“Honey never goes bad, no matter how old it is.” A clear indication of Thomas’s arrival. Thomas had some type of fascination with useless facts that he insisted on sharing with others before anything else could be said. He claimed he just would pick up such minor details after reading a much more general article. Kurt never doubted him; he knew Thomas had an astonishing memory for things that he considered interesting. “Hey Thomas, how’d your interview go?” “Pretty good. I think I got the job.” “Great. What kind of job is it?” Thomas hesitated for a second. “I’ll be doing custodial work.” No, he’s not a janitor. He’s not even a custodian. He simply does custodial work. Perhaps that was the best way of making his new job sound respectable. So who cared anyway? It wasn’t about respect, it was simply about making a living.
Growing up in a Persian-Jewish family on Long Island, NY, Zach Yadegari, 18, never wanted to go to college. After all, why would he need to? Cal AI, the calorie-tracking app he co-founded, blossomed into a $30 million empire before he could even submit applications, so it’s safe to say he was doing just fine. “After Cal AI started taking off, it confirmed it. I was like, ‘Okay, clearly, you don’t need college to be successful.’ My parents finally saw the vision,” Yadegari previously told Fortune. The coding prodigy is a longtime entrepreneur, teaching himself to code when he was just 7 years old. By age 10, he was charging $30 an hour for lessons to people who wanted to learn the skill. By the time high school arrived, he had created a gaming website called “Totally Science”, which enabled his peers to play unblocked video games online with no download or registration required. The venture brought in his first six figures. Yadegari eventually had a change of heart about college, a...