This rejection of the Ivy League learned to code at 7 years old, built an application of $ 30 million of 18 and treats university as a vacation of $ 100,000: “ not win much of the ” ‘

In adolescence, he began to create applications he considered “small projects”. One of them is no longer so small, because Cali has taken off to become an empire of $ 30 million. The application allows users to follow the calories by taking a photo of their food, inspired by the own yadegari fitness trip. (Fortune The financial files examined showing that the application reports several million dollars in revenues per month.)

Yadegari said Fortune About the wild ride of the last two years, the creation of a mixture of friends (all older than him) as co-founders, to be widely rejected by schools in the Ivy League despite a 4.0 GPA, a 34-year-old act and an entrepreneurial success, for why he decided to go to the University anyway.

“I look at him because I pay $ 100,000 a year for a vacation,” he said.

Bullating and evolve

Yadegari said that his success had started with a personal project to vulger when he was a teenager (younger).

“I was very, very thin all my life growing up, and I wanted to start growing and gaining weight,” explains Yadegari Fortune. When he realized that the majority of his progress came from the diet, he began to follow his calories more and eat in surplus.

But something was missing on his fitness trip. The application. It was “a horrible experience” using the most popular application at the time. He found that he could not eat in the cafeteria with his friends because he ate pre-ported meals that were weighed on scales, and he often had to jump while eating in restaurants because he would not know the calories.

“For a child, I was in school, it was simply not durable,” he added.

The experience was so bad for him, he said, that he abandoned most of his fitness trip for a while. But having coding skills and taking into account the rise of AI tools like Chatgpt and Claude, he decided to make one himself.

With the idea in mind, he visited the partners to whom he knew he could have confidence, a friend of the coding camp and two people he met on X.com, as indicated by CNBC. Together, Henry Langmack, Blake Anderson and Jake Castillo launched Cali in May 2024.

“We started to do tiktoks, we started to associate ourselves with influencers, then we experienced fairly explosive growth,” he said.

Last year in July, encouraged by positive comments, he decided to rush to San Francisco with his co-founders to concentrate and hire around 15 employees. As written on his X account, investors have constantly tried to “throw us money (cali)”, which they rejected. A year and four months later – CALI reports $ 30 million a year and the team has more than 30 people.

According to Yadegari, the application has a 90%precision rate. It is free to download from the Apple and Google Play App Store, with $ 2.49 subscriptions per month or $ 29.99 per year. Yadegari was previously profiled by other points of sale such as CNBC,, CBS And Techcrunch.

The coding is not new for YadeGari

By starting as a coding at only seven years old and giving lessons for $ 30 per hour at 10 years, he developed coding skills before the AI ​​boom. At 12, he had put his first application, “Speed ​​Soccer” on the App Store.

In high school, he continued to build. Yadegari began to make money online after creating a game website called “Totally Science”, which enabled his school peers to play unlissed games at school – which brought it in six figures.

“Everything I built at this point was free,” said Yadegari.

“More than two years, (totally science) has reached 5 million users and began to win $ 60,000 per month from banners that I placed on the site. I sold it at the age of 16 for $ 100,000 – and it was then that I started creating applications. ”

School days

Being an autonomous at such a young age, Yadegari knew that the conventional path was not intended for him after high school. He didn’t need to go to university to make millions, but that did not mean that he was not qualified.

He is currently not declared in his major. He abandoned the business school and now takes courses in philosophy. He always takes an entrepreneurship, but says that he “does not get much from class equipment”.

“I never wanted to go to university. I have always been contrary to the idea that everyone should follow the same formula: get good grades, go to a good college, get a diploma, find a job, then start making money. I hated this notion – and I used to fight with my parents all the time. ”

Now he combines parties with payroll checks. In Miami, he lives in a house with a pile of his friends of construction of applications sharing the same ideas aged 18 to 26 years. According to Yadegarari, they are prosperous entrepreneurs like him.

The young founders build “App Mafia”, a community and a brand where they educate people online by making content on how to create applications.

“We are going to have a lot of ideas to shape the future. We are mainly trying to direct the point of manufacturers of the Z generation,” he added.

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