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18-year-old millionaire CEO of Cal AI rejected from Harvard, Yale, Stanford
Zach Yadegari, 18, CEO of nutrition app Cal AI, faces rejection from top universities despite a 4.0 GPA and successful startup.
The 18-year-old founder and CEO of a nutrition tracking app Cal AI has been rejected by several Ivy League schools and other top American universities in a development that has left many surprised. Zach Yadegari is the co-founder and CEO of Cal AI, an app that allows people to track calories by taking pictures of their food and a business that brings $30 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).
Despite his successful business and impressive academic record - he has a Grade Point Average (GPA) of 4.0 – Yadegari failed to secure admission to some of the USA’s top universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and MIT, among others.
The New York-based millionaire teen took to X yesterday to reveal the names of all the colleges that rejected him, and the handful that accepted him. Many people, including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, expressed surprise that so many colleges would reject Yadegari, whose startup was hailed by Forbes as an app “that's challenging legacy industry giants.”
College rejections
The colleges that rejected Zach Yadegari’s admission included Ivy Leagues like Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, and University of Pennsylvania. Other top institutes like Stanford and MIT also rejected his application.
He was rejected even from New York University, Duke, University of Southern California and more.
He did manage to secure admissions in Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), considered to be one of the USA’s top engineering colleges, and in the University of Miami.
X users were shocked by the low acceptance rate, although some blamed his ‘entitlement’ and his ‘poor’ college admissions essay.
“Wow this is so insane,” wrote X user Sherry Jiang. “That’s nuts,” declared tech entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian.
Zach Yadegari’s personal statement
Yadegari took to X to share his college admissions essay, where he confessed he initially believed higher education was unnecessary. He revealed that he started coding from the age of 7 and launching his first app at 12. By 16, he had already exited a successful online gaming business.
He started Cal AI in his junior year of high school. The app that used AI to track calories from food images quickly became the fastest-growing in its category with millions in revenue. Emboldened by its success, Yadegari and his co-founder moved to San Francisco.
Despite achieving financial success and being surrounded by mentors and investors who reinforced the idea that he didn’t need college, he began to feel something was missing. Although he had earlier rejected the idea of college, a visit to the Ryoan-ji rock garden in Kyoto sparked a deeper reflection and he came to see college not as an obstacle but as an opportunity to learn.
“College, I came to realize, is more than a mere right of passage. It is the conduit to elevate the work I have always done. In this next chapter, I want to learn from humans-both professors and students-not just from computers or textbooks,” said Yadegari.
This, at least, is what he wrote in his personal statement. On X, responding to one of the many comments that came his way, the 18-year-old said: “I’m not seeking skills. I’m seeking the ‘best four years of my life.’”
