评论
打印
UPON HEARING, IN MARCH of this year, reports that a 17-year-old schoolboy had sold a piece of software to Yahoo! for $30 million, you might well have entertained a few preconceived notions about what sort of child this must be. A geeky specimen, no doubt. A savant with zero interests outside writing lines of code. A twitchy creature, prone to mumbling, averse to eye contact.
当你听说今年3月份，一个17岁的学生把自己设计的一款软件以3,000万美元卖给雅虎公司(Yahoo! Inc., YHOO)的时候。对于这孩子的形貌，你脑海里或许已勾画出一个搞笑的形象了吧：不用说，肯定是个极客。一个除了一行一行写代码之外对什么也不感兴趣的学霸。一个不敢正眼瞧人还老小声儿嘀咕着什么的神经质。
Thus it's rather a shock when you first encounter Nick D'Aloisio striding into London's Bar Boulud restaurant, firmly shaking hands and proceeding to outline his entrepreneurial vision. To imagine him in person, picture a Silicon Valley CEO blessed with an easy manner and 97th percentile media skills. Picture a guy who can confidently expound (while maintaining steady eye contact) on topics ranging from Noam Chomsky's theories to the science of neural networks to the immigrant mind-set to the Buddhist concept of jnana. And now picture this fellow trapped inside the gangly body of a British teen who might easily be mistaken for a member of the pop boy band One Direction-clad in a hipster T-shirt beneath a fitted blazer, hair swooping over his forehead, taking bites of a cheeseburger between bold pronouncements.
那么，当你看到17岁的尼克?达洛伊西奥(Nick D’Aloisio)意气风发地走进伦敦巴尔?布鲁(Bar Boulud)餐厅，与人坚定地握着手，描绘他未来事业蓝图的时候，你应该会惊讶得合不拢嘴了吧。他就像是个来自硅谷的首席执行长(CEO)，应对媒体时从容不迫，技巧上可以打97的高分。聊天时，他眼神坚定地注视着你，从诺姆?乔姆斯基(Noam Chomsky)的理论、神经网络科学，到移民心态乃至佛教瑜伽，他一切话题都能自信地畅所欲言。但他又像是个One Direction男孩组合的成员，修长的身材配着嬉皮T恤和修身小西装，头发凌乱地搭在脑门前，一边咬着吉士汉堡，一边发表着让人瞠目结舌的见解。
The app D'Aloisio designed, Summly, compresses long pieces of text into a few representative sentences. When he released an early iteration, tech observers realized that an app that could deliver brief, accurate summaries would be hugely valuable in a world where we read everything-from news stories to corporate reports-on our phones, on the go. The app attracted the interest of investors around the world, ranging from Hollywood celebrities to Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, the wealthiest man in Asia.
达洛伊西奥设计了一款名叫Summly的应用软件，该软件能够将繁冗的文章精简成几行关键句子。早一代Summly软件发布后，技术观察家意识到在这个无论资讯还是财报，一切新闻都快速阅于掌上的时代，这样一款简洁、精准的摘要软件蕴含着巨大的价值。该应用吸引了包括好莱坞明星和亚洲首富李嘉诚在内的全世界投资者的兴趣。
In 2011, at age 15, D'Aloisio closed a seed round of funding from Li Ka-shing. A year later, Summly launched, and within a month it had attracted 500,000 users and became the number-one news app in 28 countries. The Yahoo! sale capped off a remarkable run for someone not yet out of high school. But it's not mere technological savvy that sets D'Aloisio apart. Since long before he could shave, he has been driven by an intense curiosity and a desire to make some sort of mark on the tech world. Not just to create but to build and, yes, to monetize.
2011年在达洛伊西奥15岁时，他就曾获得来自李嘉诚的种子投资。一年之后Summy发布，并在短短一个月内吸引了500,000名用户，在28个国家登上了新款应用软件热度榜的首位。对于一个连高中都还没毕业的人来说，雅虎的收购可谓意义深远。不过，达洛伊西奥的过人之处可不只是技术知识丰富这一点。在他连胡子都不用刮的时候，他就强烈向往、渴望著有朝一日能在科技领域做出一番大的成就。不仅要创新，还要有所成就，当然，还要大把赚钱。
He's lately begun taking meetings with the likes of Marissa Mayer and Rupert Murdoch. (Murdoch is chairman of News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal.) Though D'Aloisio's net worth at this point is merely eye-popping, not obscene, in his own youthful way he seems every bit as formidable as relative gray-hairs like 27-year-old Tumblr founder David Karp or 29-year-old Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg. 'He captivates a room,' says Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital, an early backer of Summly. 'He is incredibly self-aware for his age.'
他最近已开始和玛丽莎?梅耶尔(Marissa Mayer)、鲁伯特?默多克(Rupert Murdoch)这样的产业大亨进行会面（默多克正是《华尔街日报》(The Wall Street Journal)所属新闻集团(News Corp.)的董事长）。目前达洛伊西奥的资产净值已经很高，但还没多到令人眼红的地步。但正如轻博客(Tumblr)创始人大卫?卡普(David Karp)和29岁的Facebook神童马克?扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)一样，达洛伊西奥已非常值得钦佩。Summly早期投资方之一、兴盛资本(Thrive Capital)创始人乔舒亚?库什纳(Joshua Kushner)评价道，他的气场能震住整个房间的人，他这个年龄自我意识能如此之强，实属难得。
D'ALOISIO BEGAN designing iPhone apps nearly the moment the app store opened in 2008. He was 12 years old, working on a Mac in his bedroom in the London district of Wimbledon. Because he was too young, he signed up for the Apple developer's license using his father's name. He'd taken no formal computer science classes at school, and neither of his parents (Diana and Lou, a lawyer and a business executive, respectively) knew much about tech. Instead, he learned how to program almost entirely by himself, scouring websites and watching instructional videos.
自从2008年智能手机应用商店开始运营以来，达洛伊西奥就着手设计iPhone手机应用软件。那时12岁的他住在伦敦的温布尔顿，用卧室里的Mac电脑来工作。因为年纪太小，他在填写苹果(Apple)开发执照申请时用的都是他爸爸的名字。这之前他没在学校受过正式的电脑培训，他的父母（一个是律师，一个是商界管理人士）也都不从事技术行业工作。他几乎是完全靠刷网页、看教程来自学编程的。
His first coding effort resulted in an app that played audio snippets from speeches by his idol, Steve Jobs, whose unauthorized biography he'd recently devoured. 'It was rejected by Apple for every reason,' D'Aloisio says now, laughing. 'Copyrighted audio, poor functionality, too simple.' Another early design allowed users to touch a picture of wood, producing a knocking sound. A third transformed a smartphone screen into a treadmill for your fingers. That one earned about $120 in sales on its first day.
他编写出的第一款软件是个音频播放器，可以播放他偶像史蒂夫?乔布斯(Steve Jobs)演讲的音频片段，而音频来自一个乔布斯的传记，内容没有经过授权。如今达洛伊西奥笑着回忆道，软件因为音频受版权保护、性能不流畅、过于简单之类的各种原因，被苹果拒绝了。他早期设计的另外一个应用软件能让用户触摸一张木头的图片时发出敲击的声音。第三个应用则将智能手机的屏幕变成一个锻炼手指的跑步机，这一次，软件第一天便赚了120美元。
When he wasn't programming or doing schoolwork, D'Aloisio began to fill his spare time reading about natural language processing. He'd studied languages as diverse as Latin and Mandarin, and became fascinated by concepts like grammatical frameworks, morpheme parsing and the 1960s work of the linguist Richard Montague. 'He's my favorite,' D'Aloisio enthuses. 'He theorized that natural language could be described like a syntactical programming language.'
除了编程和写作业，达洛伊西奥开始抽时间来阅读自然语言处理(natural language processing)方面的文章。他还学习了拉丁文和中文，并且对语言学理念产生了浓厚的兴趣，例如语法框架、语素解析，以及上世纪60年代语言学家理查德?蒙塔古(Richard Montague) 的理论。达洛伊西奥热情地说道，他是我最喜欢的语言学家，根据他的理论，自然语言可以被视作遵照一定句法写出的编程语言。
As he scanned the Internet for knowledge, D'Aloisio decided that what he really needed was a better way to determine, at a glance, what was worth reading. He envisioned a summarization tool that used language theory to give a meaningful synopsis in fewer than 400 characters.
随着他不断运用网络来搜集知识，达洛伊西奥意识到，他急需一个能让他快速确定文章阅读价值的方法。于是他构想了一个摘要工具，能运用语言学理论来编写低于400字的内容提要。
'There are two ways of doing natural language processing: statistical or semantic,' D'Aloisio explains. A semantic system attempts to figure out the actual meaning of a text and translate it succinctly. A statistical system-the type D'Aloisio used for Summly-doesn't bother with that; it keeps phrases and sentences intact and figures out how to pick a few that best encapsulate the entire work. 'It ranks and classifies each sentence, or phrase, as a candidate for inclusion in the summary. It's very mathematical. It looks at frequencies and distributions, but not at what the words mean.'
达洛伊西奥解释道，自然语言处理有统计学和语义学两种方法，语义学系统试图解析文章的真实含义并对其进行简洁的译介。而统计学系统──设计Summly所采用的方法──无需这一过程；该系统保留词汇和句子的完整性，并通过运算从全文挑选出最具概括力的内容。它将每个句子或词汇进行分类、排序，以便挑出编入摘要的内容。这一过程极依赖数学计算，考量的是频率和分布，而非词语的含义。
An early iteration of Summly, called Trimit, was featured in Apple's app store in July 2011 on a list of new and noteworthy offerings. There it was noticed by the influential Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch and quickly came to the attention of an investment group led by Li Ka-shing. When D'Aloisio was approached over email by Li's people at Horizons Ventures, he was only 15-and so far mostly managed to conceal that fact. He'd never met with anyone in the tech world face to face, and the information he'd listed when he registered Trimit spoke only vaguely of a London technology company. It failed to mention that the company's management and technology teams-in fact, its entire workforce-consisted of a single kid in a suburban bedroom who wasn't yet old enough to drive.
Summly的一个早期版本──Trimit，于2011年7月出现在了苹果app store“新品推荐”栏目中。正是在这里，它被极具影响力的硅谷《科技博客》(TechCrunch)所关注，并迅速引起了李嘉诚的投资集团的注意。当达洛伊西奥收到李嘉诚的维港投资(Horizons Ventures)发来的电子邮件时，他只有15岁，并且基本没让什么人知道他所做的事情。在那之前，他从未与科技领域内的任何人物见过面，而他在Trimit的登记信息中也只是粗略形容自己是“伦敦的一家科技公司”。仅靠这一信息，谁也不会想到这家公司的管理和技术团队──事实上，它的全部职员──竟然是住在郊区卧室里的一个连车都不能开的小孩。
'I thought I was going to sell the app in the Apple store for a pound or two each, and then I'd use the money to buy a new computer,' says D'Aloisio. 'I'd never had any contact from an investor before. And now here's an email supposedly from a Hong Kong billionaire. It sounded dodgy. I didn't respond the first time. They had to email me again.' D'Aloisio was accompanied by his mother and father ('they were a bit bewildered, it was kind of insane') as he took a meeting with Horizons Ventures's representatives in London in August 2011. The meeting ended with D'Aloisio receiving a seed investment of $300,000.
达洛伊西奥说，我本来只是打算在苹果app store用一两英镑的价格出售这个软件，然后用赚来的钱给自己换台新电脑。我之前从没联系过任何投资商。而如今一个香港的亿万富翁竟然给我发电邮了，这太诡异了。第一封邮件我没有回覆，于是他们又给我发了第二封。2011年8月份，他的父母带着不可置信的心情陪他一同与维港投资的代表进行了会面。会谈结束后，达洛伊西奥获得了30万美元的种子投资。
As fall arrived and school began, D'Aloisio felt immense pressure to deliver for his backers. He needed to whip his algorithm into better shape, so he contracted a team of Israeli coders who specialize in natural language processing. Searching on Google, he found and hired a retired professor living in Thailand who'd written seminal books on the topic. 'He became our main scientist,' says D'Aloisio. 'He now works at Yahoo! in the Sunnyvale office.'
当年秋天开学后，达洛伊西奥开始感觉到肩上背负起了来自投资方的巨大压力。他需要改善软件的运算法则，于是他找到了以色列一个从事自然语言处理的编程团队，并签订了合同。他还用谷歌(Google)搜索找到了一位居住在泰国、在该领域有过重要著作的退休教授。达洛伊西奥说，他成了我们的科研主管，他现在在雅虎的森尼维尔办公室工作。
Meanwhile, he was being ferried around the globe to tech conferences, getting introduced to other potential investors. D'Aloisio made a remarkable impression on everyone he crossed paths with. 'He has an eerie maturity,' says Andrew Halls, headmaster of the King's College School in Wimbledon, which D'Aloisio has attended since he was 11. 'He has an extraordinary articulateness in the face of situations that, for me, even as a 54-year-old, might be terrifying.'
与此同时，达洛伊西奥开始环游世界，到处参加会议，并结识其他潜在的投资人。他给每一位结识的人都留下极深的印象。温布尔顿国王学院中学(King’s College School)的校长安德鲁?霍尔斯(Andrew Halls)评价道，他成熟得可怕，他在各种状况下仍保持着清晰的思维，这令我这个54岁的人都觉得惊讶。
'I was blown away by him,' Kushner recalls. 'The first time I interacted with him was at News Corp, when he was meeting with Murdoch, and I was looped in to provide perspective. Nick described the vision of what he was trying to accomplish. And he was providing insight to Rupert.' D'Aloisio's stage presence, coupled with the deep-pocketed credibility brought by Li, attracted a large group of benefactors to Summly, including Ashton Kutcher, Yoko Ono and Stephen Fry.
库什纳回忆道，我当时被他深深折服了。他到新闻集团去见默多克时，我与他有了第一次接触，当时我被一同叫去提提意见。达洛伊西奥在会上描述了他想要实现的远景。他帮助默多克加深了对一些事物的见解。达洛伊西奥在台上的优异表现，加上背后李嘉诚的雄厚财力，为Summly招来了包括艾什顿?库奇(Ashton Kutcher)、小野洋子(Yoko Ono)、史蒂芬?弗莱(Stephen Fry)等许多人的捐赠。
D'ALOISIO HAS BEEN quoted opining that 'time is the new currency.' It's the driving notion behind Summly. It's also a strangely wise observation from a 17-year-old. At that age, many of us had more time on our hands than we knew how to fill without plummeting into severe boredom. It's easy to forget-conversing over lunch in a London caf钼 or strolling through the Tate Modern-that D'Aloisio was born in 1995 and has not yet graduated from high school. Or that he still lives in his childhood bedroom, in a cozy upper-middle-class home. As I chat with his parents, he excuses himself to work on his computer. Slouching down the hall in his stocking feet, hems of his skinny jeans brushing the hallway carpet, it is the most kidlike you will ever see him.
达洛伊西奥常喜欢说“时间是新的货币”。这是一个17岁男孩对人生的睿智洞察，也是Summly软件背后的发展理念。而我们多数人在他那个年龄，时间多得都不知道该怎么做才不会荒废。我很容易就忘了这样一个事实：达洛伊西奥在1995年出生于一个中上层阶级家庭，连高中都还没毕业，还住在小时候住的那个舒服卧室里。在我和他父母聊天的时候，他离开房间去在电脑上干活。只见他穿着袜子下楼，牛仔裤腿扫过大厅的地毯──此时此刻是他最像个孩子的时候。
D'Aloisio's parents came to England from Australia. His father, Lou, has worked in commodities for BP and Morgan Stanley, while his mother, Diana, is a corporate lawyer who also serves as her son's contractual representative. They always knew D'Aloisio was an extremely inquisitive child. 'But he was our first, so we didn't think it was anything out of the ordinary,' says Diana. (D'Aloisio's brother, Matthew, is 14.) They stress that despite his impressive accomplishments, he remains a normal kid. Or at least as normal as a kid can be when he's making offhand references to Markov models and stochastic processes. 'He still goes out on weekends, still goes to parties,' says Diana. 'He's got a girlfriend. All the things you do at 17.'
达洛伊西奥的父母从澳大利亚搬到英国，他的父亲卢(Lou)曾在英国石油(BP)和摩根士丹利(Morgan Stanley)工作，而母亲戴安娜(Diana)是一位企业律师，同时也是儿子的合同代表。他们向来都知道达洛伊西奥是一个非常好学的孩子。但戴安娜说因为他是长子，他们本以为他不会做出什么超出寻常的事情来（达洛伊西奥有一个14岁的弟弟）。他们强调，尽管达洛伊西奥成就非凡，尽管他聊天时会聊起马尔科夫模型(Markov models)和随机过程(stochastic processes)，他仍只是一个再普通不过的孩子。戴安娜说，他周末仍要出去玩，仍要去参加派对。他还有个女朋友。17岁孩子会做的事情，他都会做。
D'Aloisio himself strives to maintain a bubble of normalcy. He dates the same girl he did before the whirlwind hit. And though he's stopped attending school-he's too busy to sit in class while overseeing Summly's development-he still gets his work from his teachers and meets with them regularly. He cherishes the fact that his circle of friends knows little of his life as a budding industrialist. When I met him, he was about to head to Greece for a weeklong vacation with a pack of high school pals.
达洛伊西奥也尽力维持着生活原本的样子。他的女友还是之前的那个女友。而且尽管他不再去学校了──坐在教室里就没空监管Summly的研发──他还是照常去找老师拿作业。他十分庆幸他的朋友不了解他企业家的那一面。而当我采访他的时候，他正准备和一群高中死党去希腊玩上一周。
For now, D'Aloisio isn't touching the money. 'I'm too young to appreciate the value of it,' he insists. 'I don't have a mortgage, I'm 17. To me, a hundred pounds is a lot. Take that as a benchmark.' Though he's not allowed to comment on Summly's sale price, when pressed he allows that he might one day like to deploy his newfound riches as an angel investor. No one around him seems to think there's a danger that the money will ruin him or that he'll be tempted to spend the rest of his life dissipating on a beach. 'He's pretty well grounded. You wouldn't believe how frugal he is,' says Diane. 'He's got a great engine,' says Lou. 'He won't stop at this.'
现在达洛伊西奥还不负责管理他的收入。他坚称说，我太年轻了，还不懂如何发挥其价值。我没有房贷，我才17。对我来说100英镑就是个大数目了，这就是我对钱的大致概念。尽管他无法对Summly的售价置评，但当我逼问他未来打算如何支配的时候，他说他在考虑以后也许可以用所发之财来做一名天使投资人。在他身边，似乎没人觉得这份钱会毁掉他或者他会挥霍钱财浪费人生。戴安娜说，孩子很踏实，很有冲劲儿，他不会停止奋斗的。
Perhaps the more interesting question is what drove Yahoo! to shell out that reported $30 million for a single app. To be sure, Summly's text-compression abilities dovetail nicely with Yahoo!'s new focus on mobile utilities. Along with Yahoo!'s $1.1 billion purchase of the blogging service Tumblr and the launch of an acclaimed new weather app, the Summly move marks a commitment to owning the tiny real estate of the smartphone screen-and serving advertising to the youthful eyeballs that tend to gravitate to mobile devices.
而或许更引人关注的问题是，雅虎究竟为何决定拿出3,000万美元来收购一款手机应用呢？诚然，Summly的文本精炼能力与新战略下的雅虎对移动设备的侧重不谋而合。伴随着以11亿美元对轻博客的收购，以及广受好评的新款天气应用的推出，Summly软件的加入见证了雅虎占领智能手机领域的坚定决心，以及为爱使手机的年轻消费者提供优质服务的不懈努力。
But there's little doubt this was also an 'acqui-hire,' in which the person being bought is just as important as the product. D'Aloisio is now working full time in Yahoo!'s London office, and his youth, his energy and his undeniable it-factor have brought the formerly musty tech giant a much-needed injection of cool. Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer -who lends the company some of her own it-factor-praises his 'commitment to excellence in design and simplicity' and says she is 'inspired by the creativity and tenacity Nick brings to his work.'
不过无需置疑，软件的收购同时意味着“人才的收购”，雅虎买下的不只是产品，还有产品背后的人。达洛伊西奥如今已是雅虎伦敦分部的全职员工，而他的青春活力以及无可厚非的独特潜质给这个曾经腐朽老旧的科技巨头注入了迫切需要的新鲜活力。雅虎CEO玛丽莎?梅耶尔赞赏他“力求设计的完美和产品的简约”，并称自己“被他的创造活力和坚韧精神所感染”。
While D'Aloisio spends 80 percent of his work time retooling and improving Summly (which has already been integrated into Yahoo!'s iPhone app), the other 20 percent is devoted to imagining the expansive challenges he'll take on next. He predicts there will be summarization programs that do for video what Summly does for the written word. He has grand thoughts about using technology to aid learning and would like to help fellow autodidacts while disrupting the old educational models.
目前，达洛伊西奥80%的工作围绕着Summly的重构和改良展开，而另外20%的工作精力则用来思考今后的挑战方向。他预测，未来将会有一款如同Summly精炼文字一样可以精炼视频的软件。他设想了许多运用科技来帮助人们学习知识的方法，并希望在旧有教育模式瓦解的同时帮助人们更好地实现自主学习。
As for his own education: He's weighing whether to enroll in university in England or maybe the U.S. to be closer to Silicon Valley. Or perhaps he'll skip college entirely and just focus on his work. 'I absolutely want to start another company,' he says. 'Serial entrepreneurs get addicted to creation. I want to be passionate. I feel really bad when I'm not doing something new.'
而至于他自己的教育问题：他在考虑是留在英国，还是为了离硅谷更近而去读美国的大学。再或者，他也许会放弃学业，全然专注于他的事业。他说，我非常想再创办一家公司，连续创业家们都是对创新上瘾的人。我希望能保有热情。如果我不能尝试新的事物，我会感觉很糟。
