\n<\/p>\n
Zach Yadegari, the high school teen co-founder of Cal AI<\/a>, is being hammered with comments on X<\/a> after he revealed that out of 18 top colleges he applied to, he was rejected by 15.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s sure \u2014 as are tens of thousands of commenters on X \u2014 was his essay.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Cal AI was actually his second success as well. He sold his previous web gaming company for $100,000, he said. <\/p>\n Yadegari hadn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n But the time in the hacker house taught him that if he didn\u2019t go to college, he would be forgoing a big part of his young adult life.\u00a0So he opted for more school.<\/p>\n And his essay said about as much. <\/p>\n 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\u2019t need college.<\/p>\n All until he had an epiphany: \u201cIn 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,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n College would help him \u201celevate the work I have always done\u201d so he now wanted to learn from humans, not just books and YouTube.\u00a0<\/p>\n His penultimate paragraph declared, \u201cThrough college, I will contribute to and grow within that larger whole, empowering me to leave an even greater lasting, positive impact on the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite the 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, University of Texas, and University of Miami.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Many of the comments blasted the essay as \u201carrogant,\u201d saying that was the problem<\/a>.<\/p>\n Others blasted the college acceptance system as the problem (with all the usual criticisms<\/a> there).<\/p>\n Probably the more insightful comments were the ones pointing<\/a> out that colleges are looking for candidates who seem thirsty for education and will likely graduate. His essay read like had barely convinced himself to attend.<\/p>\n