From Food Photos to Millions: Inside Cal AI's Explosive Growth

We're here with Zach Yadigari, CEO of CalAI. Thank you so much for being here, Zach. Yeah, of course. Yeah, so tell us a little bit about kind of the story of how you got to where you are. I know you've talked about this before, but you have a really interesting history that a lot of people, a lot of founders don't have starting so young and building so many different businesses. So I started my first company when I was 13. I'd always been coding since I was like seven, building random projects. But at 13, I built an unblocked gaming website that let kids play games in school unblocked. And I grew this to 5 million users, 5 million, and then I sold it when I was 16 for 100K. After this, I took the funds and started building different mobile apps. The one that really took off was CalAI, an app where you can track your calories just by taking a picture of your food. And in a year and a half, we grew it to... 50 million in annual run rate before we sold it to MyFitnessPal. I mean, it's just incredible to think about so many kids when you first started out just like playing video games or just sitting around and going out playing sports and you're sitting there actually doing this work. I think for a lot of young people out there, they might have the question of how do I actually start doing that? It might seem overwhelming. What do you say to people who say, I actually kind of want to get involved in some way? Where do they even begin? So I think for me, I learned so much online, on YouTube, on Twitter. I just started reaching out to people who were building products that were successful and I wanted to learn from. And people are happy to take the chat if you write a well-written message. Yeah. And thinking about that, I know obviously AI now can do a lot of that for us and can help in a lot of ways. Are there any tools that you've used in particular, whether it's AI or whether it's just kind of other building tools that have been particularly helpful for you? For reaching out to people or anything? No, more for like building. Oh yeah. Well, totally. I mean. I switch off between Codex and Claude Code while building, for sure. I think these are probably just the two basic ones. Yeah. No, it's good to think about, okay, what do you actually use to get this done? And for people who maybe do have a business now and they're saying, all right, it's going okay, but they want to get kind of that viral moment, but then what they really are looking for, obviously, is a kind of sustained momentum. What do you have to say to them when they're like, all right, how do I actually make this company move forward and go somewhere? Yeah, so... Having one viral moment isn't enough. You could get that posting organically on any platform, but what you really need to build out is some kind of sustainable and self-sustaining marketing flywheel. So this could be influencers, paying influencers to post for you. This could be UGC getting an army of like 20 creators posting every day. This could be paid ads, getting people to make creatives, running them on Facebook ads. So there are so many ways. You just have to pick one that you think would work for your... company and double down and then when you do that and let's say you get all this momentum there's a lot of excitement you have companies that are interested how do you make that decision to say okay yes I do want to sell to my FitnessPal again you could have kept going with it you could have been looking for other offers what makes you say okay this is the right one for me personally it was a simple equation I would have gotten, I had a number in mind that I wanted to personally have to be financially free and not need to worry about money again. And so it accomplished this. And then also I didn't want to necessarily work on a calorie tracking app the rest of my life and so that also led me to think like okay it hits my number and now I can start something I'm more passionate about so that's what I'm going to move on and do. And thinking about that what you're more passionate about and what you're going to do next talk to us a little bit about what's coming what can we expect next. So now I'm building AI hardware. I'm building an AI personal assistant that lives in your phone, lives on email, text, call, anywhere, but also will live in hardware that you wear. So you'll have a band on your wrist where you could talk to your assistant all the time, smart home speaker, all kinds of different devices. And so would you be actually making the device itself or would it be something that's kind of integrated into some of the other wearables and other products that we've seen? We're going to make it. We're making it ourselves. That's incredible. And when you think about this journey that you're now on and thinking about other people who might be out there saying, okay, I have an idea for something that I want to build as well. At this stage, having already had this kind of acquisition and now being in a new place than you were last time, how does it feel different? I feel that this time, first of all, it's a way more competitive space. So it's definitely more difficult on that side, like getting the right talent that we need. It's a way harder problem to actually solve and tackle. It's also a little bit easier the fact that now I know so many more people, I have connections, relationships, and this is something that's helping me overcome some of the challenges that are also involved. And I was going to ask that as my next question about the challenges. Even though you have this experience, it does not mean that starting another company is easy. So when you're now starting this next company, what are you thinking about as far as the biggest challenges are? Especially keeping in mind supply chain issues and so many other things going on in the world that can have an impact outside of just what you're trying to do yourself. The biggest challenges so far have really just been building the strongest team. We're being ruthless about talent. We know that in order to win in a competitive landscape like this, it's really just getting the smartest people together. And so that's what we've been prioritizing. And we've been doing a good job, but it's definitely just shown to be way more challenging than anything I've built in the past. Yeah, and just finally looking towards the future, we can expect to see you building this company. When do you think this is going to get to a point where we'll really be seeing what it looks like and people can really be accessing it? Well, the devices are shipping in December. People can start texting it today, so you can try it now. Awesome. That's amazing. Thank you so much. Zach Yadigari, really appreciate you being here today. Of course. Thanks.