Book review: Tech wunderkind shares inspiring success story

"App Kid: How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream"

Author: Michael Sayman

Knopf, 292 pages, $27.99

One day 17-year-old Michael Sayman was sitting in his pre-calculus class ignoring his teacher when an e-mail arrived on his iPad. Facebook was asking if he’d like to be flown to California to meet Mark Zuckerburg. He banged his head on this desk to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. He wasn’t. His teacher thought he was playing around and took his iPad away. Zuckerburg offered him an internship at Facebook. This opportunity turned into a six-figure, full-time job.

For years he had been helping his family escape poverty by helping them pay for electricity, food and their restaurant, which was losing $4,000 a month. Zuckerburg saw him on CNN at age 13 when he was called The Boy Genius of Apple and had done three years of publicity for the apps he’d invented. By the time he was in high school, his app called “4 Snaps” was the top app of all of them.

Before he left for California to meet with Zuckerburg, Sayman was invited to speak at a tech conference in Peru, which paid for his and his mom’s flight to South America to talk about 4 Snaps. He was gaining world-wide recognition.

Sayman does a good job in this well-written memoir describing his highs and lows of climbing to the top of the computer world. He describes not just how he comes up with his apps but also the circumstances around what he was doing.

Many years before Sayman went to California, Steve Jobs introduced to the world the iPhone, in January, 2007. Sayman was amazed at this momentous event.

“My mom snickered and shook her head.” His dad jumped in: “You are only 10 years old. Apple products are so impractical — incompatible with everything. You really want that?” Sayman responded, “‘Yes, yes, yes!’ I could hardly contain myself.” He had his iPhone in four days and there was no stopping him.

Seven years later he was the youngest engineer hired by Facebook and at age 21, hired by Google, he became its youngest product manager. A millionaire, he has never stopped coaching, accepting speaking engagements and offering encouragement to young Hispanics and Latinos. And from his teenage years he supported his family through many monetary crises, treating them generously to gifts and trips. It will be interesting to see how his next memoir will take shape. Today he is a product manager, an app entrepreneur and software engineer. Where will he go from here?

Mims Cushing lives in Ponte Vedra Beach and has written three books.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Book review: 'App Kid' by Michael Sayman