Ali Partovi

Ali Partovi (born 1972) 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.

Partovi currently serves on the board of directors at FoodCorps.

Ali Partovi worked as a Software Consultant at Oracle from August 1994 to April 1996.

He worked on the Interactive Tv project as a field engineer, helping deploy trials for telco and cable companies.

Ali 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.

Ali says that he was recruited for his computer programming skills and his business management skills.

He worked in sales, marketing, finance, and business management until Microsoft acquired the company in 1998 for $265 million.

At the time, LinkExchange reached 400,000 sites and about 21 million consumers.

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.

After Microsoft acquired LinkExchange, Partovi stayed with them and became the Lead Project Manager for MSN Keywords.

However, executives in Microsoft, Yahoo, Excite, and other search companies had their hopes pinned in Banner Ads.

GarageBand was established in 1999 as a site where an independent artist could post their music, and other users would discover them.

When Microsoft viewed MSN Keywords as a threat to Banner Ads and shut it down in 2000, Partovi left.

This online platform, meant to help users discover new artists spawned out of GarageBand.

Ali had bought the assets of GarageBand in 2002 and had saved it from bankruptcy.

When he and his brother attempted to re-invent the company, iLike was founded in 2006.

Ali became CEO, and Hadi became President.

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 had raised funding pre-launch at a $50 million valuation.

After 7 or 8 years, iLike was acquired by Myspace for $20 million.

Initially, Apple was interested in purchasing iLike because Jobs was impressed by the product and the team.

However, Partovi lost the acquisition by telling Steve Jobs that they were worth three times as much as Jobs was offering ($50 million).

When iLike did not have a competing offer, Jobs ended negotiations.

Partovi refers to the Steve Jobs encounter as one of his "most painful memories".

Ali and Hadi created Code.org in 2013 as a non-profit initiative to promote computer science, and the two brothers funded the initiative.

They 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.

He is currently the CEO of Neo, a mentorship community and venture fund he established in 2017.

Ali Partovi was born alongside his twin brother Hadi Partovi amid the White Revolution of Iran and the Iran-Iraq war.

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.

His father influenced Ali and Hadi to care about education and found code.org and Neo.

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, where they were members of Sigma Chi.