The high schooler making $20M a year

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
By the way, it's nude on a Monday. Where are you right now?

**Zach Yadegari** (0:05)
I actually skipped class to do this podcast.

**Shaan Puri** (0:08)
Let's go. Sorry, Ms. Bicker Staff. The boys are calling.
Okay, this kid right here on the screen is making $20 million as a high schooler. The high schooler that is making $20 million a year in revenue. That is absurd. Zach, welcome to the show, man. I think this is actually the make everybody else feel bad. When you find out that like a 17, 18 year old kids make a $20 million in high school, I think a lot of people's initial reaction is wow. And another group is like, oh, man.

**Sam Parr** (0:48)
How much of that per year is profit, Zach?

**Zach Yadegari** (0:51)
It's more than 30%.

**Sam Parr** (0:54)
All right, so it's impressive. Very good.

**Shaan Puri** (0:56)
Ballin. We're gonna tell the story, fight to figure out how it's going. Sam, do we need to address your letterman jacket? Are you just in the high school mood? What's going on?

**Sam Parr** (1:03)
Look, I found out that Zach was coming on and I wanted to look the part, you know? Like, what's that movie, Shaan? It's like Never Been Kissed, where they pretended that they're in high school.

**Shaan Puri** (1:14)
Or 21 Jump Street.

**Sam Parr** (1:15)
Yeah.

**Zach Yadegari** (1:16)
That's us.

**Sam Parr** (1:17)
Like, this is actually the second group of high schoolers that we spoke with over the last two weeks.

**Shaan Puri** (1:22)
I'm Jonah Hill.
All right, Zach, dude, welcome to the show. You've listened to the podcast before, I understand?

**Zach Yadegari** (1:30)
Yeah, last two years.

**Shaan Puri** (1:32)
Would you say we maybe inspired you, slash were the sole cause of your success?

**Zach Yadegari** (1:36)
Yeah, I'd say this is the sole reason for any of it.

**Shaan Puri** (1:40)
All right, so let's explain. Start with what your app does, because it's like, what app is making $20 million for a high schooler? So let's explain, what is your app, and when did you start it? Let's start with that.

**Zach Yadegari** (1:51)
So Cal AI is the app and it lets you take a picture of any meal and get back the calories, proteins, fats and carbs to track it. So think any other calorie tracking app, but then heavy AI features involved.

**Sam Parr** (2:08)
Does it work really well? That sounds like a really hard thing. Like, you know, you were literally 12 years old or maybe eight years old when Silicon Valley, the TV show came out and that was like the joke was like, is this a hot dog or not? Now the app says a lot more. You know, does that work really well or is it like mostly right?

**Zach Yadegari** (2:29)
So the scanning is about 90% accurate on average, which is really good when you look at the data for FDA nutrition labels. They can be up to 20% inaccurate. So it's actually really good there. But we only recommend that you use it. Well, if you're training for Mr. Olympia, let's say, we don't recommend you use our AI calorie tracker. You could use the food database, weigh your food on a scale.

**Sam Parr** (2:53)
Well, and the scale stuff, like I, you know, I'm a weirdo. I've actually used MyFitnessPal for probably five years, almost every day now.

**Zach Yadegari** (3:01)
Yeah.

**Sam Parr** (3:01)
And what a lot of people don't realize is when they eyeball their calories, they're probably always off by like 30 or 40%. Have you tried tracking your food, Shaan?

**Shaan Puri** (3:09)
Yeah, actually, I think I came on this podcast a while back and I said this exact problem. I was like, MyFitnessPal, it's so slow and annoying to type in every single thing and estimate the weight of it. So, okay, I'm eating this. How many grams of it? I don't really know. I didn't weigh it out. And then you get this calorie thing, but also they have like five entries for whatever, for chicken breast. If you don't know which one to pick. And I remember even saying, I think on this podcast, like I wish somebody just had it where you could just take a picture and computer vision would just know.
And I can't wait for that to happen. And it sounds like it's kind of happened. So you started this how long ago?

**Zach Yadegari** (3:48)
10 months ago.

**Shaan Puri** (3:50)
10 months. Okay, so 10 months ago, you started this as a 17 year old. And can you just give us a sense of the growth? So in 10 months, you started obviously with zero. First month, roughly, where were you at?