About the Book
Esta es la historia de Michael Sayman, quien a sus trece años creó una empresa de desarrollo de aplicaciones iOS que llamó la atención de Mark Zuckerberg. Desde entonces, ha trabajado para Facebook, Google y, actualmente, para Roblox, la conocida empresa de juegos virtuales.
Emprendedor por naturaleza e hijo de inmigrantes hispanos, Michael luchó desde niño por encontrar su lugar en el mundo. En App Kid, nos cuenta cómo, a raíz del colapso del negocio familiar que llevaban sus padres, aprendió a programar por sí mismo, lanzando una aplicación para iPhone que llegó a recaudar miles de dólares al mes, lo suficiente para mantener a flote a su familia. Entrado en la adolescencia, nos comparte la increíble experiencia que vivió al pasar de la escuela secundaria directamente al mundo profesional, entrando a trabajar en Facebook como su empleado más joven, y creando nuevas funciones operativas que cautivaron al mismo Mark Zuckerberg. A lo largo de su trayectoria, se enfrenta con retos y preguntas existenciales que le llevan no solo a alcanzar exitosamente otras metas profesionales, sino también a descubrir su orientación sexual y a aceptar, con el apoyo de su familia, que es gay.
Sinceras y emocionantes, las memorias de Michael incluyen todos los altibajos, tanto los éxitos como los fracasos, del apasionante camino que ha recorrido hasta llegar a sus 25 años. Es la fascinante historia de un joven hispano que, aun sin tener mayoría de edad, se destacó en el feroz universo de Silicon Valley, convirtiéndose en una inspiración para miles de niños y jóvenes que se encuentran en la búsqueda de su propio éxito e identidad.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
An inspiring and deeply personal coming of age memoir from one of Silicon Valley’s youngest entrepreneurs—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.
About the Author :
Teen entrepreneur, programmer, and student MICHAEL SAYMAN created an iOS app development company at thirteen, after teaching himself to code. Since then, he has gone on to create dozens of apps, which have been downloaded more than 3 million times worldwide.
Review :
Publishers Weekly [Starred]
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 “catch22” 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. (Sept.)
Kirkus [Starred]
A notable debut memoir about identity, immigration, and computer coding.
It’s not the extraordinary experiences of a wunderkind building moneymaking apps while still in high school that makes this coming-of-age story so compelling, but rather the ordinary ones. Sayman’s biography is undeniably impressive: He built his first app for the iPhone when he was 13, and it quickly started earning him $10,000 per month. At 17, his 4 Snaps app and video promotion landed him a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg and an internship at Facebook, which he parlayed into a full-time job, where he worked on Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status and developed youth-oriented projects. By 21, Sayman had landed a big-money job at Google. His adventures at those secretive tech giants and his insights into their business plans and work cultures add even more fascinating layers to the text, especially considering his problematic home life with his Bolivian and Peruvian immigrant parents and his struggle to come to terms with his sexuality. Sayman is a born storyteller, and he manages to narrate without falling into the romanticized traps that plague so many coming-of-age memoirs. Even with his connection to Zuckerberg, there was no outside force to save him. He worked through countless challenges himself—via extensive Google searches, trial and error, and listening to others and deciding on his own. “How lucky I’d been to grow up steeped in the American belief—or fairy tale, depending on how you looked at it—that anyone could reinvent themselves at any time,” he writes. “That was the spirit that had driven me to wake up to who I really was.” At personal appearances, he would explain his life as thoroughly as he could because he wanted people, especially Latinx teenagers, to know that a similar life was possible for them. Sayman’s superpower is turning his specific Silicon Valley success story into something sweet, universal, and inspirational
