[Editor's Note] Milos Bezanov is a second year student currently studying International Politics at King’s College London.
Got GCSE's coming up next month? Under pressure? We've all been there, especially when your teachers constantly preach the importance of these “exams” and how they determine your entire life. Through sheer desperation, you seek an excuse, and the ideas start flowing... “I broke my leg... got run over by a wheelbarrow..” and become increasingly more unlikely in the search for something original.
However, even if you devoted days to this endeavour, coming out with “I gotta promote my new application to the world's 11th richest man”..is one that is most probably beyond anyone's creative ability. This is no excuse, as Nick D'aloisio, a 16 year old King's College School student who, ironically, was revising for his exams when he came up with a whole new way of revising.
Realising how time consuming sifting through different articles and web pages actually was, he wanted to see if there was a service available that summarises the content. There wasn't. Today, this is what Summly does, but the shift from idea to product was an adventure which only begins with the student's dream of finding an excuse that actually works.
Nick D'aloisio was always thirsty for knowledge. The Brit-Australian, grew up in Perth, where he enjoyed star gazing, proceeding to learn everything there was to know about them. It wasn't too long after moving to London that this thirst for knowledge soon began to translate itself into an entrepreneurial streak. After eventually convincing his parents to buy him a MacBook Pro, at 12 he downloaded the apple development kit and “through trial and error” started creating apps. After initial failures, he developed SoundStumblr and Facemood, which summarises peoples moods on the basis of their facebook timeline. He then developed Trimlt.
This latter idea was designed to simplify the arduous task of revising by enabling users to see a quick summary of the webpage's or newspaper article's contents before actually viewing them. Like so many ideas that hit success, it's mind bogglingly simple, or at least it appears to be so; “it's one of those ideas, it's so obvious when someone tells you it, but beforehand it's not”. If anyone is not sure how to tell a good idea from a bad one, this is close to a criteria as you're going to get.
He got confirmation of the idea's value soon enough, attracting investment for trimlt and being featured in a few local press reports. It was one such report that caught the interest of Solina Chau, an investor with private equity firm Horizons. After having a chat with Nick's parents, who up until this point had no idea about their sons entrepreneurial endeavours, he was flown to America to meet Li Kai Shing. He is the owner of the Horizons, a keen investor in tech businesses...oh, and the 11th Richest man in the world.
Through this investment, Trimlt became Summly, a much more powerful version that is capable of summarising the contents of huge articles into just a few bullet points. It’s easy to forget at this point that he's only 15. Not surprising considering that he had his age hidden; “ It was a conscious decision to not disclose my age”, as he believed that focus would shift from the product to him. Either way, the success of the product necessarily shifts the focus on to the inventor
Nick is quick to recognise the advantages of being young; “ Youth was, in some ways” an enabler”, as not having to worry about the business as a source of income let him be more experimental with the app's development. Since then the business has been going from strength to strength; 15,000 viewers on the website (unique visitors) and 25,000 downloads between June 2011 and December 2011 according to Nick.
Without going into too much technical depth (because I will probably get it wrong), the USP is not the concept, but the service. It uses “machine learning technology” to mimic the behaviour of humans when summarising. This is what he calls the “unique approach”, and is how Summly differentiates itself from other note taking services. However, he does acknowledge that a big internet player like Google can come along and push him out the market, but at the same time is quite confident that the tech giant won't pursue such a risky strategy; “What's to say that we don't sell to their competitors and suddenly Google has lost out”. It seems he has keen business instincts to back up that knowledge.
What next for Nick D'aloisio? Despite his technical ability, he's not your typical geek. He cites sports as a great hobby of his, and is keen to study politics and philosophy at university; “I do want to devote time to Summly now, but want to make sure I've got other paths going in the future”.
Looking back at his, fairly short but jam packed life, summarisation as a concept fits quite well. He always wants more time, to explore new ideas, and to see if he can make them work. This begs the question why? Is he really that short on time? Perhaps to find the answer we need to look at something Steve Jobs, his idol, said; “I've looked every morning in the mirror and asked myself, it today were the last day in my life, would I do what I am about to do”. It seems almost impossible for a person of 16 to think like that. Then again, Nick D'aloisio is no ordinary 16 year old.
[Editor's Note] Milos Bezanov is a second year student currently studying International Politics at King’s College London.
