GRAND ENTRETIEN NICK D’ALOISIO
“I DREAM OF A VIRTUAL BRAIN. IT’S COMING IN 10 OR 20 YEARS” When he was 17, the south Londoner Nick D’Aloisio sold his news app Summly to Yahoo for 30 million dollars. Now his latest app Yahoo News Digest is being developed for the Apple Watch. Where did it all go right for the millionaire Oxford teenage undergraduate? Interview: Ian Tucker / The Observer / The Interview People - Photos: Reuters, Redux
You taught yourself to code and built some apps, then sold your work to Yahoo for $30m… easy-peasy?
“We did IT at school but it was just PowerPoint and all that stuff – coding wasn’t on the curriculum. But once I started downloading iPhone apps, I began to teach myself the Objective-C coding language with the specific goal of building apps. I just saw a massive opportunity and I had lots of ideas. Every app I developed was like a learning exercise and I’d get better through trial and error.
I was making it up as I was going along, and I still am, because that’s how it works in the startup world.
Were you entrepreneurial at school, flogging Mars bars to your classmates?
“No, I wasn’t into any of that. But when I put my first app on the App Store, it made £79 in a day. And that’s when I realised there’s a material element to this.
When you launched Summly, which led to the deal with Yahoo, how did it feel to be compared to Larry Page, Jeff Bezos and other Silicon Valley billionaires?
“I see myself as a work in progress, so there’s no point evaluating those kind of comparisons now because they don’t mean anything.
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People like Ashton Kutcher, Wendi Deng and Stephen Fry became investors in your company. Did you feel nervous doing meetings and being responsible for their money?
“I was nervous for my first TV interview and when I met Li Ka-shing [the Hong Kong billionaire who invested $300,000 in Summly in 2012] but I also saw that I had absolutely nothing to lose. I was making it up as I was going along, and I still am, because that’s how it works in the startup world. And so in that sense it’s liberating. And I could always go back to school… basically, this is better than homework.
The News Digest app you have created for Yahoo builds on Trimit and Summly, your previous news summarisation apps. It provides users with 10-12 summarised news stories, twice a day. That’s quite a newspaper model?
“We had three quite radical dogmas with this product. It should be twice a day and not live; it should be finite, instead of infinite streams of information; and it shouldn’t be personalised – it is definitive, so we all read the same digest. There is this visceral moment where people throw away newspapers, which was totally missing in digital. And there’s also like a wider sense of people wanting to be in the know and intelligent, and if you’re reading personalised information you can never be assured that what you’ve read is important in a wider scheme.
Does that sense of completion work only for people brought up on newspapers?
“To me it was very natural. It’s all about use case. I don’t mind being overwhelmed
with social media because it’s addictive and exciting for different reasons but something about news consumption, I think a lot of people may see it as a chore, something they need to do and don’t necessarily want to. And so for these utility-like behaviours, it’s really good to be in and out. So the simpler you can make the experience, the better, so that’s why we constrain it.
Is the summarisation done purely by a l gor it h m s or a re hu ma n b ei n g s involved?
“We realised very quickly it’s optimal to have a hybrid of editorial and algorithm. The two areas for human involvement are proofreading for the coherence, because no one’s solved the problem of natural language. And the second thing is the selection of the stories in the digest because, we can’t have any false positives – if things that shouldn’t be in the digest are, people will stop trusting the service.
So do you think the summaries are improvements on the original stories? A story from a news service like AP or Reuters is already supposed to be pretty definitive and free of bias.
“Even an AP story is longer than it needs to be. We’re trying to kind of take the best bits from multiple sources, and that’s quite a hard thing. We’re still learning how to do it, that’s why we still rely on editorial as well as algorithm. I think that’s a real benefit. Also it’s not just a textual summary, we augment the story with atoms of information such as Wikipedia entries, Tweets, maps and links to related stories. You can assimilate more information because a lot of it is visual rather than text.