CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE

In reading the Financial Times’ coverage of the teen entrepreneur Nick D'Aloisio, you can see how he used many Creative Competencies to create his Summly App which Yahoo just bought for $30 million.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7755d5be-956b-11e2-a4fa-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Oea4EQIm

D'Aloisio used Knowledge Mining to connect three key dots of knowledge that he embodied as a 15 year-old living in London circa 2013. They are  information (access to knowledge is a changing world is critical ); brevity (we like long-form writing but want it in short-form summaries); mobility (we want it anywhere, all the time). These are the same elements that go into Twitter and Vine. 

He scaled his creativity into creation by getting his idea into TechCrunch, a platform that angel investors observe for possible new startups. His first investor was Li-Kashing, a Chinese billionaire. His venture capital firm, Horizons Venture saw his early work in TechCrunch. Li, or the people who worked for him, was a “wanderer” who cruised different sites looking for potential startups. Ashton Kutcher, Stephen Fry and Spotify;s Shakil Khan wandered into D'Aloisio’s world and back him as well. 

Finally, Marissa Mayer, the ex-Google, now CEO of Yahoo, really scaled D'Aloisio by giving him a huge platform. Just as Google really scaled the startup YouTube, so too is Yahoo scaling Summly.

I’d like to learn more about the creative process of D'Aloisio. He learned code as a kid, according to the press. But who did he play with? Who did he bounce ideas off? Most creative people have a trusted friend, or two, where they mess around with ideas. Who is Nick’s creative buddy?