Guy Who 'Hates To Be A Curmudgeon' Explains Why Yahoo Buying A 17-Year-Old's Startup For $30 Million Makes No Sense

When a startup sells for multiple millions, other founders are left reeling.

"Why him, not me?" they wonder.

One Y Combinator founder, Origami's Vibhu Norby, vented publicly about this in a post that rose to the top of Hacker News over night. His article, "The Summly deal makes no sense" details Yahoo's acquisition of 17-year-old Nick D'Aloisio's startup for $30 million.

"I hate to be a curmudgeon, but I think Yahoo shareholders deserve an explanation," he wrote. "It's not clear at all to me that they are getting their money's worth."

He makes some valid points.

• Summly doesn't make any money
• Summly doesn't have one million users
• Only two of its five employees passed a Yahoo technical/CS screening test.
• Yahoo doesn't plan to use Summly. It plans to shut down the app. So it really spent all that money to acquire a teenager and a colleague or two.

Understandably, Norby is confused.

"The craziest thing is that there are a lot of really qualified, CS-beefy teams doing really amazing things in the mobile news/discovery space these days - and that would definitely take a $30m acquisition offer or less," he writes. "I don't really understand why they picked this one."

We're not sure either. Here's our best guess into Yahoo's thought process.

• D'Aloisio is a hustler. His investor list includes Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, Lady Gaga's manager Troy Carter, Automattic's Matt Mullenweg, Ashton Kutcher, Wendy Murdoch, and Yoko Ono.
• It's possible that, in addition to wanting D'Aloisio's hustle and teenage, One Direction-y good looks for a marketing spokesperson position, Yahoo wanted to make all those big names in California happy.
• Yahoo also knew acquiring a 17-year-old's startup would get a lot of press.
• Marissa Mayer has spoken publicly about her acquisition strategies, and Summly fits the bill. It's a mobile app, and Mayer is looking to onboard mobile talent. It was also a relatively cheap acquisition.

Is Summly worth $30 million? Probably not. But that makes the win even better for D'Aloisio (who wasn't even born yet when Yahoo was founded) and his investors.