App Kid
How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the creator of the SocialAI app comes an inspiring and deeply personal coming of age memoir from one of Silicon Valley’s youngest entrepreneurs. Michael Sayman is a second-generation Latino immigrant who taught himself how to code as a thirteen-year-old and went on to claim his share of the American dream.
As his parents watched their restaurant business collapse in the wake of the Great Recession, Michael Sayman was googling “how to code.” Within a year, he had launched an iPhone app that was raking in thousands of dollars a month, enough to keep his family afloat—and in America.
Entirely self-taught, Sayman headed from high school straight into the professional world, and by the time he was seventeen, he was Facebook’s youngest employe ever, building new features that wowed its founder Mark Zuckerberg and are now being used by more than half a billion people every day. Sayman pushed Facebook to build its own version of Snapchat’s Stories and, as a result, engagement on the platform soared across all demographics. Millions of Gen Z and Millennials flocked to Facebook, and as teen engagement rose dramatically on Instagram and WhatsApp, Snapchat’s parent company suffered a billion-dollar loss in value. Three years later, Sayman jumped ship for Google.
App Kid is the galvanizing story of a young Latino, not yet old enough to drink, who excelled in the cutthroat world of Silicon Valley and went on to become an inspiration to thousands of kids everywhere by following his own surprising, extraordinary path. In this candid and uplifting memoir, Sayman shares the highs and lows, the successes and failures, of his remarkable journey. His book is essential and affirming reading for anyone marching to the beat of their own drum.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sayman debuts with a beguiling account of how he became one of Silicon Valley's youngest entrepreneurs. The son of Peruvian-Bolivian immigrants, he fell in love with computers as a young boy in Miami. Sayman recounts how—using Google and YouTube videos to learn how to code—he created a game, sold it on Apple's App Store in 2010, and by age 13 was making $10,000 a month. In the midst of media coverage that followed over the next few years, he caught the attention of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who offered the then-17-year-old an internship. Just a year later, he was raking in a six-figure salary as a software engineer. The real emotional center of Sayman's story, though, lies in the "catch-22" of being Facebook's youngest employee, "my biggest strength and my greatest weakness." His strength was being able to educate "the grown-ups" on the youth market—which led to his significant role in the success of Instagram Stories—while his weakness manifested in his inexperience as a manager (Google later swooped in and made him its "fastest mobile app engineer"). He also shares how—after growing up in a community where "kids still used ‘gay' as a putdown"—he learned to be proud of his sexuality as a gay man. Readers will be enthralled by this humanizing look at the tech world.
