Zach Yadegari is an 18-year-old high school senior from Long Island, NY who founded a calorie-counting app that's worth tens of millions of dollars -- but that wasn't enough to gain admission to Ivy League schools ... and now he's going all LeBron James by taking his talents to South Beach.
00:03When you applied for colleges, had you already achieved success with this app or was it just a business you were starting and they said, eh, this kid, not for us, we're rejecting him?
00:16I had already achieved success.
00:18The app at the time I applied was projected to generate maybe 15 to 20 million dollars over the next 12 months and had already generated 10.
00:28What ridiculously stupid schools would reject you knowing that you could be somebody who would contribute money after graduating?
00:38I mean, what the heck?
00:39Why did you get rejected?
00:41I think that college admissions places students into a rubric that can't fully appreciate what entrepreneurs do compared to the extracurricular volunteer hours that other students may typically be doing.
00:55Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Yale.
01:04You might have heard of some of those.
01:05What was your GPA and what were your scores?
01:09My unweighted GPA was a 4.0.
01:12Weighted was closer to a 4.7.
01:15And I got a 34 on my ACT.
01:17Out of?
01:18Out of 36.
01:19Do you think that maybe they just felt like this kid is so far already beyond us that he's not going to stay?
01:28This is crazy.
01:29Maybe.
01:30I think they definitely are looking for someone moldable who they can shape how they want.
01:36But I'm just thinking that if I was running a college myself, from a business-oriented perspective, I would want someone who's, one, potentially a future donor.
01:47That's definitely a great thing.
01:48Right.
01:49But I think more importantly is just saying that all these successful people went to your school.
01:54So you are actually going to college.
01:56You decided you're going to the University of Miami.
01:59You are now a successful businessman making millions of dollars.
02:03Why college for you?
02:03I spent the last summer in San Francisco fully immersed with one of my co-founders in the business world.
02:10We were surrounded by people in their late 20s, early 30s, and spent all day building, which simulated what life could be like.
02:18I don't have to go to college.
02:19I couldn't just go all in on the business.
02:21But it was boring.
02:23I'm 18.
02:23I want to go have fun.
02:25I want to be around people my age, party a little bit.
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