In this candid, first‑person YouTube talk, 18‑year‑old Zach Yadegari walks through the creation and rapid growth of Cal.ai, an AI‑powered app that estimates calories and macros from a photo of food. He recounts his early coding start at age 7, the high‑school hack that sparked his entrepreneurial drive, and the decision to build a photo‑scanner app after traditional diet trackers proved too cumbersome. Zach describes the summer‑long hacker‑house sprint in San Francisco that led to the first hires, the massive reliance on influencer marketing to acquire users, and the operational reality of Apple’s 45‑day payout cycle that strained cash flow before the business became cash‑positive. He shares the financial outcomes – $1.4 million monthly revenue after Apple’s cut, dividend payouts (including a $100 k personal dividend) and a Lamborghini purchase – while reflecting on his mindset about age, materialism, and long‑term goals. Zach also clarifies common user misconceptions about the AI’s capabilities and Apple‑handled refunds, outlines his plan to balance college life with entrepreneurship (the “App Mafia” house concept), and states his vision to make Cal.ai the dominant calorie‑tracking platform and eventually build a generational company.
Chapters
To be 18 and have a Lamborghini, honestly, feels kind of awesome. I think a lot of people will use age as something that is a self-limiting belief, but I didn't buy into any of that. When I've wanted to do something, I will just go and do it. This has helped me with learning to code at such an early age, getting into entrepreneurship at such an early age, and then anything else along the way. My name is Zach Yadegari. I'm 18 years old and the co-founder and CEO of Cal.ai, an app where you can just take a picture of your food and then it will automatically calculate the calories and macros for you. My app brings in about $1.4 million a month after the App Store's cut. We reinvest most of the money back into the app from Calle AI. But whenever there's enough cash left over, we will pay out dividends to ourselves. Most recently, I personally was paid $100,000 from dividends. Most of the money I've made from the app so far, I've actually spent. I recently bought a Lamborghini, which is I know some will say it's an irresponsible thing to buy at my age. But I think that it's always something I've dreamed of getting and it's only gonna 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. And therefore I'm probably going to just start saving. A few years ago, I started working out. I was a really skinny kid growing up and I wanted to put on muscle, honestly, to impress girls at my school. So I started going to the gym, weightlifting, and didn't really see many results. And so, uh, after getting some advice from someone at the gym, I downloaded one of the most popular apps at the time. I started using it, and 3 days in, I quit. And that's because the app required me to weigh my food on a scale, type in everything I was eating. It was unsustainable for my lifestyle. Fast forward about a year or two, and ChatGPT and all of these other AI technologies started releasing. And so along with my co-founders, we hypothesized that we could build an app where you could just take a picture and the AI will do all the work for you. And we launched it. The response immediately was very positive. That's when we knew we had something good on our hands and we decided to go all in. And so along with Henry, my CTO, we decided let's spend the summer doing everything we can to make this app actually succeed. And so we moved to San Francisco for the month of July. We stayed there for a month, lived in a hacker house, basically slept in the office. And I think that month was the real turning point. 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. I have 3 co-founders with Cal AI. It was a lot juggling high school and running Cal AI at the same time. In the past, all of the projects I had been working on were always side projects to me. I would put school first. If I had a test to study for, I would study for the test and then I would work on the app. But Cal AI, for the first time, I would prioritize. I would put in on average 40 hours a week into Cal AI on top of school, often working while in school. 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. Our special sauce at Call.ai, what we really do right, is influencer marketing. And that's where a far majority of our spending goes to. We have many competitors. These apps are the reason that we started Call.ai. It's because they suck. There are many misconceptions about Call.ai and what AI can do. Some of our users expect it to have x-ray vision, where if you take a picture of a bowl of food and you hid things at the bottom of the bowl, it's going to pick it up. It won't. You have to make sure every ingredient is clearly in frame, and we try to teach the users early on in the app's tutorial how to use the scanner the most effectively. All refunds are handled by Apple directly. We don't process payments ourself. Within the app, and that's a common misconception of many users. They think the app actually handles payments and takes in credit card info, but they don't, Apple, though, so you have to directly request a refund with them. I started learning to code when I was 7 years old. I was obsessed with video games like Minecraft and Roblox, and so I begged my mom to put me in a summer camp to teach me how to make my own. There were many different factors that drove me to be an entrepreneur at such a young age. The biggest was that 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. My freshman year of high school, I built an unblocked a gaming website that lets students play games in school, bypassing the internet blocking protocols. Building Calii was very inexpensive because I programmed it along with Henry. It was only when we launched to the public that we really spent money. Scaling the business took everything I made from Totally Science, and then Blake doubled that on top of it. Because of Apple's payout calendar, they pay you about 45 days after you make a sale. And so because of that, we were scaling faster than Apple was paying us, and which meant that for months we were putting money in and weren't seeing a proportional amount of money out. It took about 6 months before we were finally ahead of Apple's payout schedule and we were making more than we were paying. And this sounds a little confusing. It sounds like maybe we weren't profitable. We were very profitable during that time. I decided to go to college because I could just go into the business world, start working full-time, get an in-person office with the team, and that could be cool, and that is something I do want to do. However, before that, I want to hold on to a little bit of this childhood experience of going to college, making new friends, having a good social life of peers that are also 18 years old. I'm getting a house with with a bunch of other app founders that's right next to campus. And we're going to call this house the App Mafia. We're going to be recording a ton of content, throwing parties, educating people, teaching them how they can build their own apps. I'm going to be living this dual life between entrepreneurship and just student life. And balancing that, it's gonna be probably fun, but also pretty difficult. 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. It's something I, I've thought a lot about is the end goal for Calii. For the longest time, it's always been become the biggest calorie tracking app. When we are helping people on autopilot is when I would consider the job really complete. After CalAI, I plan to build a generational company. Not sure entirely what yet, but while this company is helping many people, I want to build something that can push that even further. I think entrepreneurship is really cool because at the end of the day, age doesn't really matter much. You're either good or not good at what you do, and then the market will decide the rest.
