When a Hong Kong billionaire emailed a London tech startup to inquire about investing, he didn't realize its entire workforce consisted of a single kid working in his bedroom. Meet the 18-year-old WSJ. Magazine Technology Innovator of 2013 who became an overnight millionaire by inventing an app that may revolutionize how we read on the go
By SETH STEVENSON
Nov. 6, 2013 7:47 p.m. ET
GOING MOBILE | D'Aloisio, who turns 18 this month, is the mastermind behind Summly, a summarization app that sold to Yahoo! earlier this year for a reported $30 million. Photography by David Bailey
UPON HEARING, IN MARCH of this year, reports that a 17-year-old schoolboy had sold a piece of software to Yahoo! for $30 million, you might well have entertained a few preconceived notions about what sort of child this must be. A geeky specimen, no doubt. A savant with zero interests outside writing lines of code. A twitchy creature, prone to mumbling, averse to eye contact.
Entrepreneur and founder of Summly, Nick D'Aloisio, is WSJ. Magazine's Technology Innovator of the Year.
Thus it's rather a shock when you first encounter Nick D'Aloisio striding into London's Bar Boulud restaurant, firmly shaking hands and proceeding to outline his entrepreneurial vision. To imagine him in person, picture a Silicon Valley CEO blessed with an easy manner and 97th percentile media skills. Picture a guy who can confidently expound (while maintaining steady eye contact) on topics ranging from Noam Chomsky's theories to the science of neural networks to the immigrant mind-set to the Buddhist concept of jnana. And now picture this fellow trapped inside the gangly body of a British teen who might easily be mistaken for a member of the pop boy band One Direction—clad in a hipster T-shirt beneath a fitted blazer, hair swooping over his forehead, taking bites of a cheeseburger between bold pronouncements.
The app D'Aloisio designed, Summly, compresses long pieces of text into a few representative sentences. When he released an early iteration, tech observers realized that an app that could deliver brief, accurate summaries would be hugely valuable in a world where we read everything—from news stories to corporate reports—on our phones, on the go. The app attracted the interest of investors around the world, ranging from Hollywood celebrities to Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, the wealthiest man in Asia.
In 2011, at age 15, D'Aloisio closed a seed round of funding from Li Ka-shing. A year later, Summly launched, and within a month it had attracted 500,000 users and became the number-one news app in 28 countries. The Yahoo! sale capped off a remarkable run for someone not yet out of high school. But it's not mere technological savvy that sets D'Aloisio apart. Since long before he could shave, he has been driven by an intense curiosity and a desire to make some sort of mark on the tech world. Not just to create but to build and, yes, to monetize.
He's lately begun taking meetings with the likes of Marissa Mayer and Rupert Murdoch. (Murdoch is chairman of News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal.) Though D'Aloisio's net worth at this point is merely eye-popping, not obscene, in his own youthful way he seems every bit as formidable as relative gray-hairs like 27-year-old Tumblr founder David Karp or 29-year-old Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg. "He captivates a room," says Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital, an early backer of Summly. "He is incredibly self-aware for his age."
BOY WONDER | D'Aloisio, age 13, working at his laptop. Courtesy Nicholas D'Aloisio
D'ALOISIO BEGAN designing iPhone apps nearly the moment the app store opened in 2008. He was 12 years old, working on a Mac in his bedroom in the London district of Wimbledon. Because he was too young, he signed up for the Apple developer's license using his father's name. He'd taken no formal computer science classes at school, and neither of his parents (Diana and Lou, a lawyer and a business executive, respectively) knew much about tech. Instead, he learned how to program almost entirely by himself, scouring websites and watching instructional videos.
His first coding effort resulted in an app that played audio snippets from speeches by his idol, Steve Jobs, whose unauthorized biography he'd recently devoured. "It was rejected by Apple for every reason," D'Aloisio says now, laughing. "Copyrighted audio, poor functionality, too simple." Another early design allowed users to touch a picture of wood, producing a knocking sound. A third transformed a smartphone screen into a treadmill for your fingers. That one earned about $120 in sales on its first day.
When he wasn't programming or doing schoolwork, D'Aloisio began to fill his spare time reading about natural language processing. He'd studied languages as diverse as Latin and Mandarin, and became fascinated by concepts like grammatical frameworks, morpheme parsing and the 1960s work of the linguist Richard Montague. "He's my favorite," D'Aloisio enthuses. "He theorized that natural language could be described like a syntactical programming language."
As he scanned the Internet for knowledge, D'Aloisio decided that what he really needed was a better way to determine, at a glance, what was worth reading. He envisioned a summarization tool that used language theory to give a meaningful synopsis in fewer than 400 characters.
Appearing on the Today show in March, after the Yahoo! sale Peter Kramer/NBC Newswire via Getty Images
"There are two ways of doing natural language processing: statistical or semantic," D'Aloisio explains. A semantic system attempts to figure out the actual meaning of a text and translate it succinctly. A statistical system—the type D'Aloisio used for Summly—doesn't bother with that; it keeps phrases and sentences intact and figures out how to pick a few that best encapsulate the entire work. "It ranks and classifies each sentence, or phrase, as a candidate for inclusion in the summary. It's very mathematical. It looks at frequencies and distributions, but not at what the words mean."
An early iteration of Summly, called Trimit, was featured in Apple's app store in July 2011 on a list of new and noteworthy offerings. There it was noticed by the influential Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch and quickly came to the attention of an investment group led by Li Ka-shing. When D'Aloisio was approached over email by Li's people at Horizons Ventures, he was only 15—and so far mostly managed to conceal that fact. He'd never met with anyone in the tech world face to face, and the information he'd listed when he registered Trimit spoke only vaguely of a London technology company. It failed to mention that the company's management and technology teams—in fact, its entire workforce—consisted of a single kid in a suburban bedroom who wasn't yet old enough to drive.
"I thought I was going to sell the app in the Apple store for a pound or two each, and then I'd use the money to buy a new computer," says D'Aloisio. "I'd never had any contact from an investor before. And now here's an email supposedly from a Hong Kong billionaire. It sounded dodgy. I didn't respond the first time. They had to email me again." D'Aloisio was accompanied by his mother and father ("they were a bit bewildered, it was kind of insane") as he took a meeting with Horizons Ventures's representatives in London in August 2011. The meeting ended with D'Aloisio receiving a seed investment of $300,000.
“"I'd never had contact from an investor. And now here's an email supposedly from a Hong Kong billionaire. It sounded dodgy. I didn't respond."”
——Nick D'Aloisio
As fall arrived and school began, D'Aloisio felt immense pressure to deliver for his backers. He needed to whip his algorithm into better shape, so he contracted a team of Israeli coders who specialize in natural language processing. Searching on Google, he found and hired a retired professor living in Thailand who'd written seminal books on the topic. "He became our main scientist," says D'Aloisio. "He now works at Yahoo! in the Sunnyvale office."
Meanwhile, he was being ferried around the globe to tech conferences, getting introduced to other potential investors. D'Aloisio made a remarkable impression on everyone he crossed paths with. "He has an eerie maturity," says Andrew Halls, headmaster of the King's College School in Wimbledon, which D'Aloisio has attended since he was 11. "He has an extraordinary articulateness in the face of situations that, for me, even as a 54-year-old, might be terrifying."
"I was blown away by him," Kushner recalls. "The first time I interacted with him was at News Corp, when he was meeting with Murdoch, and I was looped in to provide perspective. Nick described the vision of what he was trying to accomplish. And he was providing insight to Rupert." D'Aloisio's stage presence, coupled with the deep-pocketed credibility brought by Li, attracted a large group of benefactors to Summly, including Ashton Kutcher, Yoko Ono and Stephen Fry.
D'ALOISIO HAS BEEN quoted opining that "time is the new currency." It's the driving notion behind Summly. It's also a strangely wise observation from a 17-year-old. At that age, many of us had more time on our hands than we knew how to fill without plummeting into severe boredom. It's easy to forget—conversing over lunch in a London café or strolling through the Tate Modern—that D'Aloisio was born in 1995 and has not yet graduated from high school. Or that he still lives in his childhood bedroom, in a cozy upper-middle-class home. As I chat with his parents, he excuses himself to work on his computer. Slouching down the hall in his stocking feet, hems of his skinny jeans brushing the hallway carpet, it is the most kidlike you will ever see him.
D'Aloisio's parents came to England from Australia. His father, Lou, has worked in commodities for BP and Morgan Stanley, while his mother, Diana, is a corporate lawyer who also serves as her son's contractual representative. They always knew D'Aloisio was an extremely inquisitive child. "But he was our first, so we didn't think it was anything out of the ordinary," says Diana. (D'Aloisio's brother, Matthew, is 14.) They stress that despite his impressive accomplishments, he remains a normal kid. Or at least as normal as a kid can be when he's making offhand references to Markov models and stochastic processes. "He still goes out on weekends, still goes to parties," says Diana. "He's got a girlfriend. All the things you do at 17."
D'Aloisio himself strives to maintain a bubble of normalcy. He dates the same girl he did before the whirlwind hit. And though he's stopped attending school—he's too busy to sit in class while overseeing Summly's development—he still gets his work from his teachers and meets with them regularly. He cherishes the fact that his circle of friends knows little of his life as a budding industrialist. When I met him, he was about to head to Greece for a weeklong vacation with a pack of high school pals.
For now, D'Aloisio isn't touching the money. "I'm too young to appreciate the value of it," he insists. "I don't have a mortgage, I'm 17. To me, a hundred pounds is a lot. Take that as a benchmark." Though he's not allowed to comment on Summly's sale price, when pressed he allows that he might one day like to deploy his newfound riches as an angel investor. No one around him seems to think there's a danger that the money will ruin him or that he'll be tempted to spend the rest of his life dissipating on a beach. "He's pretty well grounded. You wouldn't believe how frugal he is," says Diane. "He's got a great engine," says Lou. "He won't stop at this."
Perhaps the more interesting question is what drove Yahoo! to shell out that reported $30 million for a single app. To be sure, Summly's text-compression abilities dovetail nicely with Yahoo!'s new focus on mobile utilities. Along with Yahoo!'s $1.1 billion purchase of the blogging service Tumblr and the launch of an acclaimed new weather app, the Summly move marks a commitment to owning the tiny real estate of the smartphone screen—and serving advertising to the youthful eyeballs that tend to gravitate to mobile devices.
But there's little doubt this was also an "acqui-hire," in which the person being bought is just as important as the product. D'Aloisio is now working full time in Yahoo!'s London office, and his youth, his energy and his undeniable it-factor have brought the formerly musty tech giant a much-needed injection of cool. Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer —who lends the company some of her own it-factor—praises his "commitment to excellence in design and simplicity" and says she is "inspired by the creativity and tenacity Nick brings to his work."
While D'Aloisio spends 80 percent of his work time retooling and improving Summly (which has already been integrated into Yahoo!'s iPhone app), the other 20 percent is devoted to imagining the expansive challenges he'll take on next. He predicts there will be summarization programs that do for video what Summly does for the written word. He has grand thoughts about using technology to aid learning and would like to help fellow autodidacts while disrupting the old educational models.
As for his own education: He's weighing whether to enroll in university in England or maybe the U.S. to be closer to Silicon Valley. Or perhaps he'll skip college entirely and just focus on his work. "I absolutely want to start another company," he says. "Serial entrepreneurs get addicted to creation. I want to be passionate. I feel really bad when I'm not doing something new."
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