About

Zach Yadegari's Personal Statement refers to discourse about a teenage tech CEO getting rejected by a majority of the colleges he applied to due to what Twitter / X users described as a weak college essay. Yadegari, the co-founder and CEO of the AI-powered calorie-counting app Cal AI, made a post about getting rejected by schools like Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Yale despite running a startup that supposedly generated $30 million in late March 2025. Yadegari then posted his personal essay, prompting several internet users to critique his writing, saying that it did not reflect his eagerness to learn and instead portrayed him as an arrogant student with a high potential to drop out of school.

Origin

Zach Yadegari is an 18-year-old entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Cal AI, an AI-powered nutrition-tracking app that allows users to monitor their calorie intake by taking pictures of their food. Launched in May 2024, Cal AI quickly gained popularity, surpassing 5 million downloads within eight months and generating over $2 million in monthly revenue.^[1]

On March 31st, 2025, Yadegari posted the results of his college application to Twitter,^[2] sharing his basic stats and then listing the schools he applied to. Notably, Yadegari was rejected from his top choices, including Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Washington University, Columbia, UPenn and Princeton, among others. The post shows Yadegari describing himself as, "18 years old, 34 ACT, 4.0 GPA, $30M ARR biz," and gathered over 26,000 likes in four days.

Yadegari also posted his personal statement,^[3] recounting his journey as a self-taught entrepreneur. He talks about pursuing independent learning at a young age and launching Cal AI, a fast-growing nutrition app. He then describes how a visit to Kyoto's Ryoan-ji rock garden sparked the realization that rejecting college had put him in another box, one of the archetypal dropout founders. Yadegari then decides that he does want to go to college and learn from his fellow students and professors instead of VCs and mentors.

Spread

Several internet users reacted to Zach Yadegari's personal essay and pointed out what they perceived as its weaknesses as it spread on Twitter / X in early April 2025.

On April 1st, 2025, X^[6] user @buccocapital wrote, "Of course Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and Yale rejected him. They have their pick of students with perfect grades and scores. His essay is just bragging that people think he’s too awesome for college. No self-awareness. Doesn’t get the prompt. A great example of why EQ matters." The post gathered over 20,000 likes in two days.

That same day, X^[4] user @coldhealing wrote, "Harvard got the ick because you used a GPT amount of em dashes." The tweet is a reference to the text-generating app's tendency to overuse em-dashes. The post gathered over 18,000 likes in two days.

Also on April 1st, X^[5] user @LittleMammith wrote, "I don't want to dunk on some poor teenager but it is unbelievably obvious why a college would not admit someone based on a statement like this and I'm honestly bewildered there weren't people in this kid's life who tried to explain that to him." The tweet gathered over 130,000 likes in two days.

Some internet users posted parodies of Yadegari's tweets, as seen in this April 2nd, 2025, tweet by user @keysmashbandit that read, "18 years old, 34 ACT, 4.0 GPA," alongside a screenshot of Ted Kaczynski's Industrial Revolution and it's Consequences essay. The post gathered over 5,000 likes in a day.

Search Interest

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External References