We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Monday, April 1, 2013

$30 million, 17 year old guy, and the Yahoo acquisition

17 year old whizkid's company gets acquired by Yahoo for $30 million. Wow. Nice. I read this news first on Economist.

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21574497-yahoo-buys-teenagers-start-up-youll-never-work-home
My immediate reaction was, the technology that goes behind such kind of a product is impossible to be at the hands of a 17 year kid. What is the real story? This technology needs PhD level knowledge.

A quick search about the technology revealed that this boy was backed by www.sri.com, a silicon valley non-profit r & d firm. Here is a link to the company web-site and what it does.

However, for a layman the news remains as flashy as told by the news anchor or by the reporter of the story, that, a 17 year created a technology which was acquired by Yahoo. In the articles that I read on Internet I never came across name of sri.

This is what I call news without verified facts. However, who cares, because this is how the business gets done. Steve Jobs gets all the credit for all the businesses he started, no matter, he did not invent the technologies behind many of them. (By the way sri is also the place where computer mouse was invented, they licensed it to Xerox park research center in Silicon Valley, and Steve Jobs being the business genius he was, saw the great potential it hold in revolutionizing consumer PC, and brought it to the market and the rest is history).





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