Ali Partovi
CEO & Founder, Neo. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderinvestorexecutive@apartovi ↗LinkedIn ↗partovi.org ↗Wikipedia ↗
Ali Partovi is the founder and CEO of Neo, a venture capital fund and mentorship community. He previously co-founded LinkExchange, iLike, and Code.org, and was an early angel investor in companies including Dropbox, Uber, and Facebook.
2shows
2appearances
36statements
5resolved
3supported
2contradicted
60%fully supported
35said about them ↓ Everything Ali Partovi said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Partovi: Active startup CEOs cannot successfully run side venture funds
“I'm deeply skeptical of somebody who is a CEO of a startup being able to also run anything else.”
Partovi: Kalshi is the largest legal sports betting market in the US
“And now they're now the largest sports within two months or three months of launch. They're the single largest sports betting market in the United States, all legally.”
Partovi: Startup success requires embracing risk rather than constantly de-risking
“But the big learning for me is that I think success in tech requires maintaining courage, no matter how terrified you are. And I think sometimes you have to go all in, even if you feel you have a losing hand. The path that I would say I took a lot as a founder…”
Partovi: CoProcure could become the largest female-led company of all time
“An investment of mine that I'm super excited about. And I don't know if this will ever be a household name because it's a B to B type business, but it's a company called co-procure. I think it has a potential to be, could be the largest female led Company of a…”
Partovi: Tech industry pressure to drop out of college is unhealthy
“Having said that, I think there's way too much of a emphasis on you have to drop out and you're not good enough if you don't drop out. Among Silicon Valley, obviously not everywhere, but in the tech industry, I think that can be a little unhealthy.”
Partovi: Majority of Thiel Fellows joined after raising millions and dropping out
“The majority of the Teal Fellows followed that path. They became a Teal Fellow Long after raising money, long after dropping out of college.”
Partovi: Raw talent and potential matter more than resume experience
“Talent is more important than experience. I mean, they're both important, but if you have to choose, I would always rather bet on a brilliant, hardworking young person and their potential to Then somebody who has the resume and the experience, but may not have…”
Candidates with minor interview flaws almost always turn out to be terrible
“It means your smaller team needs to work harder until you find the right people, and so, of course, there's a point at which you might need to make a compromise, but I've always found that if you're interviewing someone, and you're like, ah, They're not quite …”
Partovi: Most venture capitalists are not good at recruiting for founders
“Most VCs are not good at that, and regardless, I don't want anyone, including myself, to be a crutch.”
Partovi: Startup CEOs must focus on one thing instead of diversifying
“If you are a CEO, diversification should not be at all what you do. You should be a hundred percent concentrated on one thing”
Partovi: Founder-investors earn higher returns angel investing personal capital over managing funds
“If you are a great angel investor as a founder, you can probably make more money just in angel investing. Why would you want to dilute your possibilities by taking on other money?”
Partovi: The 'us versus them' founder-VC dynamic is unhealthy and false
“If there was one thing I would change, it's the us versus them attitude between founders and VCs. It's, I touched on this just earlier. I think it's just false. You know, it's an unhealthy, false implication that these are two different species, or that the go…”
Partovi: Existing investors participating at fair market value signals company strength
“So I'm of the old school that letting your existing investors invest more is the best way to build a company. Not just to serve your old investors, it signals to everybody else what a great relationship you have and makes other people want to invest. But I wou…”
Partovi: Founders should stay in school until ready for multi-year commitment
“But if, you know, but if that doesn't make sense, I would say it's better to stay in school Until you have found the thing worthy of leaving school for. The thing that your heart and your passion is really ready to commit to for years.”
Partovi: The core founder test is whether smart friends drop everything to join
“The real thing I look for, besides, I'd say technical ability is a kind of, it's an important prerequisite. We back technical founders. But I asked myself how magnetic is this person? That word magnetic. Specifically, I'm asking myself, if this person started …”
Partovi: OpenAI hired all 2024 new graduates through Neo
“Last year, OpenAI hired all of their new grad hires through NEO.”
Partovi: Personal commitment to Neo Fund IV equals all prior funds combined
“This fund, even though it's barely larger than our last fund our partner's investment, meaning, you know, my own money from my pocket into this fund is far more than any of our previous funds. In fact, it's about the same as all the previous funds combined.”
Partovi: A startup's first 5-10 hires determine the next 100
“I realized that the people we hired made the difference between success and failure, and the first five or 10 are most important because they hire the next 50 to a hundred.”
Partovi: Investor helpfulness naturally experiences exponential decay over time
“Any investor or mentor or advisor is going to have some sort of, you know, exponential decay in how helpful they can be because hopefully the founders and their executive team over time become greater than we are.”
Partovi personally pitched nearly every early hire at Vanta and Kalshi
“In almost all my portfolio companies, if I didn't source their early recruits, I certainly helped close them. At companies like Vanta, Kalshi, Copercure, I think not a single person they hired was without a phone call, at least from me, to help convince them t…”
LinkExchange received a $125 million acquisition term sheet from Yahoo
“We received a term sheet from Yahoo for them to acquire my company. It was a hundred and twenty five million dollar acquisition”
Partovi: Do not drink alcohol during major business discussions
“Do not drink when you're having major business discussions.”
Partovi believes Apple's iLike acquisition would have succeeded if he remained passive
“I keep thinking back that if I had just done nothing, things would probably have been fine.”
The other half of the tape: Ali Partovi's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 34 times in 11 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 18John Coogan 5Hadi Partovi 4Emil Michael 3Tarek Mansour 2Dara Khosrowshahi 1Dan Lewis 1
Statements about Ali Partovi, by other people (1)
Dan Lewis evaluated multiple business models with Hadi and Ali Partovi
“And I spent a lot of time actually with Hadi Partovi and Ali Partovi exploring some of these ideas early, my co-founder, Grant Goodale. And then we kind of came up with the right business model in addition to, you know, four or five other ones that we looked a…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 29
TBPN 5
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2025 4 mentions in 1 episode
2024 5 mentions in 1 episode
2023 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- Dara Khosrowshahi: How I Became CEO of Uber; Uber Eats vs DoorDash; The Postmates Acquisition | E994 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Sheel Mohnot: How I Got Married in the Metaverse; Founder vs Product vs Market | E1035 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC: What are the World's Tech Leaders Running From? Fear? Insecurity? Poverty? What Drives the Best with Orlando Bravo, Bill Ackman, Dara Khosrowshahi, Parker Conrad, Tobi Luttke, Brian Armstrong and more..
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 16 mentions in 3 episodes 5 per episode
- Hadi Partovi: How I Became an Advisor to Mark Zuckerberg; Lessons from Steve Ballmer | 20VC #961 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour: How to Build Moats Against Incumbents; How to Hire Engineers | 20VC #931 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Emil Michael: How I Negotiated the $4B Uber-China Deal, Why DoorDash Caught Up to Uber | 20VC #941 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2018 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy
- 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ali's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | CEO & Founder, Neo | 1 | 26 | 100% 2/2 | full record on 20VC → |
| TBPNLEDGER | CEO & Founder, Neo | 1 | 10 | 33% 1/3 | full record on TBPN → |