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Where did the article make any mention of jealousy or bitterness (other than the "hurt feelings" of Yahoo's engineers)? The article describes the stupidity of this acquisition from a business perspective.

The fact that your comment has received the most upvotes indicates that people generally agree with your sentiment that nobody should be bitter or jealous. Yet nobody is suggesting any bitterness or jealousy... So who exactly is this directed at? Hey HN... I think you're "projecting." :)

Lots of the comments below read like they're full of bitterness and jealousy to me, I suspect the comment is targeted at them rather than the original article.

That is exactly it: People whose first reaction was jealousy are now projecting jealousy onto everyone else. I'm not jealous of this individual at all (though I, like most, would love to be in the same position). But being professionals in this field we naturally do try to figure out where the money is at (trying to yield hints at how we can get some of that), and when it is irrational it confuses and potentially angers us. This ridiculous canard that we can never critique a story without being jealous is obnoxious.

Simply because of the fact that in the first sentence that it mentions that he is 17 years old. Companies get acquired all of the time every day, but those don't warrant posts on HN mentioning how young the employees are. Hence the jealousy.

Because there is a fact mentioned that is out of the ordinary compared to other acquisitions, that makes it jealousy?

I think you should have the top comment - but I am willing to admit I'm jealous anyway. :) Jealous, but thankful that I was never made a millionaire at age 17...because that 17 year old will no longer get to see what the real world is like.

I thought the point was that Yahoo, a public company, was throwing away 30 million for no apparent gain.

That's the part I don't understand capitalism: on one hand, big corps try to save every dime by downsizing and outsourcing, and on the other hand, they pour money like this.

It's a control issue under the guise of a cost-saving effort. Contractors and vendors are easier to hire and fire compared to employees. Generous advances in worker productivity mean that the same permanent internal workforce is no longer required.

That's not capitalism, it's poor valuation, managerial inefficiency/stupidity, and fad/reaction behavior (among other things, I'm sure). It's counterintuitive, counterproductive, a massive waste, contrary to the penny-pinching you mention, and obtuse.

It's also just kind of how people are. You can't reasonably expect a large corporation -- which is just a big group of people who are all trying to make decisions and getting in each other's way -- to be able to make logical choices when they're subject to every large stakeholder's whim and every bit of incompetence that happens everywhere along the line.

Is it happening in a capitalist setting here? Yes. But it happens in all settings all over the world, so to suggest it's unique to this system ignores the actual nature of the issue (which is the Human Condition).

Just be careful to not fall into the "if it's good, it's Capitalism, if it's bad, it's human nature" fallacy.

It's all just incentives.

The downsizing and outsourcing is driven by incentives to remove cost from the balance sheet. If there's no incentive to do so wisely, if there's no disincentive against doing so poorly, people will inevitably make bad 'outsourcing' deals, just to have made them. Quality might take a hit, direct billings might skyrocket, products might have to be scrapped, etc. But if you don't fix the incentives, it will happen over and over.

Similarly, if you incentivize a person to make deals, if they have a stronger incentive to make deals than to make good deals (e.g. if they have no effective disincentive against making bad deals) bad deals will get made.

The are buying traction. That's 30 million dollars worth of it. It could make them back that much money by getting people to start using Yahoo again.

I have no faith whatsoever that Yahoo will productize or promote anything they create and there's no real evidence that anyone else should think that either.

Maybe.

But:

1- Is the traction convertible to any Yahoo properties?

2- Are the 1 million "downloads" legitimate interested users? Do any of them still use the app?

3- Did the "traction" come from paying firms to get them to the top of app store(s)?

I assume Yahoo knows more about this stuff than I do, and I'm not a Yahoo shareholder. Still, I didn't get the impression that the article was just complaining about rich teenagers.

What happened to the good ole days when a huge corporation would just implement the app on their own and cut out the need for an aquisition?

For $30 million, even an order of magnitude less, I think a lot of us could put together a team good enough to implement the Summly app. That's what's being questioned by the blog post.

According to Alexa, yahoo is the 4th most visited website in the world. They have innumerable ways to generate traffic. "Traction" implies a company that is not being visited at all trying to get a jump start, and is just not accurate.

Not all traction is created equal. I'm not sure how simply Yahoo could convert its users, who tend to be more conservative, to mobile.

Technical parity is a bad way to price a company, i.e. the value of Summly cannot be approximated by what it would take to replicate the technology in-house.

But at only 1 million downloads, they've paid $30 per download. If they were mostly interested in the traction, that would seem quite excessive to me.

I can tell you as a founder of a startup with about a million users, the rule of thumb right now is 10 million is the new 1 million. No VC cares.

Actually this is a very common scheme in Silicon Valley -- public companies "throwing away" money on relatively worthless startups. It is a good way to siphon money out of the stock market and into the pockets of VCs and founders -- and I would not be surprised if the person who pushes the acquisition gets a cut of the money too, or other "favors" in the future. The company knows its going to can the product and the founders will leave after their stock vests -- why else would it make the acquisition?

That's a perspective that hadn't occurred to me (I'm not actually in startups or Silicon Valley). Sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it's believable.

It does not, however, mean shareholders can't/shouldn't complain about throwing money away, though.

I'm sure Yahoo employees are asking questions too.

$30 million could be spent on building daycare for all Yahoo mums and dads who can no longer work from home.

Yep, it sounds like a conspiracy to me as well. :)

The one thing that I have learned about corruption is that at least small instances of it occur everywhere, even if its not "the norm." Wherever there is way to make money, people might very well be doing it.

And yes you are right although I tried to imply that shareholders were the ones being screwed - this is obviously unfair to shareholders, whether the transaction is corrupt or not.

Seeing these acquisitions, it always seemed like that what's very often happening is the folks who make the Buy decisions (NOT the owners of the buying company) are basically stealing from then owners to hand money to their friends)

Or, when the bizdev team is told to spend a billion dollars this year, (1) is is easier for them to like in extra money into each deal than to find more smaller deal, and (2) they don't get bonuses for only spending 500million and saying there is nothing else worth buying.

It might be something like that but with less malice. First, Summly and the entrepreneur are far from worthless. But to your point, a bunch of decent angel investors just got a pretty nice check from Yahoo. The "deal guy" builds some reputation but unlikely benefits monetarily in any nefarious way.

I think the OP sentiment and many comments here are mostly classic HN resentment of success.

I agree - sorry I think I should have chosen better wording. (Where I said "relatively worthless" I should have said "overly-valued")

>I get down about how unfair that is from time to time, but there's nothing you can really do about it, other than focus on your work.

I regret upvoting you prior to finishing your post.

This is bullshit. Of course we can do something about it. We're members of a society, and if we collectively think something is bullshit, we can do something about it.

I'm tired of people looking at these absurd inequities and shrugging and putting their head down and hoping maybe they'll get lucky too. In the meanwhile, these people at the top are ensuring that only people like them can continue to succeed.

Let's tax everyone who didn't earn their wealth. Let's put an end to dumb gambles that only reward people born at the top.

I'm confused. Are you saying this kid should have his $30M (or whatever he gets out of the deal) taken away from him, because you perceive he didn't earn it?

No.

I'm saying is maybe increase high end income taxes, maybe look into the viability of higher capital gains taxes, maybe find and create some kind of disincentive for companies to be bailing out VCs.

Find some way to even the playing field. I'm sorry, but you don't need to have come from Stanford to be smart enough to work at Yahoo! or Google or etc.

... and the funds collected are distributed in the form of bonuses to programmers who are perceived to have worked harder?

Ah, the 'regulation is the answer' argument.

> I'm sorry, but you don't need to have come from Stanford to be smart enough to work at Yahoo! or Google or etc

It's like every other human relationship, the more you have to offer the higher your standards can be. Google can afford to hire only top CS people (or accomplished non-traditional ones) because they're Google. Yahoo!... I don't think that's going to work out so well. The market will take care of it soon enough.

No, it's the "redistribute the wealth" argument. Whether you do it by funding welfare or schools or giving tax refunds, it's up to you.

>It's like every other human relationship, the more you have to offer the higher your standards can be.

It's more complicated than that. Since the prestige of your alma mater is largely divorced from the quality of the teaching therein, it's also an expression of class discrimination.

I have this burning suspicion - borne out by my own anecdotal experience - that the most important thing distinguishing the median Harvard undergraduate from the median Good State School undergraduate is a capacity to absorb the tuition fees.

Setting up a system that rewards having been born to rich parents is ultimately detrimental, in my opinion. It's just a lot easier to check whether you came from Stanford than to determine if you're smart.

>I have this burning suspicion - borne out by my own anecdotal experience - that the most important thing distinguishing the median Harvard undergraduate from the median Good State School undergraduate is a capacity to absorb the tuition fees.

Not true. Even near the upper end, the price tag is not insanely high compared to top state schools --

Harvard policy states that families with annual incomes below $60,000 pay only a student contribution of a few thousand dollars, and families with annual incomes between $60,000 and $180,000 pay the student contribution plus a family contribution averaging 10 percent of annual income.

>the more you have to offer the higher your standards can be.

This assumes that a more reputable school necessarily represents a higher quality of education, which isn't necessarily true.

The kind of things "the market" takes care of is vanishingly small, and even when it does it rarely works in favor of most people. Why shouldn't we act in some way to make sure society as a whole benefits from our economy as much as it can? After all, our economy exists to serve us, not the other way around.

Or how about you get over your negative emotions with regards to wealth so you can enjoy meeting wealthy people and end up making millions getting involved in their business deals?

After all those million-a-year investment bankers did just that.

I have no negative emotions regarding wealth. In absolute terms, I am quite wealthy; I enjoy the serendipity of my birth tremendously and every day give thanks for it.

It's just plain to me that we're getting fucked by those much further up the chain and being admonished for having the gall to find it unpleasant.

>I'm saying is maybe increase high end income taxes

Ah, so you are saying this kid should have his not $30M but $29M taken away from him, because you perceive he didn't earn it. That's quite diferent!

This is good perspective and i think it's good to keep this in mind, but let's not forget the other end of the spectrum:

Right now, somewhere in the world, a child is being born in a farm house with a dirt floor. That child will grow up to die in a civil war before age 14.

Right now, somewhere in the world, there are people waiting in line to get food from a charity.

Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is suffering from a disease because they can't afford the cure.

Right now, somewhere in the world, a man goes to work carrying bricks for 10 hours a day to feed his 3 children.

Right now, somewhere in the world, a woman rides her bike to work in polluted air at 6am, to a factory job where she will work 12 hours a day putting together tablets that all the "unlucky people who have to work" trying to be dot com millionaires will buy one day on a whim and then discard less than 6 months later. And this is good, because she has a job.

The real interesting thing is these people generally don't complain much, not nearly as much as we do.

The bell curve is a harsh mistress.

Poverty is not normally distributed on a bell curve, more like a power law distribution; cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

Actually, I've come to believe that complaining is an inherent aspect of human nature. Everybody complains; its just that you don't hear much from the above-mentioned as they do not write blogs which make the frontpage on Reddit or HN (let alone popular media) and/or are not part of your immediate circle of friends (to whom we usually air our grievances)

My Mom grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. Her biological father had a habit of staying at home just long enough to get my Grandma pregnant, then taking off. Life for single mothers (especially French Canadians) in the late 1940s/early 1950s was hard. Consequently, my Grandma worked multiple jobs just to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. Grandma was always an incredibly hard worker - she eventually remarried and her and my Grandpa started a cleaning business. She ran that business and worked incredibly hard up until the day she died.

My life was very different from my Mom's. My Dad was a police officer and, though we weren't wealthy, I never went without. But, I got to grow up in a household where two things were valued - hard work and education. Consequently, I'd spend summers working in my Grandma and Grandpa's business - I had my first job (with an actual hourly wage) when I was 8 years old and worked every single summer and during Easter break.

Grandma never complained because she got herself in that mess and by golly, she'd get herself out. That sense of resilience carried through the generations and now, finally, my generation has the benefits of a middle class upbringing, combined with the work ethic that only comes from having been very poor one generation ago.

I think that it's wonderful you're concerned with people who are less fortunate and I respect what you wrote. However, poverty is a great motivator and frankly, I'd rather hire someone who knows hunger than someone who went to prep schools and fancy Universities with billion dollar endowments...

You would rather hire someone who knows hunger because it is part of your story. I know what you mean, my family story is very similar. But the truth is that people making hiring decisions are usually from that different background. Example. When I was in Greece and the crisis and unemployment was starting to explode, I had secured a huge implementation project and convinced the bosses to hire someone in addition to the current team. They did hire an LSE graduate and a Columbia one. I was telling them that it does not make sense when so many people are getting poor to give all jobs to people who do not have a money issue, but alas it is not how it works.

i think you are projecting some point that i wasn't trying to make.

I agree that all of the events you've listed are probably happening somewhere in the world, but I disagree that we should all just accept this as "the world we live in" and carry on. Look back across history and consider what would have happened if at any point, the people on the losing end of any deal were to simply keep their heads down and keep working.

It's worth talking about. It's worth criticizing. It may not be worth obsessing over, but it is worth some portion of our attention.

It is only worth attention if that attention becomes productive action. So yeah, criticize, only if you think someone influential is listening.

A mass of dissatisfied citizens can become quite influential all on their own.

> unfair

It's laughable that a programmer would worry about how unfair the industry is on the top end. Do you get how lucky we are compared even to other engineers? To say nothing of service workers who work much harder for much less.

Every now and again, if I feel I need more money, I take a look at http://www.globalrichlist.com/ and plop in my current salary. Though the numbers are probably a bit dated by now, it's quite sobering.

Well, every now and again, I come across this type of salary comparison charts, and realize that out of context they make no sense at all. And with some context - hmmm.. Nope, not much sense either.

I don't know what you're trying to say. If you are trying to imply that someone on a developer salary in Europe or the US are not well off by global standards, you're out of your mind.

I mean just what I wrote: these lists and charts comparing everyone to everything make little to no sense without context. Global standards in the vacuum make no sense. And in the case of global salary charts - well, comparing apples to oranges doesn't even come close. But, as much as I hate generalizations, I'll try to clarify my point. So: usually, above certain, and rather low level, your happiness doesn't scale linearly with the your wealth expressed in money, and the farther you are in the "rich" percentile, the more so. This charts tend to imply that wealth should (well, that it has to!) be distributed uniformly, when it isn't, and has never been, and I'm pretty sure will never be.

Now, let's suppose you make $15k/yr. (By the way, how's that for your estimate of a European salary? See why I said I hate generalizations?) This site says you're in the top 13% richest people in the world. Immediately, a ton of questions arises: OK, top 13% - what of it? Was it practical to take everyone in the world into consideration? Why and how should this (unverified) information change your feelings about your well-being? Is the current wealth distribution, as represented by the chart, really not OK? Will the knowledge about being in the top 13% help you pay your bills? Should you, now knowing that you are ahead of 87% of population, start to think about redistribution of your wealth and transferring it to those behind you? Should you not be pissed off by those guys higher than you? What if you'd find yourself in the lower 50%? Should you get depressed, or get to work, reaching the 50% mark and then stopping, or what? I could go on and on, but the point I'm trying to make here is that all those questions can be answered in a dozen or so ways, exact number depending on your will to participate in rhetoric battles, and that's why I just can't figure out how this chart can be of any use. There's probably some statistical value in it to me, but almost none practical value. I hope you now see what I was trying to say in the GP comment.

Lastly, and moving from the comparison chart itself to the idea that it's used to be backing up here: I dislike cheap attempts to make people participate in some charity out of induced guilt, and I dislike portraying of being wealthy (whatever that means) as a kind of being unclean with money and obliged to share as a tool of said shame/guilt feeling inducing. I don't think charity should work this way and I think this instills the wrong views of the basic principles of economical and social responsibility in the readers and just exploits the guilt feeling.

TL;DR: Do you need money? You should probably stop contemplating 'global salary comparison charts' of questionable real world value, and instead get your statistics straight and start working on your skills/paycheck/whatever keeps you wealthy. Do you want to participate in the charities? Stop getting anxious and building guilt inside you for no reason, get informed (really, get your statistics straight already) and get involved.

on the flip side, someone could create a list of where you rank on the cost of living, amount of free time, environmental health standards, living space, and so on. Suddenly a lot of us would find ourselves on the other end of the scale.

with that said, I do consider myself tremendously lucky, but when looking at such lists there are more dimensions to consider than just salary number.

That helps to put things into perspective.

The tool is buggy though: after ~$1M/year it does not change results.

It's going to be strange 80 years from now when Web 2.0 billionaires are old money. "Oh, I don't have to work. Grandfather made a Facebook game."

One hopes selfishness and legacy, and in some cases, idealism, overcome genetics, and those billionaires give their money to others instead of their spawn.

http://givingpledge.org/ being the relevant reference here.

While this has little to do with the original post (which is about the logic behind Yahoo's decision, on which I have absolutely no opinion one way or another), I think it's extremely important to adress what you're saying. You write "I get down about how unfair that is from time to time, but there's nothing you can really do about it, other than focus on your work". This is not only patently false, it is dangerously so. It is the thinking of the downtrodden man who accepts the hegemony's perspective on things, namely, that this is the natural order of things, and all you can do is work.

True, the world is unfair and it will remain so. But much of its unfairness is not a result of cruel nature, but as a result of our political actions. And I won't even go into what actions we should take to adress the issues you've raised, only to say that we should, and must act to change society, and that there's quite a lot we can do. We are not sheep.

Bullshit, the scrutiny is here because of Yahoo paying 30m for some shit app. That's it. Age is irrelevant.

Can the shareholders do anything about this? It seems incredibly stupid.

> I get down about how unfair that is from time to time, but there's nothing you can really do about it, other than focus on your work.

Fairness is a fictional manmade concept. That we expect some sort of fairness in life is solely due to our social contract. It's not fair to me that someone steals my car and thus we have systems in place to address that. However, nothing in our laws, norms, ethics, or philosophy says that people must get everything they deserve and no more or no less. Hence the concept of fairness does not apply to kids of billionaires or friends of politically connected.

I think you meant "my concept of fairness".

Because other peoples' concepts of fairness certainly do consider the ultra-rich.

That was my overall point. Fairness is manmade. We decide what's fair and not and certainly your concept is different from mine. Nature doesn't care. Markets don't care. Systems don't care. All we can do as humans is impose our view of fairness on others by legal means or social norms. Most of us agree killing is bad and unfair to the person who got killed and their family/friends, so we legislate against that.

While many might feel that kids of rich people have an unfair advantage, we haven't as a collective decided to do anything to put that to an end. We have made it a bit easier for non-rich kids to get some of the benefits that rich kids get like daily meals, access to education etc. but the gap is far too wide to bridge for everyone.

You can certainly try to design a social structure where nobody is rich or nobody gets preferential treatment but those haven't worked well so far for numerous other reasons. In a capitalistic, democratic/republic society, we haven't legislated the unfairness of being born rich, mostly because most of us don't think it is unfair enough to be illegal. In fact, most of us would think it is fair when looking at it from the parents' point of view. If you work hard and make a lot of money, why shouldn't your kids have it better than you did?

What I was trying to say to the parent was that fairness is not a concrete standard, especially when it comes to things many of us can disagree on.

At the very least in the animal kingdom, monkeys have a concept of fairness: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1292337...

So not entirely manmade.

You are right. I should have said constructed.

I think man's innovation has been to pour ever larger inputs into a fairness function best adapted for a troop of monkeys.

>Fairness is a fictional manmade concept. //

I don't see this.

Fairness is about mathematical expectation. Fairness means people have equal opportunity (often within a restricted domain, or ignoring certain starting conditions). There is [nearly?] always going to be a locus in which fairness is asserted outside which it is no longer the case.

* The race is fair because both runners run the same distance. Ah but the ground is uneven.

* The race is fair because the ground and distance is even. Ah but one runner is poor and hasn't eaten for days and so is weak.

* The race is fair as the runners have been nourished equally, the distance and going are controlled. Ah, but this runner's family have a genetic disposition that enables them to run faster without tiring ... et cetera.

If mankind didn't exist a situation could still be fair or unfair for a creature - a combat test for leadership is unfair because this creature had a greater opportunity for nourishment and so grew stronger than the others. That of course doesn't mean it's the wrong test, just that each creature able to take the test doesn't have equal opportunity to achieve through their own efforts.

>It's not fair to me that someone steals my car //

Everyone had opportunity to steal a car, including you, that's fair!

I don't equate fairness and just deserts [ie justice]. For example two people can compete in a fair competition but the least deserving - the one who made the least effort or the one whose lifestyle is least noble - can win; the competition was still fair though.

I agree, however it is important to consider how we pick the people we choose to hold up as examples and who we are holding them up to.

With the traditional bigCo job market in the tank there is a push right now to get young people interested in entrepreneurship so stories like these make excellent narrative supporting that.

So you hear stuff like "bootstrap your company!" , "Be your own boss!" , "Be a risk taker!" and this message is being pushed to everyone, including those on the lower rungs of society.

I know a few people who bootstrapped reasonably successful businesses and have been asked to give talks on how anybody can do it and how they started with no investment and nothing more than $50 in their bank account etc.

Problem is that most of these guys had backgrounds that allowed for risk taking. They had families who were not necessarily uber wealthy but were quite happy to subsidise them for often over a year for things like living expenses and keeping their car on the road. The narratives often don't mention these sorts of factors.

As a 17 year old I think this is awesome and stupid (at the same time). It's pretty eye opening that if a 17 year old can make an app and get bought for a lot of money, it's possible for anyone to.

As awesome as it is for the guy, this doesn't change the fact that a Summly got paid so much for a 2 employees and a founder. I mean the app hardly had traction and $30 million can you get you a nice army of talented mobile developers with signing bonus'. $30M really isn't justified in this case.

Congrats to the summly team, but it's also really sad how desperate and pathetic Yahoo is.

Bitter and jealous is no way to go through life. All of these guys executed on their project or have specialized knowledge. The pie is not zero-sum, and we live in the greatest, most fair time in human history.

Parent is claiming that this is not true, that they got rewarded for being gifted a controlling interest in others' productivity.

>the greatest, most fair time in human history //

I think that's far from truthful.

The fairest time would be before [mass] land ownership, when anyone could stay with their tribal group or, should they choose, set off on their own and find land a-plenty to hunt/develop/farm as they see fit.

Hard times, sure; but that sort of situation seems most fair to me.

>I took the entire post as one rooted in envy and bitterness

I took it as looking objectively at the deal, something that no mainstream press coverage of the Summly aquisition I've seen does.

Well said. And I agree, sometimes when people don't realize it they are jealous and hurt. A guy I knew who was, in my experience working with him, a complete loser [1] was fired and got a job at another company and that company went public during the dot com boom and made him several million dollars. Meanwhile my company, and I personally, made no such million dollar moves. And it made me jealous and angry and I could have easily written this exact same article about how clueless that company was for hiring the loser, but the emotion was from my hurt. It took a while to get over that [2].

Yahoo may be clueless here, but we really can't say that until we see if they get $30M in value out of the deal or not. So really all we can say is that we cannot see how they came up with that valuation. Then watch what they do to see where it goes looking for insights into their thinking.

[1] I recognize that "loser" is relative to the job they were asked to do, as opposed to the individual. At the time I was much less forgiving of people who weren't in jobs they fit (or didn't fit) with.

[2] I am still incredulous but I don't get angry and jealous over it any more.

Right place right time seems to sum up all these people, and most of life is about that! But the only way to fight it is work your ass off and put yourself in a position to be at the right place at the right time (give yourself a platform for an investor to find you for a high acqui-hire price cough cough what happened here). For the many people who complain all the time on this site and critique but have never started / built or done anything except complain, you have no ground to stand on. Sitting on your computer complaining has (almost) never put someone in a right place, right time opportunity (except when blogs were first invented)

Extreme levels of correct, I myself am incredibly bitter/jealous/you-name-it. However, I get a tugging sensation that it's almost all PR-minded.

Right now, somewhere in the world, there is a person who has an empty bank account (or no bank account!), and is perfectly content.

Right place right time seems to be your shot at all these people, most of life is about that!

Right now, Taylor Swift song is stuck in my head. Thanks man.