He Made $100M Before His First College Exam

- March 5, 2026 (about 2 hours ago) • 01:08:08

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Shaan Puri	"Zach, we gotta set the table. Zach, how old are you?" "I'm 19, and you just sold your company." "You just sold your company for how much money, Zach?" "Yeah. Alright, what's up, Zach? You're here—19 years old. The last time you called on this podcast, you were in high school. You, I think, were like between third and fourth [period], or on lunch break, and you did a podcast recording with us in front of, I don't know, 250,000 people or something like that. And now we fast forward, I don't know, a year and change later, and you just sold your company. You just sold your company for how much money, Zach?"
00:38	Zach Yadegari	I can't reveal how much we sold for, unfortunately, but I can tell you that right before selling we finished 2025 having done $30,000,000 in revenue. Now the company's grown — in January we just did $5,700,000 in revenue.
00:54	Shaan Puri	$5,700,000 in January. So, if you were to multiply that by 12 and say what we could do this year, you're talking about a $50,000,000+ revenue company. But $30,000,000 last year — dude, that's amazing. You say it so calmly and like a grown-up. But can we just take a second, Sam, to be amazed and give the kids some props? That is incredible. You're a teenager who built an app with your friends, got it to $30,000,000 in annual revenue, and just sold your company to MyFitnessPal.
01:31	Sam Parr	And last time we talked to you, you were on—literally—your lunch break and you were in high school. I know that you were applying to college, and on the podcast you said, "I think I'm gonna go to college." Are you on your lunch break at college now? Is that where you are—are you at a dorm?
01:48	Zach Yadegari	I mean, I'm not gonna lie... I've missed many classes this semester. I'm at the University of Miami. I am a freshman, but yeah.
01:57	Shaan Puri	Okay, so you're a freshman at Miami, I believe. By the way, I remember being outraged on Twitter about this—I think I was one of your defenders. You applied to a bunch of colleges you wanted to go to, and you got rejected. That's insane: to be a teenager who has an app that's doing tens of millions [dollars] in revenue and still get rejected. The college admissions office was like, "We didn't like your essay," or "Your SAT score doesn't show that you're exceptional." Obviously, you were exceptional. Can you tell that story of maybe facing a little bit of rejection and how that felt?
02:26	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, I mean, right after the podcast that we did last time, I was submitting everything. I applied to every single Ivy League school, Stanford, and a few others. Stanford was my top choice — the one I really wanted to get into. One by one: rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection. I even tweeted about it because I had a 4.0 unweighted GPA at the time I applied. My company was doing, I think, about $15,000,000 a year when I applied. On paper, I had what most people need to get in, but I was just rejected from everywhere, which I felt was pretty surprising.
03:06	Shaan Puri	Why do you think that was? Do you know—there's no way to know, really. It's a black box. But do you have any suspicions?
03:11	Zach Yadegari	There's no way to know.
03:12	Shaan Puri	Well, your post kinda went viral. Did anything happen from that? Did anybody reach out? </FormattedResponse>
03:17	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, to be honest, it was actually great — it might have been better that I got rejected from colleges than that I got into any. I posted it and it got about 40 million views on Twitter. I had a ton of really cool people reach out. The mayor of Miami texted me afterwards and we actually met up. That's part of the reason I even decided to go to UMiami — it was the support from him and a bunch of other cool people like Alex Ohanian and others who had reached out to support me after that.
03:42	Shaan Puri	That's awesome. Yeah, you kinda needed that. Nobody wants a team that's too perfect and successful, so you needed a little bit of likability and a little bit of rejection in the backstory. I think, in the end, it's a good thing.
03:54	Zach Yadegari	"Yeah, but I didn't get any sympathy from the post. They were just all mad at me."
03:58	Sam Parr	> "Yeah, I don't think that you deserve sympathy. I don't think you deserved it. I think... I think it's that things have worked out as they should. Are you—did the University of Miami, or any of them, ask you for a donation already?"
04:10	Shaan Puri	The first freshman to have a library that he donates.
04:16	Sam Parr	No, seriously. They want— they have really good processes for identifying "whales" [high-value clients] and for reaching out to people.
04:23	Shaan Puri	Yeah, you actually should hire one of them. They'll kind of help your onboarding flow. The university donation people are exceptional.
04:30	Sam Parr	What's your dating life like? When you're in college, 19 years old, and you've just sold an app for $100 million — and even before that you owned an app that was doing tens of millions in revenue — are you by yourself all the time, just working? Or are you able to have fun? And is the "world's easiest pickup line" actually successful for you?
04:49	Zach Yadegari	So, I'd say the first semester I had way too much fun. I was doing too many things. My entrepreneurial friends and I, who were living in Miami with me at the time, all moved into a house together. Every couple of weeks we'd throw a house party. I'm not gonna lie — I definitely had a lot of aura [presence] throwing these parties, and the word got around in college that this was "the Cali." They called me "the Cali guy" or "Calorie Boy." Those were my nicknames. </FormattedResponse>
05:23	Shaan Puri	That's — that's amazing, Calorie Boy. Okay, so, oh, by the way, we didn't say what your app is. Your app, CalAI, is basically an app on your phone where you can take a picture of the meals you're eating, and it kind of uses AI to track and log your calories. You don't have to type in that you had six ounces of chicken breast with the skin or whatever. You don't have to do all that logging — you just take the photo and it does the thing. So that's what you guys built. For those who haven't seen the first episode, give just a quick origin story. You did the full one before, but just do a quick one here.
05:51	Zach Yadegari	Sure. I started programming when I was seven years old. I was obsessed with video games and wanted to learn how to make my own, so I started building. By the time I was a freshman in high school, I built my first company: an unblocked gaming website that let students play games in school. It was actually kind of accidental that I stumbled into turning it into a real company. At first I just built it for my friends at school, but it spread really quickly and grew to 5 million users, mostly through me making TikToks about it. It was generating $60,000 a year by putting banner ads on the website, and then when I was 16 I sold it for $100,000. After that I got into the app space and started building a few small projects. Then Calai is really the one I went all in on, and it really took off — it exceeded all expectations.
06:45	Sam Parr	Alright, guys — here's the thing about side hustles. Everyone wants one, but most people overthink them and never actually launch anything. But because of AI, you can go from my idea to your first sale in only 7 days. My old company, The Hustle, just dropped an AI side-hustle crash course. They take the things we said and break them down into simple, bite-sized steps, which means you're going to get a guide that gives you everything you need to launch a side hustle without any of the guesswork. You can get it right now: scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Now, back to the show.
07:25	Shaan Puri	I mean, you started programming early, but you're not Albert Einstein out here. You're not Mark Zuckerberg. You're a prodigy in terms of coding, correct? What makes you unique seems to be the blend of being good enough at building and, you know, good enough—or great—at marketing and just being an entrepreneur. The combination is what's important. I think that's important to call out. I remember when I was on the come-up, I had this misconception that I needed to be some sort of "900 IQ gigabrain" in order to enter a space. What I didn't realize was that even if you know nothing today, if you give it six months of full focus, you'll be good enough to be dangerous. That's kind of all you need: one skill, then stack two others. It's the combination of skills that's really valuable—you don't have to be world-class at any one thing. Was that your experience? Was it different?
08:19	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, I would definitely agree with you. I mean, coding is becoming easier and easier with AI tools. I'd say my skills now—being able to code—have really helped me understand how to lead a team. I always think the most important thing is the Pareto Principle: learn the 20% that gets you 80% of the results. That's what's necessary to actually hire someone smarter than you and be able to manage the team. I've pretty much done that in all of these different areas, and it's allowed me to build great people around me and put systems in place, I think.
08:54	Sam Parr	Your biggest skill is your audacity. I think what Sean left out was maybe one of the more interesting things. When you were starting to build, I think you made a tweet or a video and you said (I think you were 15): > "In the next three years I'm gonna have an app that does $50 million or $100 million in revenue." You said something audacious, and I think you even tweeted that out. There's an interesting combination here: the audacity to think that, as a young kid, you could figure this out, and then the tenacity and IQ to get after it and make it happen.
09:31	Shaan Puri	We found that video of you in your kitchen, basically when you're—I don't know—13 or 14 years old, saying, "I will do this, Matty," sort of speaking the words into existence.
09:42	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, I mean, it was honestly pretty crazy looking back that I did that. My plan was to make a YouTube series out of it, but I just made that first video saying, "I was going to make a million dollars before graduating high school." That was my goal. From a young age I always believed in my heart that I was going to do it. I wanted it so badly that I needed it to be true. I think self-belief has gotten me so far because it's helped me get over so many parts of life where I could have just said, "Oh, I have to go to college before I'm able to do this. I have to take a class. I have to get a degree. There's no way I could do it before." But no—I always believed, "I can do it. I can do it now."
10:25	Sam Parr	You forgot to add "per week." I want to make $1 million before I graduate high school—per week.
10:33	Shaan Puri	So, you said, "I always had that," but I'm going to question that for a second. Maybe some of it you're born with; maybe some of it just came out of nowhere—it's just a natural aura, as you would say. But Sam and I have both been on our little motivational arc, right? I was a big Tony Robbins guy. I went to the seminars; I used to listen to the audio tapes and go for walks. He had this walking series where you'd walk and he'd say, "Alright, every four steps you're going to say this thing, you're going to believe this, I'm going to ask you this question—whatever comes to your mind." I had Tony Robbins in my ear. Sam, I'm sure you had a similar sort of self‑brainwashing where you worked on it—you practiced the muscle of self‑belief. I'm curious, Zach—I don't know you very well—did you work on the muscle of self‑belief in any way?
11:16	Zach Yadegari	Well, it's honestly a great question. Of course I had doubts. In my head I was like, "Shit, this is a crazy goal—can I actually do this?" I remember one story: when I was really young I was in the car with my mom and I asked her, "Mom, if I'm rich—if I'm rich when I'm older, I want to do this." Then I paused and changed it to, "When I'm rich, I'm gonna do this." I've always been conscious about shifting my language to a when, not an if, even though I, of course, had doubts — can I really do this? — and yeah, I had those doubts. The motivation arc... I used to be obsessed with motivational content. I still am, but not as much. Especially the year before I started Calai, I curated my TikTok For You page so I would only interact with videos of motivational speakers. My entire feed was just David Goggins yelling, "Get back to work, get back to work," and all these other people. That's actually why I started my first app, which was a motivational alarm clock where you could choose people. Basically, identified by watching these TikToks, everyone in the comments was like, "This got me so pumped up — I want to make this my alarm clock, how can I do that?" There was no easy way to do that, so I was like, "Shit, I want to build an app because I want this for myself too and all these people clearly want it as well." That lets you set these motivational sounds as your alarm, and so that was the idea behind Grindclock.
12:42	Sam Parr	GrindClock. GrindShot. Thus, GrindClock was born. So... so, Zach.
12:49	Shaan Puri	Dude, I would use that now, by the way.
12:51	Sam Parr	"So, you're rich? How do you feel? When did the wire hit? It's March — when did it hit? I think you announced this a few days ago. How's it feel? When did the wire hit?"
13:03	Zach Yadegari	We announced it on Monday, but the sale actually took place in December. We couldn't speak about it until now. The wire hit the same day it closed. Honestly, I'm just gonna be real: the excitement hit me when they first made the offer over the phone. But then I thought, "Wait — it didn't happen yet; we don't have anything signed." Quell the excitement. Quell the excitement. After that, it never felt as good as that first moment did.
13:30	Sam Parr	And how long did the process take? Was it miserable, or was it alright? Was it smooth?
13:34	Zach Yadegari	It was honestly much faster than it would normally be. Some of that was the timing. Part of the reason we didn't share anything until now is because peak season is January and February, and we didn't want to really influence anything. [unclear: "rock"]
13:48	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so, real quick—let's tell the story about the acquisition. One of the reasons I want to do this is because the exit part of it, for any entrepreneur, is such a huge deal. It's literally probably the biggest deal you'll ever make in your life. Most people don't really talk about how it goes down. They don't talk about how it feels. They don't talk about what they did, the ups and downs, or the techniques that actually made a difference. Right before we started this podcast, you were mentioning that you had watched— I made this video a long time ago, actually, for Sam's conference. Sam was like, "You wanna come speak?" and I was like, "Yeah." I gave a talk called "How to Sell a Failing Company." Now, your company wasn't failing, but mine—I would say—was. Meaning it wasn't achieving the goal I had for it, and there weren't, like, huge companies knocking at the door every day offering briefcases full of cash. I had to sell the company. I didn't get bought passively. I felt like every story I had ever heard about somebody selling was that everybody was knocking on their door, they wanted us, and we picked. I was like, "Well, that shit ain't me." So I had to run a process and essentially create an auction. It had a good outcome, but nobody really talked...
14:53	Sam Parr	About. I think the line is: a bunch of Silicon Valley big shots say, "Companies are bought, not sold." I remember hearing that, and I'm like, "Oh—so people aren't hollering at me all the time that I'm a loser." And then the reality is... that's not the reality; that is the reality, yeah.
15:06	Shaan Puri	Maybe—for other people it works, but for me, that ain't it. It wasn't it for me. I had to figure out how to sell it, and I shared some of the lessons. So, you were saying, real quick, that you would watch that—that was somewhat helpful for you. But can we talk about that? That's why I want to talk about the acquisition, because I feel like it makes a huge difference. Founders get very few reps; you get very few chances to practice doing it. So it's kind of useful to hear stories of how it...
15:27	Zach Yadegari	All went down—yeah? Great. Honestly, going into this was my first time with everything, so it was scary and stressful, and I kept overthinking things. But hearing stories was helpful. </FormattedResponse>
15:41	Shaan Puri	And, by the way, you sold to a company that's owned by private equity. So it's your first time; it's their— they're pros. They're basically professionals. It's like sitting down with Magnus Carlsen for your first game, right? This is what they do, whereas this is your first time doing it.
15:54	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, yeah — 100%. The process, honestly, started back in May 2025. It was a few months before I went to college, and I was thinking, "Maybe there's a world where I can be a normal college student and get a normal freshman experience without having to worry about a company at the same time." So I decided to talk to some people and see how they were feeling, to see if they were interested. I kind of ran a sales cycle for that. I made a list of the 10 companies that I felt made the most sense, and out of all of them, we were extremely undervalued, to be honest.
16:34	Shaan Puri	And so, explain the details. You make the list—great. Now what do you do? Do you email them? Call them? How do you approach them? Do you say, "Hey, just wanted to see if you maybe would want to do something," right? Yeah. What—who did you do corp dev [corp dev = corporate development] with? Who did you talk to, and how did you talk to them?
16:48	Zach Yadegari	So I was recommended that, or I heard somewhere: you lose leverage if you're just cold outreaching. So I tried to get people I knew to make warm intros, saying something along the lines of, "Hey, I think you guys should meet — this is a cool company; I just thought of this," as if it was his idea, right? Not me asking him. He made all those intros, got on calls with a lot of the CEOs of these companies, and many of them immediately shut it down: "Oh, nice meeting you, but we're not interested." Some even replied by email, "Cool company, but we're not interested." But a few were interested. We did a few calls and met some of the team. Honestly, I was surprised that only after a couple of meetings it was very quick to get an offer. It wasn't like I imagined — talking to the team and getting to know them for a long time. It's different for everyone, but a few of the people we talked to said things like: > "This is the information we want to know. Hop on two calls with the team." > "Okay, is, you know, a number — what do you think?"
17:55	Shaan Puri	And you said the offers at the first round were low. What were you—did you just have crazy expectations? Were they not actually low? Do you have crazy expectations, or were they actually low? It's like, you know, 1x revenue or something. What were they offering, basically, at that time when you thought they were too low?
18:10	Zach Yadegari	"Less than we would make in a year."
18:12	Sam Parr	"In profit or revenue."
18:14	Zach Yadegari	It was about what we would make in a year in profit.
18:17	Shaan Puri	Okay, wow. So, what—your "one X profit" type of thing? Did you just politely turn them down? What'd you say? And, by the way, did that ignite some rage in you? Did you get a little, well... fuel from—
18:28	Zach Yadegari	After that, I guess we did kind of— I politely turned them down. After that, I was like, wait: is my company just not sellable? I was looking at it and thinking, wait—Weight Watchers just declared bankruptcy. All of these companies... how much money do they really have in the bank? Are we just not going to be able to sell? Is this just going to be a cash-flowing business forever? I started to accept that idea in my head—that we were just going to be a cash-flowing company. I actually began to put some things in place, like looking for a potential CEO to bring on so I could step away and move on to something else. For the next few months, that's really what I believed. What changed was that I spoke to another founder who sold his company. He told me what worked for him and basically explained how bankers work—M&A bankers. You go to them; they create a list of all these companies you've never even heard of before. These companies that are about to go public just want to roll up all these smaller companies into them. So they're willing to give you, essentially, "fair market value" for your company anytime you want.
19:34	Sam Parr	Dude, your experience is very similar to mine—except you were ten years younger. I think it's a similar experience for many entrepreneurs. You build a company and have these huge aspirations of selling it. I've talked to so many people who have done this: you go through your first process and then a massive letdown. You think, "Oh, this company— they lowballed the offer," and it's like... equity in a privately held company that's overvalued is basically worth nothing. So you go through this process: you get your hopes up, then you're defeated. You're defeated for ten days, and then you're like, "Alright, I have to go back to work." You think, "Maybe I'm just going to own this forever, so I might as well build the company to last forever." Months later, years later—sometime later—you get the second round. You care a little bit less, and your company is a little bit better because you've just assumed it's going to last longer. It's exactly like dating: the second you don't want to date someone, or you don't really care, they start coming to you. That's the exact same process I've gone through. I have probably five to ten friends who have gone through this exact same emotional process. By the way, yours was actually faster—I think you said it was low stress or that it went pretty smoothly—but if I had to guess, going through this felt kind of defeating. Oftentimes, that's like a five-year process. </FormattedResponse>
20:53	Zach Yadegari	"Yeah, that's exactly what happened, and I just resonated with that fact. And actually—this goes into Sean, what I was saying before—so then the second time I was set on building the company into a long-term, enduring business. It was going to be bootstrapped or whatever. Let's just figure out how we make it endure—long, long term."
21:14	Sam Parr	"Dude, you're making a potential buyer weak at the knees by saying those things, yeah."
21:20	Zach Yadegari	So on that note, we were thinking: we really want this company to last. We probably want to make it freemium, because any company that's been around for ten years and is really big in the app space — all the ones I can think of — are freemium. So that's what we started to work towards. You know who's really good at freemium? MyFitnessPal. I wanted to hop on a call with their CEO and squeeze whatever information about freemium I could out of him. I pitched it as "catching up," but planned to ask him questions about freemium. I reached out, got on a call, and they did not answer a single question about freemium. It makes sense — it wouldn't be in their interest to help us. They actually spun the conversation from that topic to other possibilities: maybe the companies could form a partnership, or something else might make sense. And that's how things really started. That's great.
22:21	Shaan Puri	There's a moment in Ben Horowitz's book The Hard Thing About Hard Things where he talks about a few key moments that happen. It feels like, when it's happening in your company, it's unique to you. But then you read these books and you realize, "Oh shit — every company goes through these moments." One of them he calls the "we're effed" moment [sometimes written "wefo"]. It's like, "It's over." You'll hit a moment where you feel completely screwed. That feeling is common, and what you realize is there is actually a pretty high survival rate after that moment when it feels like there's no survival. Another is the "no one's coming to save us" moment. That's not from Ben — it's from our conversation — but all three of us basically had that moment. It's like, "Oh — so I guess we're not just going to get a magical offer and everything will work out. I guess I have to actually make this company work for me. There's nobody coming to save us." That realization actually strengthens your resolve. So some things that seem bad in the moment are exactly the dose of medicine a founder needs when it happens. Yeah, Zach — you talked about this and then the conversation picked up. Can you give us, like, "Zach's acquisition corner" real quick? If you're now advising the next 19‑year‑old who's going through acquisition talks, what are the do's and don'ts of that conversation? Do you throw out a number? How do you react? How do you position or present yourself? Meeting in person versus doing it over the phone — what are the things you learned from this experience?
23:56	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, so, like Sam said, very similar to girls. You basically want to play hard to get. You don't want to be too interested, but you also don't want to seem uninterested at the same time. So it's kind of like the push and pull.
24:13	Sam Parr	It's like what I describe it as: you could let them know you're interested, but you also let them know that, regardless of whether they get on board or not, you're going some places.
24:22	Zach Yadegari	Exactly. Yeah — exactly. That's a great way to put it. What helped me the most was that I had a friend. I actually had a couple of people who had been through acquisitions, and I was constantly getting on the phone with them. They gave me advice throughout the whole process. So if you're trying to sell your company and you know someone who's gone through an acquisition, just having them help you through this is super valuable. Just talk through things — like you said, things are very similar across companies, even if you think they're not. They've seen things that I'm going through right now, and they would give me the right things to say.
25:01	Sam Parr	You, Sean — or you guys, Zach — have you seen Good Will Hunting? You've seen that, Sean, of course. There's this one scene where Ben Affleck is talking to Matt Damon. Matt doesn't want to go work for the NSA and take this fancy job. Ben Affleck says: > "No f that. You're not doing it for you; you're doing it for me. You're doing it because my favorite part of the day is that second when I honk the horn to pick you up to go to our construction job. I hope that you don't come to the car because you're off doing something amazing and fancy. You owe it to me." When Zach was talking about it he was like, "I just, I just want to go to college and have a normal experience." There were all these people who were like, "No f that. You go build this company and you do that for me; you're not doing it for you." You know, that's how I feel when I hear it. He has everything that, you know, in my late twenties and thirties I would have begged to have. You had it at 18. It's so funny hearing you go through this experience because I remember when we were talking to you before — you were like, "I want to go to college. I want to do this." You're the man; you're the best. But in our head, I imagine both Sean and I were like, "But you have this gift — you're blowing it."
26:08	Shaan Puri	Yeah. I think we actually— I think you did what we told you, which was: go for the social life. But, you know, this is your path. This is what you're good at. This is what you should do. Like, don't worry about the classes side of things. Did you feel, when you were in college, that you had two different lives? Were they separate? Did the professors all know what the hell was going on? Did they put some respect on that name? Did the other kids know what was going on? Or did you just sort of have this dual life where you were trying to be a normal student, and they treated you like a normal student and didn't really know what was going on?
26:36	Zach Yadegari	It was a pretty dual life. There were times when it was close together. As I mentioned, I was living in a house with a bunch of my entrepreneur friends. When we were throwing parties, it was all the entrepreneurs and a bunch of college kids. We would invite our other entrepreneur friends too, so the actual going‑out aspect was very cohesive, I would say. It was really interesting — the wildest thing to experience.
27:04	Shaan Puri	Zach, I got a question for you. You had — what I think is pretty normal for a teenager/college student — a little douchebag arc. You go and you're doing this amazing thing: you come on the pod, you're this upstanding guy with self-belief, working hard, building this app, doing well with your friends, trying to be a good student — good grades and all that good stuff. And then you launch a course. You release a video where you're standing on a Lamborghini, you're humping a Lamborghini, throwing money in the air. We were like, "Oh, what is this? Where did he go?" He went... he went entertained on us. What happened? Can we talk about the douchebag arc?
27:43	Zach Yadegari	Alright, so the guys I started the house with—the entrepreneurs—we kind of decided at first: the idea was, "let's just get a house, live together." It's a beautiful city, it's Miami, and we're going to all build our companies side by side. We'll share learnings. That's going to be great; we'll all grow very quickly together. Then we thought, "wait—we're all super talented individuals." Why don't we... and this is a really interesting thing we're doing: we're all young, having fun, and building companies. Let's record it. Let's make some content out of it. But then it became, "oh wait": hiring videographers and editors and all the back-end systems in place is actually going to be pretty expensive and take some time. How can we monetize it? That's when the idea came up: okay, let's make a course to help other people learn how to make apps too. Then we could continue to do what we do—make cool content—and at least break even. A lot of people's criticism was, "you're already making so much money, why do you need to make more?" It's because we're business people at heart—we want to break even. When we were thinking about angles to launch this, we decided to go the super controversial route. Like you said, the Andrew Tate angle: "sell the dream, sell the lifestyle" instead of selling the product. It was interesting. It's definitely not a real representation of any of our characters—we very intentionally wanted to rage-bait people. But yeah, it worked. It took over the Twitter timeline, but it definitely started a lot of beef with people, which might not have been great.
29:17	Shaan Puri	Yeah. Looking back now, are you like "good move, bad move"? What's the post-game?
29:22	Zach Yadegari	I think it makes the story more interesting, but if I were to do it again I would definitely take a different angle. To be honest, there was no reason to even launch on Twitter given what we were trying to do. Twitter users were not who we were trying to make videos for. It wasn't really our native platform, so we decided to try to take it over. But yeah — I don't think it was the right strategy.
29:44	Shaan Puri	"What's the first dumb purchase going to be, or have you already had your dumb purchases from the cash flow? I guess—you're 19 years old, you just sold your company. I'm... you can't say the number, but I'm just going to guess it was probably close to $100,000,000. That's my guess. I'll just make a guess for you because you're not allowed to say anything. What's the dumb purchase going to be? You gotta do something dumb—what are you going to do?"
30:10	Zach Yadegari	So, I already had the car — the dream car. That was out of the way: the Lamborghini, the one in the video.
30:18	Shaan Puri	Green? Yellow? What'd you do? What color did you go with?
30:20	Zach Yadegari	It's matte black—matte black. Okay.
30:22	Shaan Puri	"Gotcha. The funny thing is, you look like the guys who walk up to a guy in a Lamborghini and say, 'Hey, you're on TikTok.' You have a little fake microphone and you're like, 'Hey, what do you do for work?' It's supposed to be an old real-estate guy or, like, a shipping magnate. But you're also the guy in the car. It's crazy—it's the Spider-Man meme."
30:40	Sam Parr	Okay, so you got the car already. What do you wanna get now?
30:43	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, got.
30:43	Sam Parr	You're a Long Island kid. You're probably... [word unclear]—you're a watch guy, if I had to guess.
30:48	Zach Yadegari	I mean, I didn't get into any crazy watch collecting yet. I'm maybe going to get a watch soon—I do have one, but I'm not a huge collector of anything yet. However, what I did do, and wanted to do for a while, is decide where I'm going to donate everything in my closet. Last week, I went shopping with a stylist and redid everything—a whole new wardrobe. Honestly, it's been great. I feel like it's... it's...
31:16	Sam Parr	Pretty cool.
31:17	Shaan Puri	That's such a great move. And by the way, that costs so much less than people think to do. I did that when I was 24 years old. It didn't—yeah, I'm 15 years older; I don't wear any of that stuff anymore, but it was such a great move at the time. I think I paid something like $3 or so for the stylist to come with me for a day or two. I found her—I literally posted on Craigslist originally and got a bunch of applicants. I just told her, "I don't want to buy a $500 belt. I'm not trying to wear Gucci; that's not the goal. I just want to look good and have clothes that fit me right because I don't really know how to do any of that stuff. Can you help me out?" She was amazing. It was such a good process. I think every young guy who comes in with a little bit of money—it's one of those purchases that sounds a little silly; you kinda don't want to say you did it, but actually it's a great move.
32:05	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, no — I think it's definitely worth it.
32:08	Sam Parr	So, are you—are you working at MyFitnessPal now?
32:11	Zach Yadegari	Yes, I am. I'm still the CEO of Calais.
32:13	Sam Parr	How long are you going to work? Do you have an earn-out, or are you there for two years?
32:18	Zach Yadegari	I can't say exactly on this, but there is a [place] where I'm staying before I leave.
32:25	Sam Parr	Okay, okay — that's...
32:29	Shaan Puri	"Did they buy it? They bought 100% of the company, though." "Yes, they own it now. You don't have to... it's not like an investment that you then... It's not an investment; it's actually an acquisition." </FormattedResponse>
32:39	Sam Parr	Yes, I looked up the MyFitnessPal CEO. It looks like Mike Fisher—he was at Etsy. So yeah, you know, huge company. And then I think, if I had to guess... like, someone made an article on him, so I assume he graduated from West. I think that would be — that is gonna be really cool for you to learn from this guy. If I had to guess, he's an operator. He's probably pretty rigid, in a good way, and that's gonna be—you'll probably learn a lot.
33:04	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, yeah. It's been good so far. We catch up, like, about once a week, and it's nice.
33:08	Shaan Puri	Can you teach us some of the tactical, good decisions that made a difference for you in actually building the app? We're kind of glossing over the fact that you built this app—many people build apps, but your app actually started to work, grow, and scale a lot. We talked about this a lot on the first episode, about your TikTok strategy: how you would message tons of people, have them create content that talked about the app in an organic, native way, and then that would lead to awareness and downloads. But are there small things—either product decisions or a marketing hook—that you stumbled into that changed the way you guys thought about things? Like, “Oh, we thought it should be X, and then actually one day we realized this other thing was the way to do it.” Can you tell a story like that? I love those stories. Yep.
33:56	Zach Yadegari	There were two things here that I would say were crucial to the growth of the business. As I mentioned the last time I came on, influencer marketing is what started us, and it took us really far. We got to about $2,000,000 a month just from influencer marketing. The thing is, after that we kind of plateaued a little bit. What really got us over the hump—the next step—was running ads: performance ads on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. So we invested a lot more time learning and scaling ads, and that's actually what's fueling most of the growth at this. So there's a lot of learnings on that.
34:37	Sam Parr	How much were you spending per month? Can you reveal that, or not?
34:40	Zach Yadegari	Well, it's scaled over time. In January, we spent maybe a little over 1,000,000 [unspecified currency].
34:47	Sam Parr	Oh, wow — that's pretty efficient. I saw a post where you said that you bought, like, a $400,000 ad with MrBeast. The guest or the host asked, "Was that profitable?" and you said, "I don't know."
35:00	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, so we did an ad with MrBeast. We paid him $500,000 for him to put us in one of his videos. It was basically this contestant who was brought on. He was locked in a gym until he... lost a certain number of a certain...
35:13	Sam Parr	"Amount we met him of when." </FormattedResponse>
35:14	Shaan Puri	He was.
35:14	Sam Parr	"Filming the video."
35:15	Shaan Puri	We met him while he was filming. We were at his— we were at his studio.
35:18	Zach Yadegari	Oh, really? Oh, sorry.
35:19	Shaan Puri	"Nigga, my friend has been locked in this gym for, you know, a hundred days now. He's got two hundred more to go. So we went and visited him at the zoo."
35:28	Sam Parr	This was, like, 16 months ago... That's how long they were planning this video.
35:33	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, that was a wild video. I think it was one of their best-performing videos.
35:38	Shaan Puri	"Yeah."
35:38	Zach Yadegari	They were making a second video on their second channel about whether he maintained his body weight after the video or just regressed. We were offered the chance to sponsor that video. I knew someone on the team, so he helped us sponsor it. They let me fly out to actually see it happen, and they offered me one of the takes to come in and talk about the app. They ended up using that take in the video. I'd say the immediate results were a little unprofitable. It's always hard to attribute because most people go directly to the app store and not many people click a link, so you don't know exactly how many people downloaded. But looking at the time overlap, promo code usage, and a few other metrics we use, we probably made $350,000—maybe $400,000—just from that $500,000 promo. The rest of it, I believe we were profitable long term, and if we're not yet, we will be. Having a brand name—Mr. B—say we were in a video allowed us to do many more deals afterward. We had much more credibility with our brand, and the profit from those deals has exceeded the total amount.
37:04	Sam Parr	"How big is the team?"
37:05	Zach Yadegari	The team is about 30 people—a little more than that.
37:09	Sam Parr	And how many hours a week are you spending going to class?</FormattedResponse>
37:12	Zach Yadegari	Well, first semester I took, I think, four classes a week, so it wasn't that crazy of a schedule. It was like an hour and a half.
37:23	Shaan Puri	What's your major? What are you studying? Are you, like, "rocks for jocks" type of schedule—where you're like...
37:28	Sam Parr	I'm going to have to... history.
37:29	Shaan Puri	"And just 'I need to pass,' or are you like, 'I'm trying to be a Computer Science major'?"
37:33	Zach Yadegari	I first joined the business school—or, rather, I applied to it—but I switched out and went undecided because I wanted to do more of what Steve Jobs always talked about. He took a calligraphy class that enabled him to build the Macintosh operating system. So I took a VR class, which was really cool; it was all about the metaverse. I also took a design class and a business class. The professor there was actually a really awesome guy.
37:57	Sam Parr	Dude, you know how China raises super athletes? They get two seven-foot people and make them breed. They set them up so that by age 12 the kid has everything they need. Yeah—this is like you for business. You already have an exit, you're running a company, you're downloading Steve Jobs ideas and going through... I'm...
38:18	Shaan Puri	I'm impressed with your decision-making. Even just that little thing — like, you know, business would be the obvious choice for you — but saying, "I'm gonna go undecided so that I have the freedom to take interesting classes that spark my curiosity, maybe outside my normal path," because long-term that's actually going to help you. I feel like some of your decisions have been good. In fact, that's probably the most impressive part about you. You're a well-spoken guy, you've obviously hustled, you built a cool app — all of that's great. But the decision-making is what really stands out to me, in a way that's not common among people in general, and definitely not among younger people. I have friends who make terrible decisions, and when I see you I'm like, "This guy's kind of consistently making good decisions." Are you a big mentor person? Do you have someone you call with a lot of questions? Are you just figuring this stuff out on your own? Are you a journaler? What's helping you here?
39:18	Zach Yadegari	Thank you. First of all, it really means a lot. I definitely had mentors who supported me. One was someone who was my cofounder with Kaliai, Blake Anderson. He's helped me a lot with so many things — not just business, but personal life too. I've learned a ton from him, and I'd say that's definitely helped me. The biggest thing is he's helped me shape a lot of decision-making frameworks: how to analyze when to make certain decisions. He kind of taught me about what EV is and all of these different principles to help make smart decisions.
39:57	Sam Parr	Give us some of those. I would like to learn. What are your frameworks for making good decisions? Like—what comes to mind? </FormattedResponse>
40:02	Zach Yadegari	Sure. Well, EV (expected value) is a good one. Gamblers obviously know this: take the percent chance of winning something and multiply it by the prize. That gives the expected value. Then compare that to what you have a 100% chance of getting versus the chance of losing it all versus the prize money — whichever is greater is often the choice you should make. Using that was very helpful when thinking about selling the company and what makes sense in terms of what we're willing to sell for. Ask: what do we think the EV is? What's the chance of us getting to this? What's the chance of it falling apart? That was helpful — it's a good decision-making framework.
40:53	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's a great one—especially for selling. Let's say somebody offers you $100 for your business. You have a 100% chance of getting the $100—or maybe not even 100%, maybe 90%, because it might not close. So, the expected value of that offer is $100 (100% × $100). Now suppose you keep going and there’s a chance you could get $500. You ask, "What do you think the chances are you could get there?" If there's a 10% chance, then 10% × $500 = $50, so the expected value of continuing is $50. In that case, it's a better decision to take the $100 (expected value $100) over the $50. If you think it's a 20% chance, then 20% × $500 = $100, so you're even. But what's the percentage chance it all falls apart and goes to zero? If you keep running it, you have ongoing risk of it failing. Even if you think failure is only a 10% chance, you have to factor that in. Once you do the math, you get a more objective way of making a decision—rather than going on pure emotion, your mood in the moment, or fear and greed based on whatever day or weather you're having.
41:56	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, that was a perfect example.
41:58	Sam Parr	And selling for—in my opinion, selling for you—that's just such a no-brainer. It's a no-brainer because the liquid money that you have is going to compound. I mean, to have what you have — I don't know what you have, but seven or eight figures, I don't know — at that young age is going to compound like crazy. Also, I think people underestimate the clout that comes with a sale, right?
42:15	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, yeah—that's true.
42:17	Shaan Puri	He's like, "I don't underestimate that." Okay, so where to from here? So you're just gonna go to college now? Eventually, in the future, you want to start something new? If you start something new, do you—you're like, "I have to go bigger." Are you going to fall into that trap? What's going to be the mindset going forward now?
42:35	Zach Yadegari	I have so many ideas always. I'm very committed to making sure Calai will endure long term, and I want to make sure that the transition is super smooth between the companies. I will likely, in a few months, start something new. I don't know if I'm going to be as open with this one as I was with Kalle. I was so public about Kalle, which I think was great—so much upside, even though there was downside too. But there was way more upside. With the next one, I'll probably be a little more stealthy. I think I know what I want to build, but I'm not going to share just yet. I'm definitely excited to work on something new. I have tons of new ideas.
43:14	Sam Parr	"What were the top three ideas that you're interested in?"
43:18	Zach Yadegari	I'd say the contenders don't really matter that much because I didn't believe in them enough to want to start them. But there are many good ideas. While building Calai, I constantly had ideas for other apps. I kept thinking, "This would be a cool million-dollar idea; it could go super viral and it's not hard to build." But it doesn't make sense for me to spend my time on those because I'm shooting for a billion-dollar company. One idea I actually tweeted about two days ago is that someone should build a semantic search for your followers on either Instagram or X (or wherever you want), so you could look through them. This could be helpful for many reasons. For example, if you're looking to date someone — Instagram, many people don't realize, is one of the biggest dating apps today — being able to semantically search for your "type" among your followers would be useful. You could also semantically search for "who are the entrepreneurs that follow me" or "who are the cool people." My tweet blew up and I had so many people follow me. I was looking through and thought, "Oh shit, this really cool person's following me — I had no idea," and I didn't get a special notification. Being alerted to things like that would be useful. That's definitely an easy, few-million-dollar idea that someone could build.
44:39	Sam Parr	Pretty cool.
44:39	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I've always wanted that. I would pay for that same thing. I don't go through who follows, so I don't get alerted if somebody interesting follows me—someone I would want to know about. It's a hard thing to exactly define: who would you want to know about? I don't know. I can't give you one rule, but there's somebody who could figure it out. If you could solve that one problem, a lot of people would be interested—whether it's on the search side or the alert side. I'm a believer in that. What are some other cool ideas? If there's somebody who's the, you know, sort of 17-, 18-, or 19-year-old version of you, are you guiding them to be like, "build apps"? Is that the play you still see as the juiciest, or is it specifically around AI? What ideas would you brainstorm for the next version of you who's sitting somewhere listening to this episode right now?
45:28	Zach Yadegari	So, if they are just trying to get started, and it's one of their first projects, they're not trying to swing too big. They're trying to aim for something reasonable—like build a million-dollar company or make a few million dollars from it. I think apps are such a great space to build in right now because there are so many apps that are possible to build, especially enabled by AI, but even without AI. For example, some that have spun up recently: my friend built an app called Quitter. It is an app that helps guys quit porn. It doesn't really use AI; it just gamifies the process, gives you a streak, provides a roadmap, rewards, and meditation guides. That's been super helpful for a lot of people, and now it's making over $5,000,000 a year.
46:12	Sam Parr	That's crazy.
46:13	Shaan Puri	"That's awesome. What are some other cool apps that we aren't aware of—apps that are not on our radar? I'm thinking people who are doing well, people who are crushing it, people who have cool ideas."
46:19	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, did you guys see claim?
46:21	Sam Parr	"No—how do you spell it?"
46:22	Zach Yadegari	No. Okay, so it blew up on Twitter a little bit. It was made by one of my friends. It's basically an app that allows people to get into class-action lawsuits. Like, let's say you drank Pepsi and then there's a Pepsi class-action lawsuit — you could sign up so that when it's settled you get, like, $10 or $15.
46:40	Sam Parr	How do you... hell yeah — how do you spell it?
46:44	Zach Yadegari	C A C L A I M — it actually got taken off the App Store, unfortunately, but they made about $1 million in their first 30 days after launch.
46:54	Shaan Puri	Playing "Make Them Pay" is the... yeah.
46:56	Sam Parr	When Chard and I were 22, an app was released in San Francisco that was amazing. It was called DoNotPay. Is that still around? Oh yeah — it is. It felt like magic when it launched. San Francisco was buzzing about it; I imagine New York was the same. If you get parking tickets, sometimes you think, "I'll just get two parking tickets a month instead of paying for parking — it's a better deal." The app would automatically tell you, before you even got back to your car, that you had a parking ticket, and it would fight it for you. It was amazing.
47:31	Shaan Puri	But it would scan the ticket and be like, "Look — he wrote the number, but it went outside of the box, the box where it was supposed to be." Technically, you don't have to pay now, right? Or: "He didn't fill this in." Or: "The visibility on that sign is low, so you don't have to pay."
47:46	Sam Parr	And then I think the city banned it, and it went away. Apps like that were amazing. This is the same thing as Claim, where it's like, "Just go and find me money, or save me money—go ahead and do that for me."
47:57	Shaan Puri	"What's your framework you use to think of — you sort of use to filter good versus bad ideas? Is it 'I work backwards from the ad' — think about what the TikTok would be, and if it makes for a juicy TikTok then it's going to be a good app? Or is it 'I want an app that makes you money or helps you stop a problem or start something you want to do'? I guess — walk us through how you think about these."
48:19	Zach Yadegari	That's a great question, because I think a lot of people always ask, "How do you come up with ideas?" The first question I always get when I tell someone about Kali Eyes is, "How do you come up with that?" Everyone's trying to think, "I want to come up with these huge ideas—how can I do it?" I think that a better skill is learning how to come up with ideas, but the more important skill—and the better skill—is a framework to validate what is a good idea. You can come up with ideas all the time, but you need to know which ones are good and which ones are bad. You need a way to filter through them quickly. The way I validate ideas needs to be a little bit different for everyone because it depends on your skill set. I validate whether ideas are good or bad for me: things I'm interested in, things I think I could "kill" and really blow up. For me, I look for ideas that are very marketable and can go super viral. I also look for things I have firsthand experience with, or things I know people are experiencing—so I know who I'm building for very specifically. I've seen enough companies that I can make comparative judgments. For example, if there's an adjacent company to the idea I have and that adjacent company is doing X in revenue, I can estimate that I can at least get to Y, if not all the way to X or surpass it. That gives me a quick way of thinking about how far this can go. Before building that intuition, you can analyze the TAM [TAM: total addressable market] of a space, analyze the competitive landscape, and look at a few other metrics that help you objectively assess whether something is worth pursuing.
50:01	Sam Parr	But what's your checklist now? So, for TAM, what's your TAM size?
50:05	Zach Yadegari	To be honest, TAM [Total Addressable Market] is one of those things where I try to— I kind of always look at my gut for this. I'm not, like, doing Google research: "Okay, what's the..." I didn't look up what's the TAM of a calorie-tracking app before starting Calai, but I kind of saw, "Okay, this other app is making $200 million a year," so I know that's, like, the minimum ceiling—the lowest floor of what we could get to. And so that's how I validated building one. But I think a lot of people are deterred by seeing that another app or another product is doing... no, it should
50:36	Sam Parr	Be the opposite, I should say. That's proof.
50:38	Zach Yadegari	Yeah—exact. That's proof it works, and the market is so big that all of these apps can be successful. I mean, if a company is still growing, that means there's still a gap; there are still people who are underserved and can use it. I hear this all the time: I was in an entrepreneurship class where people were pitching their ideas, and everyone was like, "Wait—that already exists." "That already exists." It tends to deter them. But it shouldn't.
51:00	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's so funny. That is the first thing — "Oh, that already exists." Yeah. Okay, so we're looking for nonexistent business ideas. No, not a lot — no, like, how few ideas fall into that. I mean, there are some that are in that category, but that doesn't describe most. Yeah, that's a pretty crazy mistake that people make.
51:20	Sam Parr	"Are you a...?" "Yeah. I had a friend who was an out-of-state person, and he was looking at University of Miami. It was $100,000 a year to go. Are you... spending? Are you the one—are you paying for your own tuition?"
51:32	Zach Yadegari	"I do have a scholarship. My parents actually paid for my first semester, which was nice. But now I am paying going forward if I do want to stay. I paid for this one, and after this I'll probably just honestly drop out... so it won't be—"
51:45	Shaan Puri	An issue.
51:48	Sam Parr	That's so funny. Are you—like, it wasn't until I was 33 that I got off my parents' cell phone bill. It was just too much of a pain in the ass. Are you still, Sean? Are you on your parents' family plan still?
52:00	Shaan Puri	I think I was until literally last year.
52:02	Sam Parr	Yeah, like...</FormattedResponse>
52:03	Shaan Puri	It was, by the way, exactly as much of a pain in the ass as I thought it would be. I was, like, four hours in the AT&T store with my three kids. It was terrible. Zach, I got a question for you: what are you curious about right now? What's exciting to you? You probably are—you know—young and kind of technology-forward. You hang out with different people who, you know, do shit and who are young. So I'm always interested in what your generation is more interested in. Are there certain types of businesses that you admire? Are there certain technologies that you're playing with? Like, you mentioned VR, for example. Are there companies you think are really cool? Are there spaces—white papers you're reading, research you're reading—that have got your interest? Let's just play a game of: what's been interesting to you lately?
52:50	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, I mean—interesting, which honestly is a little bit scary too. People like Elon Musk are saying all the time that we're going to have so much abundance that the need for entrepreneurs is kind of going to go away pretty soon, and that money won't matter anymore. He's saying, "you shouldn't save for your retirement," and so that's a super interesting concept. I already feel like the world I live in now—since I was maybe 10 or 11—is completely different. A lot of the beliefs I held and was taught in school have been completely flipped on their head, and now I believe the opposite. It really seems like we are going to experience an entirely new world pretty soon if these AI labs reach the goals they're setting out to achieve. That's a little scary but exciting at the same time.
53:48	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so what do you do? Because that's paralyzing, right? I flip-flop between: "Oh my God, there's so much opportunity — I'm gonna make so much money," and then an hour later, "Oh, I'm obsolete." Then the next thought is, "Wait — money's actually obsolete." I'm just flopping between these different extremes: where's the puck going? It's very hard to figure out: what do I actually do with my time, my energy, and my talent now? What is going to matter if you believe it is going to be a whole new world? Okay, so do you just wait? Like, what do you do?
54:20	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, no—it's honestly a great question. I was actually at dinner with Steve Cohen last night, and he was... he was kind. </FormattedResponse>
54:28	Sam Parr	"Of saying that the $50,000,000,000 ($50 billion) owner of the Mets, Steve Cohen."
54:33	Zach Yadegari	Yes, it was very cool—very nice. Great to meet him in person. But the most interesting thing he was saying was that right now he's just trying to figure out how to invest in, or extend the timeline of, his companies—or ones he's looking at investing in. He said, "Three years: just survive three years and then figure it out after that." No one knows where the future is heading, so you have to figure out how to survive in the intermediate period. And then, after that, figure out, "Okay, what do we do next?"
55:01	Sam Parr	"Did you learn anything else at that dinner? He's pretty— I mean, he's kind of... he—he kind of..."
55:05	Zach Yadegari	It was super interesting.
55:07	Sam Parr	"Up there with Elon and a few of these other guys. His insights are probably as wide."
55:12	Zach Yadegari	We had very interesting discussions on where society's heading with all these different possibilities — and the timeline, the chance of it getting there. It seems like it may take... well, what's interesting is a lot of people are thinking about the AI part. Like, "okay, we saw the AGI, then overnight everything changes" — that's kind of what people are assuming. But software is one problem. Software is one small problem. The hardware — like building out these humanoid robots that are going to execute these tasks — that's a whole other problem. There are cool companies like Physical Intelligence that are trying to solve this, but that is potentially just as hard. And so people are
55:57	Sam Parr	"Are you interested in getting into some of these really, really big ideas that require a lot of venture capital and can be tens of billions, even hundreds of billions of dollars companies? Or do you prefer to stay in the consumer space and kind of stay in the same industry that you're in now—a bootstrappable thing?"
56:17	Zach Yadegari	I really enjoy building products for consumers. I just love it. It's the biggest compliment to me when I hear that someone else uses something I built—especially when they love it. Like with Cali: every once in a while someone will say, "Oh yeah, I use that." When they hear I built it, it's so awesome to see. I definitely want to keep that feeling. I think whether that's hardware or software, both are cool. I do definitely want to build a company that has a hardware component—maybe not exclusively hardware, but something that can be either software or hardware, or both, that we sell.
56:52	Sam Parr	Sean, do you have a take on what he was talking about with AI? Where do you generally land when you oscillate from "I'm gonna make a ton of money" to "money doesn't matter"?
57:05	Shaan Puri	Alright, that's a complicated question. I do think both of the first parts are true of what I said: there's never been more opportunity, and also there's going to be a ton of creative destruction. Meaning—oh my god, there's so much opportunity—also, some of the things I own or operate could get wiped out. I think both of those are true. Similarly: "Oh my god, I'm all powerful — I can do so much now with AI," and at the same time, "I might be obsolete." That's also true if I don't actually build up skills to use AI well. If I just think, "I'll be in my little bubble and keep doing things the way I've been doing them for the past ten years" when this new super‑weapon came out, that's a little bit silly. It'd be like having an army with muskets right when tanks were invented. So both of those perspectives are true. Now, the question Zach is asking is: what do you do if kind of AGI is around the corner? That corner, depending on who you believe, is one to fifteen years away. What do you do in that situation? There are two approaches. One is you join the AGI race: go join one of the labs and try to build something in that space. The other is to build something that gets better every time the model gets smarter—companies whose products improve as models improve. For example, tools for lawyers: every time models get smarter, those legal tools become more useful. Then there are things AI can't touch in the near term—real‑world things like community, religion, gyms, exercise—activities people will still do. Those may be the "last‑man‑standing" areas in a world where AI keeps getting better at digital work. You can choose that direction. A friend told me he talked to a famous investor who said, "AI is going to be crazy — we're going to do this and this and this. What do you think I should do?" The investor replied, "You should buy railroads." He didn't mean literally railroads, but rather find something physical that AI is unlikely to touch. That way you have time to adjust, instead of betting on something that might be here today and gone tomorrow.
59:41	Sam Parr	I think I'm, like, a huge history nerd. Zach — as Sean and many of the listeners know — I love history. I don't know much about AI, though. What I've learned through history is that humans have thought the same things about their time as every other person in a different time has thought. There's a famous story about Winston Churchill, who was the leader of England during World War II. People thought the Nazis were going to take over the world; Churchill thought the world might end. He wrote, "I think the world actually might end," and that's where his famous quote comes from: > "If you're going through hell, keep on walking." You have to keep going. If you're in the middle of hell, you can't stop — you have to keep moving. Generally speaking, great, smart people — titans of industry and world leaders — every decade think that something bad is going to happen. We've mostly been fine. There have been a lot of blips in the story, but overall we've mostly been fine. I tend to be, I admit, blindly optimistic because I have faith in human beings. It's probably going to be fine. It may be a decade or two of uncertainty and perhaps pain for particular types of people, but in general it's likely to work out.
01:00:55	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, I think that's a very valid take, honestly.
01:00:58	Shaan Puri	And, by the way, if it doesn't end up fine, it doesn't matter. Then it doesn't matter for you — it's over.</FormattedResponse>
01:01:04	Sam Parr	That's why I put my money in Chase Bank. I did all the bank runs a few years ago and it freaked me out. I thought, "I'm going to invest all my money in Chase because I don't think it's going to fail — and if it does, money doesn't matter."
01:01:17	Shaan Puri	Yeah, it's all over that. I'm not even talking about the world-ending stuff. It's just: what do you do with your time and your talents in a highly, rapidly changing world? I, again, think you either lean way into it—meaning you join the frontier. You do something adjacent where the more the frontier work advances, your cause benefits; your specific utility benefits. Or you go the exact opposite direction, and you say, "Well, that stuff's going to get so abundant—what's going to be scarce?" You go figure out what will still be scarce if that becomes really abundant: if intelligence becomes super abundant; if the ability to get work done on a computer becomes super easy; if your AI is going to do better than you. If drivers are obsolete because the cars drive themselves, okay—what's left? What's still scarce at the end of the day? Go in that direction. I think that's a pretty reasonable take.
01:02:12	Zach Yadegari	The things that stay scarce seem to be human connection — that’s one that will remain scarce. Then there’s entertainment: sports, games, live events. These things will be more scarce, especially when AI is making your feed on Instagram and everything you see is just hyper-dopamine-optimized content. </FormattedResponse>
01:02:38	Shaan Puri	Right — if everything's fake, then real becomes scarce. Yeah, and truth becomes scarce. You're right. Like with chess, there are already chess bots that play better than all the human players. But we still like to play chess and watch people play chess — specifically humans. Nobody's watching the AI play chess, but we will watch Magnus Carlsen or whoever, as a specific example. The same thing is true for sports. There are machines that run way faster than humans, but people still tune into a human running and not a machine. Even if it's a car, it's a car being driven by a human and not drone racing, which is more automated. Those have been kind of almost proven to be AI-proof in a way — they have some immunity. So you're like, "Oh, okay, they're kind of immune to that." It seems like owning a sports team is probably a good type of investment, whereas owning a call center is probably not an investment you want to be in anymore, right?
01:03:36	Sam Parr	Zach, a question that we ask a lot of people who make a lot of money overnight is: "What did you do with it? Where did you invest your money?" So I'm curious—with that, you don't have to say numbers; you can say percentages. Do you have a strategy?
01:03:51	Zach Yadegari	"My strategy is essentially that I want to take... I don't like investing in other people. Frankly, I like to invest in myself. I don't want to rely on someone else to multiply my money—trusting their CEO to make the right decisions to grow their company. I want to invest in myself, so I am putting most of it in the S&P 500. But generally, the strategy is that I want to take more outsized risks on my own, like putting funds into my ventures. That's my plan: I'm going to take money out and put it into my own ventures as I start things."
01:04:31	Sam Parr	Okay, so you have 100% of a sum. What percentage are you going to keep in the S&P, and what percentage are you going to put into your own company?
01:04:40	Zach Yadegari	So right now, I believe it's 70–75% in the S&P 500, about 25% in the money market or bonds, and then a few percentage points scattered elsewhere — a tiny bit of Bitcoin and a tiny bit of gold. I believe that's it: really just those four places. I'm going to be pulling out of, mostly — or I guess everything — when I need to invest in my company.
01:05:09	Sam Parr	So, wait—wait. 100%, you're going to put in your own company?
01:05:12	Zach Yadegari	Not 100%. I think for the next venture I will most likely raise money. Now this is kind of like my nest egg — I never need to worry about it. I'm definitely willing to take risks.
01:05:24	Sam Parr	But how much—what percentage? In your head you're thinking, "Let's say hypothetically you have $10,000,000. What percentage do you want to put into your new company?"
01:05:31	Zach Yadegari	Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe this goes to the EV question a little bit, because it really depends how confident I am in the idea. Like that Elon story — he almost went bankrupt because he split up his wealth, giving half to Tesla and half to SpaceX, and that saved both companies. So if that's what it takes at some point, and I'm confident, then maybe that's what it will take.
01:05:55	Shaan Puri	You're an impressive young guy. Is there anything you want to get back? You're like, "Oh, I suck at this today. I'm really poor at this area; I need to figure this out." What's an area you're trying to grow in?
01:06:05	Zach Yadegari	That's a great question. I want to understand the full picture of the world much better. I'm not someone who really understands economic policy well. I don't really understand GDPs of the world and how that influences things. Building a company like CalAI, it doesn't really influence it. But if I'm trying to build a massive company—if I'm trying to build the next Meta or the next OpenAI, the next Apple, the next Google—I think it is important to understand the general trends of where the world is heading.
01:06:38	Sam Parr	Crazy, dude. There's that story—or that video—where Obama makes fun of Donald Trump at the press dinner. There's a meme that says, "this is when Trump became the villain," or "this is when he decided to run for president." It's so funny that we get to have you on here. We saw you come up, and we're now talking to you when you've definitely made it. If you accomplish nothing further from here on out, you're going to be a 10 out of 10—a massive success. We're hearing you at this fork in the road. Is this going to be Sean and Sam talking to Elon when he is 20 years old? Because it definitely could be. You're saying things that definitely indicate this is going to be a very cool thing to look back on in ten or twenty years—that we were able to catch you so early.
01:07:28	Zach Yadegari	"Thank you. I'm very ambitious."
01:07:31	Shaan Puri	Thank you. You should end every conversation with that—"Goodbye." I'm very ambitious. That's awesome, Zach. Thanks for coming on; I appreciate you making the time.
01:07:44	Zach Yadegari	Thanks for having me. It's always fun.
01:07:47	Sam Parr	Thanks. That's it — that's the pod.

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He Made $100M Before His First College Exam

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