Nick D’Aloisio was only 12 years old when he taught himself to code, and had coded several apps by the time he was 15. Nick saw a problem with how people consume news: we have so much information at our fingertips that it would be impossible to read even a tiny fraction of it, much less all of it. Nonetheless, it was often necessary to read full articles because summaries often left out important information or were just generally hard to read. At 15, he got his first investor for his app Summly, an app that uses an algorithm designed by D’Aloisio to summarize news in a way that was both thorough and easy to read. The app was published in December of 2011 and immediately took off. Yahoo aquired it in March 2013 for $30 million, making D’Aloisio one of the youngest self-made millionaires. D’Aloisio won Wall Street Journal’s “Innovator of the Year” award in 2013, was named to Forbes “30 under 30,” and received many other awards for his innovation and work with Yahoo. Now 21, he studies at Oxford University.
i cant imagine the pressure of being in the national spotlight at such a young age but it looks like he has managed it pretty well. good for him!