Business
Gen Z coder rejected by the Ivy League despite founding a $30 million app says college is ‘not worth it for most people’
Zach Yadegari, 18, never wanted to go to college.
After all, why would he need to? Cal AI, the calorie-tracking app he co-founded, blossomed into a $30 million empire before he could even submit applications, so it’s safe to say he was doing just fine.
“After Cal AI started taking off, it confirmed it. I was like, ‘Okay, clearly, you don’t need college to be successful.’ My parents finally saw the vision,” Yadergari previously told Fortune.
The coding prodigy is a longtime entrepreneur, teaching himself to code when he was just 7 years old. By age 10, he was charging $30 an hour for lessons to people who wanted to learn the skill. By the time high school arrived, he had created a gaming website called “Totally Science”, which enabled his peers to play unblocked video games online with no download or registration required. The venture brought in his first six figures.
Yadeguri eventually had a change of heart about college, and decided to apply. But despite having an extensive entrepreneurial background, a 4.0 GPA, and a 34 score on the ACTs, he was rejected from the Ivy League, including Stanford, which Yadegari said “is known for start-ups.”
18 years old
34 ACT
4.0 GPA
$30M ARR bizStanford ❌
MIT ❌
Harvard ❌
Yale ❌
WashU ❌
Columbia ❌
UPenn ❌
Princeton ❌
Duke ❌
USC ❌
Georgia Tech ✅
UVA ❌
NYU ❌
UT ✅
Vanderbilt ❌
Brown ❌
UMiami ✅
Cornell ❌— Zach Yadegari (@zach_yadegari) April 1, 2025
Yadegari said the only schools that accepted him were Georgia Tech, University of Miami and University of Texas. He decided to attend the University of Miami, not for the prestige, but for the atmosphere.
“If I wasn’t going to optimize for the best school academically, I was going to optimize for the best school socially,” Yadegari said.
“Two weeks into school, I’ve been having a great time,” he told Fortune in late August.
That could be because he views college as a “six-figure vacation.” He throws parties and lives in a house with other like-minded app-building friends between the ages of 18-26. According to Yadegari, they are successful entrepreneurs like himself.
Yadegari is currently undeclared in his major. He dropped out of the business school and now takes classes in philosophy. He still takes one entrepreneurship class, but says he’s “not gaining much from the class material” because he already has the experience.
Even though he’s enjoying his new endeavor of parties and paychecks, he believes his Gen Z peers don’t need college to find success.
“It’s not worth it for most people, for sure, even for me, like, I mean, I’m having a lot of fun, I think it’s worth it for me, the second it becomes not worth it, I’m going to stop,” he said.
“But I feel like I have all my life to make money, but like, the few $100,000 that it’s going to cost me now, it’s going to be worth it to make the memories… rather than to just, like, save it, spend it, invest it, whatever the case,” he added.
The start of Cal AI
At 16, Yadegari started building apps he deemed as “small projects.” One of them isn’t so small anymore, as Cal AI has taken off to become a $30 million empire. The app allows users to track calories by taking pictures of their food. (Fortune reviewed financial records showing the app brings in several million dollars of revenue per month.)
Yadegari said his business was inspired by a personal quest to bulk up when he was a (younger) teenager.
“I was very, very skinny my entire life growing up, and I wanted to start getting bigger and gaining weight,” Yadegari told Fortune. When he realized a majority of his progress was coming from diet, he started to track his calories more and eat in surplus.
But something was missing from his fitness journey: a user-friendly app to track calories He found the most popular app at the time was “an awful experience.” The lack of reliable tracking meant he couldn’t eat at the cafeteria with his friends: he was eating pre-portioned meals that were weighed on scales, and often skipped eating at restaurants because of unclear calorie counts.
After brainstorming a smartphone solution, he presented the vision to partners he knew he could trust, including one friend from coding camp and two people he had met on X.com, as reported by CNBC. Together, Henry Langmack, Blake Anderson and Jake Castillo launched Cal AI in May 2024.
According to Yadegari, the app has a 90% accuracy rate for calorie tracking. It’s free to download on both the Apple App Store and Google Play, with subscriptions priced at $2.49 per month or $29.99 annually.
Yadegari’s financial success has been profiled in outlets including CNBC, CBS and TechCrunch—and he didn’t need the Ivy League to get there.
