One of Yahoo’s newest employees is a 17-year-old high school student in Britain. As of Monday, he is one of its richest, too, Brian Stelter reports on Tuesday in The New York Times.
That student, Nick D’Aloisio, a programming whiz who wasn’t even born when Yahoo was founded in 1994, sold his news-reading app, Summly, to Yahoo on Monday for a sum said to be in the tens of millions of dollars. Yahoo said it would incorporate his algorithmic invention, which takes long-form stories and shortens them for readers using smartphones, in its own mobile apps, with Mr. D’Aloisio’s help.
“I’ve still got a year and a half left at my high school,†he said in a telephone interview on Monday, but, partly to abide by the company’s new and much-debated policy that prohibits working from home, he will make arrangements to test out of his classes and work from the Yahoo office in London.
Mr. D’Aloisio declined to comment on the price paid by Yahoo (the technology-oriented Web site All Things D pegged the purchase price at about $30 million), and he described himself not as the majority owner of Summly but as its largest shareholder.
Summly’s other investors, improbably enough, included Wendi Murdoch, Ashton Kutcher and Yoko Ono. The most important one was Li Ka-shing, the Hong Kong billionaire, whose investment fund supported Mr. D’Aloisio’s idea early on, before it was even called Summly.
“They took a gamble on me when I was a 15-year-old,†Mr. D’Aloisio said, by providing seed financing that let him hire employees and lease office space. The fund read about Mr. D’Aloisio’s early-stage app on the Silicon Valley news site TechCrunch, found his e-mail address and startled him with a message expressing interest.
The others signed up later. “Because it was my first time around, people just wanted to help,†he said.
