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18-year-old CEO calls for fair admissions after rejections by top varsities
Zach Yadegari’s startup Cal AI generates $30 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
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Malvika Choudhary - Thu, 03, Apr 2025
- 16:07 EDT
- 140
Zach Yadegari / LinkedIn
An 18-year-old entrepreneur and CEO has called for fairer college admissions processes after being rejected by multiple Ivy League and leading U.S. universities.
Following his rejections, Yadegari published an open letter to college admissions offices titled “Make Admissions Fair Again”, in which he criticized the current system for prioritizing diversity over merit and circumstances over capability.
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Despite his perfect 4.0 GPA and a multimillion-dollar startup, Zach Yadegari, the co-founder of Cal AI, a nutrition-tracking app with $30 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), claimed he was denied admission to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT, among others.
His rejection list also included Columbia, Brown, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania, Duke, New York University (NYU), and the University of Southern California (USC). He was, however, accepted to Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), the University of Miami and The University of Texas.
“The student that runs fake clubs and stacks extracurriculars is admitted over the student that runs a real business,” Yadegari wrote.
He argued that top universities should focus on recognizing and rewarding excellence, rather than engaging in what he called “social engineering.” “We can no longer afford to sacrifice achievement on the altar of social engineering. We must favor the ‘best and brightest.’ We must recognize and reward excellence. The current system is unfair and un-American,” his open letter read.
Yadegari, who shared his college essay on X (formerly Twitter) on April 2,described how he initially dismissed college as unnecessary. He began coding at age 7, launched his first app at 12, and by 16, had exited a six-figure online gaming business. A visit to the Ryoan-ji rock garden in Kyoto, however, led him to reconsider the value of higher education.
https://t.co/5wK7aCEYod pic.twitter.com/3ZQ1EbZDg1
— Zach Yadegari (@zach_yadegari) April 2, 2025
“College, I came to realize, is more than a mere rite of passage. It is the conduit to elevate the work I have always done,” he wrote in the essay which he shared tagging Elon Musk.
My personal statement pic.twitter.com/X0SOwcpMzU
— Zach Yadegari (@zach_yadegari) April 1, 2025
In November 2024, Forbes highlighted the young CEO as “challenging legacy industry giants” with his AI-powered nutrition tracking app. A month earlier, the publication detailed Cal AI’s rapid growth, reporting that the bootstrapped startup had already reached $15 million in ARR by leveraging strategic App Store optimization and user engagement techniques.
Yadegari’s post ignited widespread debate online, with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and others expressing surprise that top universities had turned him down. Some X users criticized elite colleges for rejecting a student with a multimillion-dollar business and Forbes recognition, while others argued that his essay’s tone may have hurt his chances.
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