Wouldn’t you like to know how it feels to be a millionaire by age 20?
While his classmates spent their time studying, gaming, and browsing their social apps, Nick D’Aloisio built an app that would turn his life and that of the tech community around.
Aussie-born British businessman Nick D’Aloisio earned a reputation after he built the app Summly and sold it to Yahoo for $30 million when he was just 17 years old. He is not an early life success story but a story of vision, perseverance, and capitalizing on an idea whose time had come.
A Young Mind with a Big Vision
In 1995, Nick was born and brought up by a family that held a choice for creativity and technology. He had an attraction to computers from a young age, and when he was 12 years old, he would roam around with code. But it had not crossed his mind to create his breakthrough app when he was 15 years old.
Discontented by how much had to be read before getting to stories online, Nick had a vision of a product that would deliver readers through newspaper reading much more efficiently. A simple summary iOS app, Trimit, resulted from it. Trimit attracted Asia’s richest man, Li Ka-Shing, who invested in Nick’s venture
Guided and mentored by them, Nick developed Trimit into a sophisticated app called Summly.
The launch of Summly
Summly applied natural language processing and artificial intelligence to summarize news stories in concise, read-friendly summaries. It was simple, fast, and perfect for mobile. The app took off and gained publicity in the press. Summly had been downloaded over a million times during 2012.
Through his creativity, Nick gained coverage by major television networks, and he became celebrated as a face of youthful brilliance in technology.
It purchased Summly for about $30 million back in March of 2013. They then closed down the app shortly after, incorporating their technology into their news offerings. The amazing thing about it, though, is not necessarily that it had happened via an acquisition, but that it was built by a teenager who had no business background whatsoever.
Life After Summly
Having been purchased by Yahoo, he worked there for a number of years as a product manager and had become accustomed to life with the corporation. But he did not stop. He wanted to realize his academic ambitions, and he attended university in Oxford to read Philosophy and Computer Science.
He started a new firm, Sphere, whose goals are to enable groups to communicate and exchange information, in 2015. His firm attracted new publicity. Sphere was purchased by Twitter in 2021 to add community-fostering features to the platform.
Nick’s achievement is not an isolated incident of good fortune—it is a product of vision, technology, and communication.
Lessons We Learned from Nick D’Alois
Nick’s story has several lessons for young dreamers and would-be entrepreneurs:
1. Start Early, Think Large
Nick did not wait to finish a four-year education before he started working out his concept. Nick self-taught himself how to code and took full advantage of free online materials to create his app. He had a fantastic head start since he started early.
2. Solve Real-World Problems
Frustrated by an excess of information and no time to waste, Sumly was born. Solving an issue everyone could relate to, Nick created something people needed.
3. Learn and Adapt
When Trimit did not launch as intended, Nick learnt lessons and re-designed the app into an improved version thereof. His resilience and perseverance had served him well.
4. Education Remains A Priority
Neither becoming rich later discouraged Nick from loving learning, and he persisted in going to learn even more. His working background at Oxford speaks volumes about how you can learn no matter where you are in life.
5. Be Humble and Curious
The youngest tech millionaire, Nick, has not let all that wealth go to his head, and he is not satisfied even now. He continues to tinker with new ideas and contribute much to tech.
Nick D’Aloisio’s journey from bedroom code-craft to signing multi-million-pound tech deals is one of sheer brilliance. Behind all the newspaper headlines, though, is an individual who put passion, perseverance, and brainpower into making something that mattered.
A life where overnight sensation is common, Nick’s is a reminder that the key is solution-seeking, curiosity, and risk-taking to test out your ideas–no matter how young you are.
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Writer,
Maliha Mahbub
Intern, Content Writing Department
YSSE