Agents Of Innovation

Michael Sayman is the author of "App Kid: How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream," an inspiring and deeply personal story of one of Silicon Valley's most extraordinary entrepreneurs, who taught himself to code when he was thirteen and thus began his American dream. Watching his parents lose their jobs in the Great Recession, Michael Sayman, then thirteen, did a Google search: “How to code?” Within a year he had already launched an iPhone application and with it he was earning thousands of dollars a month, enough to keep his family afloat and without having to leave the United States. Completely self-taught, Michael went from high school straight into the professional world, and when he was seventeen, he was Facebook's youngest employee, creating new features that wowed Mark Zuckerberg. Three years later, he decided to go to Google, where he became a product manager and a founder in residence. After his stint in Silicon Valley, he now splits time between his hometown of Miami, Flo