Teen with 4.0 GPA who built the viral Cal AI app was rejected by 15 top universities

Summary

Zach Yadegari, the high school teen co-founder of Cal AI, is being hammered with comments on X after he revealed that out of 18 top colleges he applied to, he was rejected by 15. Yadegari says that he got a 4.0 GPA and nailed a 34 score on his ACT (above 31 is considered a top score). His problem, he’s sure — as are tens of thousands of commenters on X — was his essay. As TechCrunch reported last month, Yadegari is the co-founder of the viral AI calorie app Cal AI, which Yadegari says is generating millions in revenue, on a $30 million annual recurring revenue track. While we can’t verify that revenue claim, the app stores do say the app was downloaded over 1 million times and has tens of thousands of positive reviews. Cal AI was actually his second success as well. He sold his previous web gaming company for $100,000, he said. Yadegari hadn’t intended on going to college. He and his co-founder had already spent a summer at a hacker house in San Francisco building their prototype, and he thought he would become a classic (if not cliche) college-dropout tech entrepreneur. But the time in the hacker house taught him that if he didn’t go to college, he would be forgoing a big part of his young adult life. So he opted for more school. And his essay said about as much. He posted the whole thing on X. It repeatedly said how he never planned on going to college and documented his experience making ever more money as a self-taught coder. He wrote how VCs and mentors reinforced the idea that he didn’t need college. All until he had an epiphany: “In my rejection of the collegiate path, I had unwittingly bound myself to another framework of expectations: the archetypal dropout founder. Instead of schoolteachers, it was VCs and mentors steering me toward a direction that was still not my own,” he wrote. College would help him “elevate the work I have always done” so he now wanted to learn from humans, not just books and YouTube. His penultimate paragraph declared, “Through coll...