Meet the 4.0 GPA Teen Behind the Viral Cal AI App

In a case of defiance, 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. 

Cal AI

Yadegari is the co-founder of the viral AI calorie-tracking app Cal AI, which he says is generating millions in revenue on a $30 million annual recurring revenue track. While that number isn't readily verifiable, the app stores do say the app was downloaded over 1 million times and has tens of thousands of positive reviews.

Cal AI was his second success. 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 cliché) 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.

Choosing College 

He posted his entire essay on X, and It repeatedly stated how he never planned on going to college and documented his experience making ever more money as a self-taught coder. He wrote about how VCs and mentors reinforced the idea that he didn’t need college.

He did all this 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 college, I will contribute to and grow within that larger whole, empowering me to leave an even greater lasting, positive impact on the world.”

Facing Rejections 

Despite his grades, test scores, and real-world achievements, he was rejected by Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Duke, and Cornell, among others. He was, however, accepted by Georgia Tech, the University of Texas, and the University of Miami.

Still, his tweet about the many rejections went viral, with over 22 million views, more than 2,700 retweets, and upwards of 3,600 comments.

Many of the comments blasted the essay as “arrogant,” saying that was the problem. Others blasted the college acceptance system as the problem (with all the usual criticisms there).

Probably the more insightful comments were the ones pointing out that colleges are looking for candidates who seem thirsty for education and will likely graduate. His essay read like he had barely convinced himself to attend.

More to Come 

Yadegari told TechCrunch that he’s still figuring out his next steps but was fascinated by the response his X post received. “It was interesting to see many different perspectives, but ultimately, I’ll never know exactly why I was turned down. At the end of the day, when I wrote my essay, I hoped admissions offices would perceive me as authentic because that’s all I ever want to be.”

Yadegari also says he’s come to realize that business success isn’t the greatest achievement of his 17-year-old life. Having obtained some of that, “I realized that life was not just about financial success,” he said, “it is about relationships, and about being a part of a larger community.”