It's not the fact he's 17. There are 25 year olds in startups, as recently as yesterday's Demo Day at YC, who've been given multi-million dollar investment and acquisition offers.
It's the fact that they paid $30m, for what essentially a lot of people here could build.
Heck, Yahoo has talented hires, they could create a similar app from scratch for significantly less.
But they instead chose to buy it, at the stupidly high figure that they chose. That is why people just don't understand.
>It's the fact that they paid $30m, for what essentially a lot of people here could build. Heck, Yahoo has talented hires, they could create a similar app from scratch for significantly less.
Ok, I think get your point. Still I have to disagree. The thing is this, many successful ideas don't need lots of genuine innovation and creativity. Instead they need to be 1. realized, 2. at the right time and 3. targetted towards the right people.
IMHO Facebook is a prime example for this. When you look at the history of communities, Facebook was by no means innovative. There have been plenty communities already and the world of communities progressed towards continuous improvements. In fact I used to be a vivid user of many Web 1.0 communities and watched with great excitement the transition from tech-people dominated communities towards general audience communities. Why did Yahoo not create Facebook? Well, it's the same reason small startups can drive big elephants out of business. I think there have been enough posts about this thing on HN in the past.
>But they instead chose to buy it, at the stupidly high figure that they chose. That is why people just don't understand.
1. The authors did put a lot of time in it (yes, multiple people worked on that, check out the website's About)
2. A great number of users are using it
3. Yahoo is not the only company interested in taking over a working website. Market mechanics.
It's the fact that they paid $30m, for what essentially a lot of people here could build. Heck, Yahoo has talented hires, they could create a similar app from scratch for significantly less.
But they instead chose to buy it, at the stupidly high figure that they chose. That is why people just don't understand.