Dara Khosrowshahi (cousin) Ali Partovi (Persian: علی پرتووی; born 1972)[1] is an Iranian-American entrepreneur and angel investor.
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] Ali and Hadi began coding when they were ten on a Commodore 64 their father had brought from a seminar he had attended abroad.
Ali and Hadi both went on to acquire both Bachelor’s and Master's Degrees in Computer Science from Harvard University,[6] where they were members of Sigma Chi.
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.
[6] He worked in sales, marketing, finance, and business management until Microsoft acquired the company in 1998 for $265 million.
However, executives in Microsoft, Yahoo, Excite, and other search companies had their hopes pinned in Banner Ads.
[6] 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.
[14] Ali and Hadi launched a short video featuring Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, and others to inspire kids to learn how to code.
[17] From 1998 to 2017, Ali has backed major tech companies, including Facebook, Airbnb, Dropbox, Uber, and Zappos.
[6] Ali and his twin brother Hadi have been identified as the most prominent angel investors, with their portfolios having a very high number of now successful companies.
[6][18] Although Partovi has backed many tech startups, in the beginning, he was afraid of investing in ventures he thought were terrible ideas.
[21] In 2017, Ali Partovi founded Neo, a community of mentors meant to accelerate the development of leadership in the tech environment.
[18] The company identifies top Computer Science students and accelerates their careers by introducing them and investing in their startups.
[19] In 2016, he had a conversation with Stephen Curry,[19] who was in the Warriors then, and the idea of scouting tech engineers ceased being just a theory.
[23] Reducing the risk may draw out the outcome of an identified opportunity, only resulting in a small success and a waste of a lot of resources and time.