Yahoo is getting its spark back and one of the people helping make the company cool again is 18-year-old Nick D'Aloisio.
D'Aloisio gained overnight fame and fortune in March when he sold his relatively unknown tech company Summly to Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) for a reported $30 million.
He's been working at Yahoo ever since, developing apps and completing his high school education on the side.
D'Aloisio is seen as a young genius in the tech industry, and his presence alone is helping Yahoo restore its reputation as an innovative firm.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is betting his insight will strengthen the firm's mobile capabilities, vital for a company that had become known as an aging Internet portal.
D'Aloisio is working on advancing the ideas and technology originally developed at Summly, aiming to make Yahoo's mobile search experience more user-friendly.
His original Summly app automatically summarized mobile search results into easily digestible chunks of text. It was quickly folded into Yahoo's infrastructure after the acquisition.
D'Aloisio said the apps he's working on now will do something similar, only this time including multimedia content such as video.
"I'm still working on news and information and trying to take the notion of summarization to another level and see what that would look like," he said in an interview with CNN at LeWeb, a conference for tech startups and entrepreneurs in Paris.
But is D'Aloisio just biding his time until he leaves to start another company? Apparently not.
"I can leave whenever I want. I'm there at Yahoo because I'm enjoying my work," he said.
D'Aloisio said he was having fun being part of Yahoo's transformation and drawing on the experience of the people around him.
"We're redefining all our mobile products. The apps are winning awards ... I'm enjoying actually learning and being mentored by these people."
Another advantage is he no longer needs to chase venture capitalists for new rounds of funding, allowing him to focus entirely on developing new technology.
Shares in Yahoo have surged by more than 150% since Mayer took over as CEO in July 2012.
Mayer has redesigned the Yahoo logo and made several high-profile acquisitions. She's also introduced various employee perks and rules, inspired by her previous work at Yahoo's arch competitor, Google (GOOG, Fortune 500). 
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