Every now and then you think you’re doing pretty well in life, and then some teenager comes along and earns more in a week than you will in a lifetime. This year’s offensively rich teenager is Nick D’Aloisio, but hey, at least he earned it.
D’Aloisio invented an app called Summly. Summly is designed to take long-form articles online and shorten them up for cellphones using an algorithm. And to be fair, this wasn’t something he brewed up in his basement: The basic code was good enough to get venture capital from the likes of Rupert Murdoch’s wife, and the kid had a company with actual employees working for him.
Now he’s got a job at Yahoo!, as well as a pretty fair chunk of what’s reported to be $30 million. How’s he going to balance school and work?
“I’ve still got a year and a half left at my high school,” he said in a telephone interview on Monday. But he will make arrangements to test out of his classes and work from the Yahoo office in London, partly to abide by the company’s new and much-debated policy that prohibits working from home.
You know, we should be jealous of his wealth, or the fact that he started a company in high school, but man… can you imagine only having to spend two and a half years in high school instead of four? This kid is living the dream.
Of course, if he follows the usual wunderkind trajectory, he’ll have burned out by thirty and will be pretending he was normal, but who knows, maybe he’ll luck out. And either way, he can dodge high school.