's not repeatable. This is nothing new. It happens all the time.
Counting on luck, of course, is not a reliable business plan. Whether these folks deserved all the money they got or not is really a moot point - your best shot at success remains to put yourself in a position where you deserve it. You may still not achieve it, or you may grossly overachieve it, but still the best way to go overall.