Zach Yadegari, Co-founder of high school teenagershammering Leave a comment on x He revealed that of the 18 top universities he applied for, he was rejected by 15.
Yadegari said he scored a 4.0 GPA and scored 34 points in his performance (31 was considered the highest score). His question is certain–the thousands of reviewers on X are also his articles.
As TechCrunch reported last month, Yadegari is Cal AI, co-founder of Viral Ai Calorie App AI, which Yadegari said will make millions of dollars in revenue, a $30 million annual recurring revenue trajectory. While we can’t verify the revenue claims, the app store does say the app has been downloaded 1 million times and has thousands of positive reviews.
Cal AI is actually his second success. He said he sold his former online gaming company for $100,000.
Yadegari doesn’t plan to go to college. He and his co-founder have spent a summer in a dark room in San Francisco, building their prototypes, and he thinks he will be a classic (if not cliché) university abandoned tech entrepreneur.
But time in the hacker’s house told him that if he didn’t go to college, he would give up a large part of his adult life. So he chose more schools.
His papers have said a lot.
He posted the entire content on X. It repeatedly says that he never planned to go to college and documented his experience as a self-taught coder. He wrote about how VC and mentors strengthened the idea of he didn’t need college.
Until he had an epiphany: “When I turned down the path of college, I unconsciously tied myself to another framework of expectation: the founder of the prototype dropout. Instead of the school teacher, the instructor who guided me in my own direction,” he wrote.
The university will help him “improve the work I’ve been doing” so he wants to learn from humans now, not just books and YouTube.
His penultimate paragraph declares: “Through the university, I will contribute and grow to the whole, giving me the ability to have a greater lasting, positive impact on the world.”
Despite his achievements, test scores and real-world achievements, he was rejected by Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Duke and Cornell. However, he was accepted by Georgia Tech, the University of Texas and the University of Miami.
Still, his tweets about many rejections spread, viewing over 22 million, over 2700 retweets, and over 3,600 comments.
Many comments blow up this post as “arrogance”, Say that’s the problem.
Others blow up the university acceptance system (with All the usual criticism There).
Perhaps more insightful comments are The person pointing to The university is looking for candidates who seem to have a desire for education and may graduate. His article reads like he barely convinces himself to participate.
Even the Y combinationist Garry Tan Weighing xnot feedback on Yadegari, but his own “confession” was also widely rejected by his university application and listed “because I rewrite my paper after reading Ayn Rand’s Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. (However, Tan did go to Stanford.)
Yadegari told TechCrunch that he was still figuring out what he next, but was fascinated by the responses his X post received. “It’s interesting to see a lot of different perspectives, but in the end, I’ll never know exactly why I was rejected. At the end of the day, when I write my paper, I hope the admissions office will see me as real because that’s all I want.”
Yadegari also said he has realized that business success is not the biggest achievement in his 17-year-old life. “I realized that life is more than just financial success,” he said, “it’s about relationships and being part of a larger community.”
