Ali Partovi

Ali Partovi (Persian: علی پرتووی; born 1972)^[1] is an Iranian-American entrepreneur and angel investor. He is best known as a co-founder of Code.org (which he founded with his twin brother Hadi), iLike, LinkExchange, an early advisor at Dropbox, and an early promoter of bid-based search advertising.^[2] Partovi currently serves on the board of directors at FoodCorps.^[3] He is currently the CEO of Neo, a mentorship community and venture fund he established in 2017. Neo was the first investor in Cursor.^[4]

Ali Partovi was born alongside his twin brother Hadi Partovi amid the White Revolution of Iran and the Iran-Iraq war.^[5] Both his parents were intellectuals. His mother studied Computer Science in Boston, and his father Firouz Partovi was a founding member of the Sharif University of Technology and the second employed professor.^[5] His father influenced Ali and Hadi to care about education and found code.org and Neo.^[6]

Ali and Hadi began coding when they were ten on a Commodore 64 their father had brought from a seminar he had attended abroad. The family fled to the United States during the Iranian Revolution. Ali and Hadi both went on to acquire both Bachelor's and master's degrees in Computer Science from Harvard University,^[7] where they were members of Sigma Chi.^[8]

Partovi joined Tony Hsieh and Sanjay Mandan in 1996 to co-partner in the establishment of the internet company LinkExchange. The three were later joined by Alfred Lin who served as CFO. Partovi says that he was recruited for his computer programming skills and his business management skills.^[7] He worked in sales, marketing, finance, and business management until Microsoft acquired the company in 1998 for $265 million.^[9] At the time, LinkExchange reached 400,000 sites and about 21 million consumers.^[10]

Partovi was one of the first people to recognize the paid search opportunity because he saw how badly small business owners wanted their businesses to show up on search results. In 1998, LinkExchange acquired Submit It!, started by college-dropout Scott Bannister, which helped owners submit URLs to search engines.^[11] After Microsoft acquired LinkExchange, Partovi stayed with them and became the Lead Project Manager^[7] for MSN Keywords. However, executives in Microsoft, Yahoo, Excite, and other search companies had their hopes pinned in Banner Ads.^[11]

This online platform, meant to help users discover new artists spawned out of GarageBand.^[12] GarageBand was established in 1999 as a site where an independent artist could post their music, and other users would discover them. Partovi had bought the assets of GarageBand in 2002 and had saved it from bankruptcy.^[7] When he and his brother attempted to re-invent the company, iLike was founded in 2006.

The service made use of a sidebar which made it easy for users to discover new artists. It became a massive success within the first few months of launching. Users could directly register on the platform or use third-party networks such as Facebook. iLike had a "post-once publish-everywhere" dashboard for artists. iLike was acquired by Myspace for $20 million.^[13]

From 1998 to 2017, Partovi backed tech companies including Facebook, Airbnb, Dropbox, Uber, and Zappos.^[7] In 2017, Partovi founded Neo, a community of mentors meant to accelerate the development of leadership in the tech environment.^[14] Partovi stopped Angel Investing around this time as this new company includes a venture fund.^[15] The company identifies top Computer Science students and accelerates their careers by introducing them and investing in their startups.^[14] It has $200 million in venture funds, over 1200 introductions to startups, 539 community members, and 57 portfolio companies.^[14]

In 2023, Neo led Bluesky's seed round, was the first investor in Cursor, and invested in Kalshi.^[16][17][18]

Partovi's philanthropy work is focused on computer science education.^[19]

Partovi created Code.org in 2013 as a non-profit initiative to promote computer science, and the two brothers funded the initiative.^[7] He believe that everyone in the world should be able to read and write code, yet many American public schools don't offer computer science classes.^[20] Code.org launched a short video featuring Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, and others to inspire kids to learn how to code.^[21] This video garnered over 15 million views on YouTube.^[22] Code.org also established Hour of Code, a tutorial that introduces students to programming.^[23]

Partovi grew up playing the piano with his brother and is an avid musician.^[24]

As an immigrant himself, he is passionate about legislation affecting immigrant populations, including foreign and educational policies.^[25] He has spoken out about the restrictive consequences of the recent immigration bills passed in the United States. In his article, 'Immigrants are Humans,' Partovi states how he and other immigrants had been deported as 12-year-olds and how such policies do not help anybody and hurt America.^[26]

As of 2019, Partovi has four children from two marriages.^[27] Partovi's cousins include Dara Khosrowshahi, Amir Khosrowshahi (co-founder of Nervana Systems), and Farzad "Fuzzy" Khosrowshahi (co-founder XL2Web which was acquired to become Google Sheets).^[28][29]