Zach Yadegari, a high school teen co-founder of Cal AI, has been hammered in comments about X after revealing that of the 18 top colleges he applied for, he was rejected by the age of 15.
Yadegari says he got a 4.0 GPA and nailed 34 scores on his ACT (over 31 is considered a top score). I’m sure his problem was his essay, as did the tens of thousands of commenters on X.
As TechCrunch reported last month, Yadegari says that Yadegari generates millions of revenues on its $30 million annual recurring revenue track. Although they can’t confirm that revenue bill, app stores say the app has been downloaded more than a million times and there have been tens of thousands of positive reviews.
Calai was actually his second success. He sold his former web gaming company for $100,000, he said.
Yadegari had no intention of going to college. He and his co-founder had already spent the summer building their prototypes at the San Francisco hackerhouse, and he thought he would become a classic (if not cliched) college dropout tech entrepreneur.
But his time at Hackerhouse taught him that if he didn’t go to college, he would build a large part of the life of a young adult. So he chose more schools.
And his essay said a lot about it.
He posted everything to X. It repeatedly said he never planned to go to college and documented his experience of making more money as a self-taught coder. He wrote about how VCS and mentors reinforced the idea that they didn’t need college.
“When I refused to go to college, I was unconsciously bound by a different framework of expectations. I was the founder of a typical dropout. Instead of a school teacher, it’s heading in a direction where the VCS and mentors are still heading in their own direction,” he writes.
College would help him “promote the work I’ve always done,” so he wanted to learn from humans now, not just books and YouTube.
His penultimate paragraph declared, “Through the University, I will contribute to its greater whole, grow, and allow for even more lasting and positive impact on the world.”
Despite his grades, test scores and real-world achievements, he was rejected by Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Duke, Cornell and others. However, he was accepted by Georgia Tech, the University of Texas and the University of Miami.
Still, his many rejections have gone viral with over 22 million views, over 2,700 retweets and over 3,600 comments.
Many of the comments denounced the essay as “arrage” and said that was the problem.
Others have accused the university’s acceptance system as an issue (there are all the usual criticisms out there).
Perhaps the more insightful comments pointed to the fact that universities appear to be thirsty for education and are looking for candidates who are likely to graduate. His essays read as if he barely convinced himself that he would be present.
Even Y Combinator’s Garry Tan has heavily on X with his own “confessions,” rather than Yadegari’s feedback, but he has also been widely rejected, with his own “confessions,” in which he waited on his university app, “after reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead,” and the philosophy of perspective appears to be a permanently rebuttal topic. (However, Tan came to Stanford to attend.)
Yadegari tells TechCrunch that he still knows the next step but was fascinated by the response his X post received. “It was interesting to see so many different perspectives, but in the end I never know exactly why I was turned down. At the end of the day, when I wrote my essay, the admissions office wanted me to think I was authentic.”
Yadegari also says he has come to realize that business success is not the greatest achievement of his 17-year-old life. “I realized that life isn’t just about financial success,” he said, “it’s about being a relationship and being part of a larger community.”
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