Speaker: Michael Sayman

Teen entrepreneur, programmer, and student Michael Sayman created an iOS app development company at thirteen after teaching himself to code, becoming one of Silicon Valley’s youngest entrepreneurs. Since then, he has gone on to create dozens of apps, which have been downloaded more than 3 million times worldwide. A second-generation Latino immigrant, Michael Sayman watched his parents’ restaurant business collapse in the wake of the Great Recession. Within a year, Michael had taught himself to code and 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 employee 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.