Good morning.
The best founders share one trait: they never wait for permission. From Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang urging leaders to “do too much” to an 18-year-old who built a $30 million app after being rejected by every Ivy League school, this week’s stories show how conviction and obsession often matter more than credentials.
Let’s dive in.
Co-founder of $29B AI startup says the best CEOs ‘overdo it’
Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang believes the secret to exceptional leadership is doing “too much.” In a blog post, the 29-year-old billionaire wrote that great CEOs set the upper bound for effort and ambition across their teams. “It will seem like overkill,” he said, “but too much is the right amount.”
Wang pointed to leaders like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk as proof that “ordinary effort” never creates extraordinary results. His own company, now valued at $29 billion, grew rapidly after he made a risky pivot in 2022 toward data generation for large language models, a move critics called “extreme.”
Wang’s philosophy? What most call overcommunicating, overdelivering, or micromanaging is simply leading. “If you’re not overdoing it, you’re underdoing it,” he wrote.
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Gen Z coder rejected by the Ivy League built a $30 million app instead
At 18, Zach Yadegari has already built a $30 million business before finishing his first year of college. Despite a 4.0 GPA and a 34 on the ACT, the teen founder was rejected by every Ivy League school, including Stanford and Harvard.
His app, Cal AI, uses image recognition to track calories from photos and now brings in several million dollars in revenue each month. Yadegari started coding at seven, launched his first business at ten, and says building Cal AI convinced him that college isn’t essential for success.
He chose to attend the University of Miami, calling college a “six-figure vacation,” and now studies philosophy while living with other young founders. “I’m having a lot of fun,” he told Fortune. “The second it becomes not worth it, I’m going to stop.”
After selling her first company, Lacey Kaelani launched Metaintro, an AI-powered job search platform that matches candidates with every publicly listed job on the internet. Within a year, she grew it to two million users across 120 countries with a seven-person team and a guerrilla-style go-to-market strategy that mixed global job fairs, newsletters, and viral social campaigns.
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Amanda & Insane Media team
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