In this candid YouTube monologue, 18‑year‑old entrepreneur Zach Yadegari recounts the rapid rise of his company Cal.ai (also called Call AI), an app that estimates calories from food photos. He announces that the app generated over $1.5 million in a single month, has amassed 2 million downloads, and is on track for roughly $12 million in annual revenue, all while he is still in high school. Zach describes the shift from an initial money‑focused mindset to a purpose‑driven one, highlighting user impact stories such as a night‑shift nurse who lost weight thanks to the app. He explains that every dollar earned has been reinvested into the business, and he outlines his 17‑person team and co‑founders Blake, Henry, and Jake. The video then pivots to Zach’s personal backstory: learning to code at age 7, creating early games like Speed Soccer, building and selling the gaming hub totallyscience.co (5 million users, low‑six‑figure sale), and developing smaller apps before Cal.ai. He reflects on the ongoing debate about attending college, weighing the lack of necessity for a job against social benefits, and shares his lifestyle as a high‑school senior who still attends parties and avoids substance use. Finally, Zach announces a new documentary‑style series where he will post weekly, minimally edited videos documenting his entrepreneurial journey, hoping to inspire others and eventually become the subject of a larger film. The tone oscillates between enthusiastic, reflective, and pragmatic, underscoring his belief in hard work, self‑belief, and skepticism toward conventional wisdom.
Chapters
2024 was fucking ridiculous! 8 months ago I launched Cal.ai— an app where you simply take a picture of your food and then it will tell you how many calories it is. And... It fucking ripped! Yummy! Eaty! Cal.ai is going to generate more than $1.5 million this month and I'm the CEO. Not only that, but I'm in high school. What the fuck? What's more important is the impact we're having on people's lives. Hundreds of thousands of pounds have been lost. We've been helping people combat obesity and other health problems, and we've helped people become more confident in their bodies. There was one message in particular which really struck me. A nurse couldn't track her calories because she worked night shifts and never found the time. She had a newborn baby, and it was a big struggle for her. Calii allowed her to start tracking her calories without it being a big time commitment, and she's finally started to lose weight. That really hit me. If I'm being completely honest, when I first got into the mobile app space in general, and especially when I started Calii, I was just in it to make money. I saw the potential because there were a bunch of other apps blowing up around the same time, and I wanted to capture some of that success for myself. But these messages have really shifted things where I don't only care about the money anymore. It's honestly the impact that really drives me to keep pushing harder and harder every day, trying to build the best product to help all of these people. We've had 2 million downloads, which is nuts for such a short time and how many lives we are touching. Wanted to quickly mention that we have not taken out a single penny from the company. Everything has been reinvested right back into the machine. We are fueling growth and we will not slow down for anyone or anything. We are in the trenches right now and the Bugattis will have to wait. Now, I don't think Call AI is going to be the next Apple, although I do have a grand vision building a company that scale in the future. But it's still incredible what we've been able to achieve in such a short amount of time and what we're going to continue to achieve. Of course, none of this would have been possible without my amazing team at Call AI and my co-founders Blake, Henry, and Jake. To formally introduce myself, I'm Zach Yadegari. I'm 18 years old. When I was 7, I started learning how to code. I was obsessed with video games, Minecraft and Roblox especially, and I wanted to learn how to make my own. So I enrolled in a coding camp, or I was 7, my mom enrolled me in a coding camp. And while there was not much I could learn in those 3 weeks at 7 years old, it really planted the seed. And for the next few years, all day, I would binge watch YouTube videos learning how to program all kinds of different games. Eventually, I got into Unity, which is a professional game engine, and I put my first game on the App Store. It was a little game where a ball would fall from the sky. You would just tap the soccer ball and shoot in the goal. It was called Speed Soccer, and I launched that on the App Store officially when I was 12. 2 years before I launched that app, I had started teaching coding lessons for $30 an hour. That was my beginning in entrepreneurship. So I always look back on these two key parts of my upbringing. It was learning how to code and getting into entrepreneurship. And the whole time they were closely paired. My freshman year of high school, this was right after COVID. Schools gave out Chromebooks to students to reduce contact. And students, of course, abused this. They started playing games during school. I saw an opportunity. The problem was that these games were fragmented on hundreds of websites. Each website had an obscure domain link and you could only play one game on it. So people would bookmark 10 different websites and it would be very difficult for these to be shared around. So I decided to build a hub website that would aggregate all of these games. I called it totallyscience.co. Over 2 years, I grew this website to 5 million users. But more than that, I earned my first dollar online. Over winter break, I applied to Google AdSense, unsure of what to expect. I imagined maybe I would make like a couple dollars if I I was lucky, $50 a week. I put it on, put in the ad code. My first day I made $100, and I have a screenshot. This blew my mind. I honestly didn't think it was real. I thought that these were just numbers on a screen. There's no way they would ever transfer to a bank account. This must be a glitch. Something was wrong. But it wasn't. A couple months later, when I finally had an LLC set up, I transferred the money to my bank account and I had it. This blew my fucking mind. A gaming website that I made in school was making me $100 a day. 2 years later, I sold that website for low 6 figures. Then I got into the app space. I built a few small apps. Grind Clock, which was a motivational alarm clock. I would wake you up with a motivational speaker screaming at you, get the fuck out of bed, get to work. Built a couple others, then Cal AI. Where I am today, I'm a senior in high school and I'm running this company. I have 17 full-time employees. This, this is a paper I had to write for social studies last night. 3-page paper. Of course, the guy that builds an AI app Yeah, I'll leave it at that. But there's been this big question recently. Do I go to college? Do I not? I've spoken to so many people about this. This question has consumed the last year of my life. I think I've came to a conclusion, although it's subject to being changed, as it has oscillated back and forth the last year. I don't think I need college for the classes. For most people, college is a career path. It will help you land your first job. For me, I'm in a very fortunate position where I don't need to go to college in order to get a job, but I think I could benefit from college socially, just enjoying my life. And building friendships, potentially finding a girlfriend. Ladies, I've sacrificed so many childhood memories in order to build these companies. I mean, to be honest, not as many as most people may think. I'm still a high school kid who goes to parties. I am not that crazy at these parties. I've never gotten drunk in my life. I've never done a drug, but I still hang out with my friends. I'm not shutting myself in my room. A lot of people like to think that's the only way to be successful. It's not. So I'm still deciding on college. I have applied. So we'll also see where I get it. So I've wanted to record this video for a while, by the way, but I kept trying to go for perfection. I've tried to wait for inspiration to strike, and so I was just like, fuck it, I'm going to pick up the camera. I'm going to record. This is by no means a masterpiece. My goal with this series, I hope and plan to record a video a week. With very little editing, just documenting the progress of my life and whatever company I'm building, which right now is Call AI. But hopefully this will last, will outlast Call AI and be this big documentary almost. Hopefully someone pieces it together into a documentary. That's one of my dreams in life, one of my biggest. Visions and dreams, aspirations, is to have someone make a movie about me. So there's not much I could do except be massively successful in order to have that happen. And so I think documenting this will help me help more people, help me help more people who want to get started in entrepreneurship. And that don't necessarily believe in themselves. I want to show that I'm no one special. I don't think I'm a genius by any means. I don't think I'm a genius. I think I'm extremely hardworking. I think I have a lot of self-belief, and I think I'm very skeptical and critical of what the masses typically will agree upon. But I don't think I am a genius. So we will see how far these traits take me. I think I'm on a good path right now, although time will tell. And I hope documenting this journey will go somewhere and help some people. Whether you decide to follow my journey or not, I'll tell you one thing. I'm just getting started.
