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Comment by minimax | Hacker News Reader

In 2005 Yahoo buys Delicious, a bookmarking site, for between $15MM - $30MM. Summly was acquired for a reported $30MM. Delicious had 5MM users, and let's face it how much "CS beef" goes into a bookmark sharing site. Summly claims to have 1MM downloads. The difference between Delicious' 5MM users and Summly's 1MM is a factor of five but the order of magnitude is roughly the same. Joshua Schachter is highly respected as an entrepreneur and engineer within the HN community, but Nick D’Aloisio is considered just some lucky teenager.

The jealousy on display in the post and subsequent comments is, I think, glaringly obvious to anyone who would take a second to compare it to almost any other startup acquisition where the founder isn't a 17 year old.

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I think the assumption is, rightly or wrongly, that the 17 year old kid is unlikely to have done anything the rest of us couldn't have done. Whereas if he were an older more experienced developer, he would get the benefit of the doubt that maybe he had special something on offer that was worth Yahoo buying.

At least, that's what's going through my head.

EDIT:

If the assumption that the Summly codebase doesn't actually contain anything worth $30 million is true, then this purchase is all about branding. It's about fooling Wall Street into thinking Yahoo is revitalized and focused on new technology and talent.

When IMHO, in reality, any sane investor should see this purchase as evidence that Yahoo is acting irrationally and I'd pull every dollar I had out of it.

Your comment does a lot to make the point that Summly was a horrific acquisition on any count.

I don't think nearly as many people here are jealous as they are aghast.

1MM downloads is far from 1MM users. So it's not really a factor of five.

Delicious in 2005 had a huge level of excitement surrounding it. It was also the beginnings of "Web 2.0" and tag-mania, and Delicious was positioned nicely. Paying $15M-$30M for Delicious in 2005 made sense. Like the OP, I don't really understand this purchase.

Frankly, I'm jealous and I don't see why that's a problem. Who wouldn't want $30m for an relatively-mediocre app? Is this not what a large portion of the entrepreneurs strive for: exits for inflated sums of money?

Delicious was actually the first social bookmarking site I was aware of (and used). So I'm under the impression that they were ahead of the curve. Saying it's just a social bookmarking site I guess is the same as saying it's just a wheel.

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