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Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

I don't really buy this argument. There are reasons for acqui-hires, but it's usually to bring on board a strong existing team, a world-class domain expert, or a tech base with employee support.

Summly was none of those. They got one 17 year old dev, and a fairly-decent product they made basically no use of. I don't know how good D'Aloisio is, but he's not that good. Especially without the kind of status and support that could turn out a bold new product within Yahoo.

I know nobody wants to go work for Yahoo, but they spent 30 million dollars. Hire 10 self-directed, expert devs for $1,000,000/year. I promise you can find good people at that price.

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I'm one of two ex yahoo engs who integrated Summply summarization algo into Yahoo home page. More specifically it was (is?) a large personalization platform that would carefully pick which news to show you and in what order. It only took us a couple of days. It was mostly invisible for an outsider because Yahoo already had a decent summarization algorithm, but was a clear improvement.

While I don't know if all these dictionaries and calibrated weights of parameters were really worth $15M, I'm positive that such an IP was major reason of the acquisition.

> Summly was none of those. They got one 17 year old dev, and a fairly-decent product they made basically no use of. I don't know how good D'Aloisio is, but he's not that good. Especially without the kind of status and support that could turn out a bold new product within Yahoo.

Summly was not D'Aloiso's product in terms of development. He may have had the idea, but the technology was SRI's (the same guys who developed Siri), and IIRC, Summly had exclusive use of that. So please stop demeaning it as "some 17-year-old's app".

I'm... not sure where I was demeaning it that way? I certainly never said the quoted thing, and I didn't intend it.

I don't think that Summly was a bad product, and I don't think D'Aloisio is a bad dev. I specified him alone because as far as I know he's the only one Yahoo acquired - SRI is great but Yahoo didn't acquire their devs or exclusive rights to their tech.

The question at hand is whether Yahoo got their money's worth, and I'm claiming that they didn't bring on enough relevant tech or expertise to justify the expense. That holds even if Summly, SRI, and D'Aloisio are all fantastic.

> I don't know how good D'Aloisio is, but he's not that good

What does that even mean?

It means that if you're acqui-hiring, you're paying a massive premium to get good talent you couldn't get another way. I'm saying that nothing about Summly suggested that it was worth spending $30,000,000 for 18 months of the sole employee's time.

I wrote it that way to point out that I'm not calling D'Aloisio a bad hire or a bad developer. He's got a good reputation, and Yahoo News Digest (his big project there) was actually really well received.

Rather, it wasn't worth the commitment Yahoo made for him, because he wasn't taking on the kind of sweeping rework or major new project needed to help with the death spiral. It fit into the general pattern of grabbing shiny new things at high prices, without really chasing the outcomes in users or revenue that might have mattered.

That it doesn't matter how good they are; their skill could not explain the reason to spend that much money.

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