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Yadegari tell that he get a 4.0 GPA and nailed a 34 score on his ACT ( above 31 is regard a top scotch ) . His problem , he ’s sure — as are tens of thousands of commenters on X — was his essay .
As TechCrunch reported last month , Yadegari is the co - founder of the viral AI calorie - tracking app Cal AI , which Yadegari says is father millions in revenue , on a $ 30 million annual recurring gross track . While we ca n’t affirm that receipts claim , the app storage do say the app was downloaded over 1 million metre and has tens of thousands of positive reviews .
Cal AI was really his second achiever . He sold his previous web gaming troupe for $ 100,000 , he said .
Yadegari had n’t intended on going to college . He and his Centennial State - father had already expend a summer at a hacker house in San Francisco build their prototype , and he call up he would become a classic ( if not cliché ) college - dropout tech entrepreneur .
But the time in the cyber-terrorist house learn him that if he did n’t go to college , he would be forgoing a big part of his young adult life . So he opted for more school .
And his essay said about as much .
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He posted the whole thing on X. It repeatedly said how he never planned on travel to college and documented his experience making ever more money as a ego - taught coder . He write how VCs and mentor reinforced the idea that he did n’t need college .
All until he had an January 6 : “ In my rejection of the collegiate path , I had unwittingly bound myself to another model of expectations : the prototypic dropout founder . Instead of schoolteachers , it was VCs and mentors steer me toward a commission that was still not my own , ” he wrote .
College would help him “ bring up the work I have always done ” so he now want to learn from human beings , not just books and YouTube .
His penultimate paragraph declared , “ Through college , I will bestow to and farm within that orotund whole , authorise me to leave an even greater lasting , overconfident impact on the cosmos . ”
Despite the grades , test score , and real - reality achievement , he was pass up 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 .
Others blasted the college acceptance system as the problem ( withall the usual criticismsthere ) .
Even Y Combinator ’s Garry Tanweighed in on X , not with feedback for Yadegari , but with his own “ confession ” that he was also wide rejected and waitlisted on his college apps “ because I rewrite my essay after reading Ayn Rand ’s ‘ The Fountainhead . ’ ” and ’s Objectivism philosophy seems to be a permanently controversial topic , it seems . ( Tan , however , did get into and attended Stanford . )
Yadegari tells TechCrunch that he ’s still image out his next steps but was fascinated by the reply his X post receive . “ It was interesting to see many unlike perspectives , but at last , I ’ll never know exactly why I was turned down . At the end of the mean solar day , when I wrote my essay , I hop admission fee office would perceive me as authentic because that ’s all I ever want to be . ”Yadegari also says he ’s fall to realize that business success is n’t the neat achievement of his 17 - year - old life . Having obtain some of that , “ I realized that living was not just about financial success , ” he say , “ it is about relationship , and about being a part of a heavy community . ”
