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Comment by pan69 | Hacker News Reader

This is my (pessimistic) take on this Summly thing. I think the following scenario happened:

15 year old kid does something with computers and for some reason the press is all over it. Some smart investors thinks; "hey, I can use this to make money". They invest money into this 15 year old which gives him more press coverage. Wait a few years and the investor gets his buddies at Yahoo to buy it for a substantial amount of money. Ka-ching, money in the bank.

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If this is true, imagine what it's like to be a Yahoo engineer. You just lost the ability to telecommute. You've suffered through downsizing. Morale is (by all reports) completely in the tank, and now they dump $30M into a 17 year old?

I'd want to know where my chunk of the pie is.

Surely you mean Ka-Shing ;-)

The first investor was Horizons Ventures, the investment arm of Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing, who put in $300k.

That's what I call an aptronym.

Li Ka-Shing's right-hand man is Canning Fok, who is often referred to as, yes, you guessed it, Cunning Fox.

http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-sons-rise-in-the-states-2...

Mr. Ka-Shing himself, sure. He oversees every single investment his firm makes. I totally believe this.

Besides, we don't know Ka-Shing isn't reading TechCrunch all day.

You usually don't get to be a billionaire without spending a lot of time in the office and working pretty hard. To give some apropos examples: Marissa Mayer is reportedly going over every Yahoo hire; _In The Plex_ mentions Page doing the same thing at Google.

His first Internet adventure was back in 2000...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/655740.stm

"Police had to step in to keep order among investors queuing to buy shares as the internet gold rush swept dramatically into Hong Kong.

A crowd of about 30,000 people formed outside one of the few banks where small investors could apply for shares in internet firm tom.com.

...

Thousands of investors pushed and shoved through queues stretching back as far as half a mile to hand in their forms at the worst hit HSBC branch in Kowloon.

Analysts have predicted that the Hong Kong firm's share sale will prove to have been a record 2,000 times over-subscribed."

That was my thought exactly, this story sounded like an investor bailout.

Summly had tons of investors, who put in a grand total of $1.5 million. If they needed to be bailed out of that, they shouldn't have been investing in the first place.

This is not "bailout" it's a "set up". :)

You're forgetting his loaded and well-connected parents.

Well, I guess that explains my hunch for:

"..and for some reason the press is all over it"

A VP on Wall St. is a mid-level position, like senior engineer. The dude is well-off but not loaded nor connected.

I'd be surprised if this didn't play a major role here.

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