Teenager with 4.0 GPA who built the Viral Cal AI app was rejected by 15 top universities

Zach Yadegari, Cal Ai’s co -founder, Zach Yadegari, the teenager of the Gymnasium by comments on x After revealing that of the top 18 colleges he applied, he was rejected by 15.

Yadegari says he got a 4.0 GPA and nailed to a score of 34 in his practice (over 31 is considered a top score). His problem is sure – just like the tens of thousands of commentators in X – was his essay.

As TechCrunch said last month, Yadegari is the co -founder of the Cal Ai AI app that Yadegari says, produces millions of revenue, on an annual repetitive $ 30 million income route. While we cannot verify that revenue claims, application stores say that the application has been uploaded over 1 million times and has tens of thousands of positive reviews.

Cal Ai was actually his second success. Sold the previous web game company for $ 100,000, he said.

Yadegari had no intention of going to college. He and his co-founder had already spent a summer in a hacker house in San Francisco, building their original and thought he would become a classic (if not cliché) college-Dropout technical businessman.

But time at the hacker’s house taught him that if he did not go to college, he would make much of his young adult life. So she chose more school.

And his essay said so much.

He wrote the whole thing in X. repeatedly said that he was never planning to go to college and document his experience of making more and more money as a self -taught coder. He wrote how VCs and mentors reinforced the idea that no college was needed.

Everyone until he had a superficial: “During my rejection on the collective path, I was committed to another framework of expectations: the archetypal founder of abandonment.

The college would help him “lift the work I have done”, so now he wanted to learn from people, not just books and YouTube.

His penultimate paragraph stated: “Through the college, I will contribute and grow up in this greater whole, with my strengthening to leave even more constant, positive impact on the world.”

Despite the grades, the results of the tests and achievements of the real world were rejected by Stanford, Mit, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Duke and Cornell, among others. However, it was accepted by Georgia Tech, the University of Texas and the University of Miami.

Still, his tweet for many rejections became viral, with over 22 million views, over 2,700 retweets and over 3,600 comments.

Many of the comments threw the essay as “arrogant” Saying it was the problem.

Others threw the college acceptance system as a problem (with All the usual criticisms there).

Probably the most insightful comments were the ones that show In addition to colleges they are looking for candidates who seem thirsty for education and will probably graduate. His essay read as he had just convinced himself to attend.

Even Y Combinator’s Garry Tan weighed on xNot with feedback on Yadegari, but with his own “confession” that he was also widely rejected and expected in the college applications “because I rewritten my essays after Ayn Rand’s” The Fountain “was read.

Yadegari tells TechCrunch that he still counts his next steps, but he was fascinated by the response of X. “It was interesting to see many different prospects, but in the end, I will never know exactly why I was rejected. Finally, when I wrote my essay, I would like it.

Yadegari also says that he has realized that business success is not the greatest achievement of his 17 -year life. Having acquired some of them, “I realized that life was not just about financial success,” he said, “it is a relationship to be part of a wider community.”