Most teenagers stress about college essays and SAT scores. Zach Yadegari was sitting in an AP exam room, staring at a blank test for twelve hours straight—deliberately. He had already decided his path, and it didn’t involve answering questions about American history or calculus. It involved building something that would eventually pull in $1.4 million monthly.
“To be 18 and have a Lamborghini, honestly, feels kind of awesome,” Zach says with the kind of unapologetic confidence that comes from betting on yourself and winning. That Lamborghini—controversial purchase as it may be to some—represents more than teenage extravagance. It’s proof that age is just a number when you refuse to let it become a self-limiting belief.
The Skinny Kid Who Hated Food Scales
Zach’s billion-dollar idea didn’t start in a boardroom or an accelerator. It started in a high school gym, where a skinny kid was trying to impress girls.
“I was a really skinny kid growing up and I wanted to put on muscle, honestly, to impress girls at my school,” he admits. Like countless others before him, he downloaded one of the most popular calorie-tracking apps, determined to transform his physique. Three days later, he quit.
The problem wasn’t motivation. It was the app itself. Weighing food on a scale, typing in every ingredient, logging every meal—it was unsustainable for a teenager’s lifestyle. But most people would have simply accepted this friction as the price of fitness. Zach saw an opportunity.
Fast forward a year or two. ChatGPT had just exploded onto the scene, and AI was suddenly everywhere. Zach and his co-founders had a hypothesis: what if you could just take a picture of your food and let AI do all the heavy lifting?
They built CalAI.
The response was immediately positive. “That’s when we knew we had something good on our hands and we decided to go all in.”
The Summer That Changed Everything
Going “all in” wasn’t just a figure of speech. Along with Henry, his CTO, Zach made a decision that would become the real turning point for CalAI. They moved to San Francisco for July, lived in a hacker house, and basically slept in the office.
“I think that month was the real turning point,” Zach reflects. “That’s when we started making our first real hires, started building up a team, and got into a really good rhythm that would carry us throughout the next year.”
But here’s what makes Zach’s story particularly remarkable: while he was building CalAI into a million-dollar company, he was still in high school.
“It was a lot juggling high school and running CalAI at the same time.” For the first time in his life, Zach flipped the script on priorities. Every previous project had been a side hustle—school came first. With CalAI, he was putting in an average of 40 hours a week on top of his classes, often working while in school.
The AP tests became the ultimate symbol of his commitment. “Took my APs this week, AP tests. Sat for 12 hours total doing nothing. I don’t care. There are more important things to discuss. Basically, I didn’t even take my AP tests. I didn’t think I was going to go to college at this point. So I just sat there and didn’t take a single one.”
The Cash Flow Catch-22
Success in the app world comes with peculiar challenges. CalAI was profitable—very profitable—but for months, it felt like the opposite.
The culprit? Apple’s payout calendar.
“They pay you about 45 days after you make a sale,” Zach explains. “And so because of that, we were scaling faster than Apple was paying us, which meant that for months, we were putting money in and weren’t seeing a proportional amount of money out.”
Zach had made money from his previous venture, Totally Science—an unblocked gaming website he’d built freshman year to help students play games in school. Blake, one of his co-founders, doubled that investment. But as CalAI scaled, they were trapped in a paradox: making money hand over fist on paper while watching their bank account drain.
“It took about six months before we were finally ahead of Apple’s payout schedule and we were making more than we were paying,” he says. “This sounds a little confusing. It sounds like maybe we weren’t profitable. We were very profitable during that time.”
When the cash flow finally caught up, it caught up hard. Zach’s most recent dividend payment? $100,000. For an 18-year-old.
The Special Sauce
CalAI operates in a crowded market. Calorie-tracking apps are everywhere. So how does a teenager’s startup compete with established players?
“Our special sauce at CalAI, what we really do right, is influencer marketing,” Zach reveals. “And that’s where a far majority of our spending goes to.”
But the product itself had to deliver. There are limitations—AI doesn’t have X-ray vision, and users need to make sure every ingredient is clearly in frame. Managing user expectations became part of the challenge. “We try to teach the users early on in the app’s tutorial how to use the scanner most effectively.”
And then there’s the misconception about payments and refunds. Users often don’t realize that Apple handles all transactions directly. “All refunds are handled by Apple directly. We don’t process payments ourselves within the app.”
Perhaps that’s the lesson in building consumer apps: the technical innovation is only half the battle. The other half is education, marketing, and managing the psychology of your users.
The Seven-Year-Old Who Wanted to Build Games
None of this success happened overnight. Zach’s entrepreneurial journey began at seven years old, when he was obsessed with Minecraft and Roblox.
“I begged my mom to put me in a summer camp to teach me how to make my own,” he remembers. That summer camp planted a seed that would grow for over a decade.
But the real driver wasn’t just a love of games—it was rebellion against the system. “I always felt like I was pushed down a very narrow path in the school system. So I want to get a good grade on this test so that I could get into a good college, so that I could get a good job, so that I could make money. And then I decided if I could skip all of those steps and just make money, then I wouldn’t be stressed anymore.”
That’s the kind of logic that only makes sense to someone who sees the world differently. Most people accept the conveyor belt. Zach asked why the conveyor belt existed in the first place.
The Lamborghini and What Comes Next
When Zach bought his Lamborghini, the internet had opinions. Some called it irresponsible. Zach sees it differently.
“I think that it’s always something I’ve dreamed of getting and it’s only going to have diminishing returns as I get older. I’m not that materialistic. I don’t have many things that I plan to buy past that.”
The money from CalAI gets reinvested back into the app. But when there’s enough left over? Dividends get paid out. And Zach is unapologetic about enjoying the fruits of his labor while he’s young enough to appreciate them.
Still, despite sitting out his AP exams, Zach decided to go to college. Not because he needs a degree—his company already makes more than most college graduates will see in years—but because he wants to hold onto “a little bit of this childhood experience.”
He’s getting a house with other app founders right next to campus. They’re calling it the App Mafia. “We’re going to be recording a ton of content, throwing parties, educating people, teaching them how they could build their own apps.”
It’s a dual life: entrepreneur by day, college student by night. Or maybe it’s the other way around. “My only concern is that I’m not going to want to do any college work whatsoever. And if that becomes something where I just never do anything, I don’t know how long I’ll last there before they kick me out.”
The End Goal
So what’s next for someone who’s already achieved more at 18 than most people do in a lifetime?
“For the longest time, it’s always been become the biggest calorie tracking app,” Zach says. But there’s more on the horizon. “After CalAI, I plan to build a generational company. I’m not sure entirely what yet. But while this company is helping many people, I want to build something that can push that even further.”
The vision is ambitious, but then again, everything about Zach’s story is ambitious. From the seven-year-old begging his mom for coding camp to the teenager sitting through AP exams without writing a single answer, he’s been playing a different game than everyone else.
“I think entrepreneurship is really cool because at the end of the day, age doesn’t really matter much,” he reflects. “You’re either good or not good at what you do and then the market will decide the rest.”
The market has decided. And right now, it’s saying that Zach Yadegari—high school dropout, college student, app founder, Lamborghini owner—is pretty damn good at what he does.
CalAI continues to grow, processing millions of food photos and helping users track their nutrition on autopilot. Zach’s vision of making health tracking effortless is becoming reality, one snapshot at a time.
Source: Based on reporting and interviews originally published by CNBC.