Hadi Partovi
Founder & Chairman of the Board, Code.org. On 2 shows, 1 appearance, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@hadip ↗LinkedIn ↗partovi.org ↗
Hadi Partovi co-founded the education nonprofit Code.org and served as its longtime CEO. He previously co-founded Tellme Networks and iLike, and has been an early angel investor and advisor to companies such as Facebook, Airbnb, and Dropbox.
2shows
1appearances
19statements
4resolved
3supported
0contradicted
75%fully supported
23said about them ↓ Everything Hadi Partovi said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Top Tech Founders Like Jobs and Musk Actively Micromanage Product Details
“If you think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg Elon Musk, none of these folks are just trust that the team will get it done. They're getting very involved in little details. And it's much harder to point to examples of incredible consumer technology s…”
Partovi: 'Move fast and break things' fails for multi-billion-dollar tech giants
“This works well, if you're small, the Facebook and you move fast and break things, you know, this idea of shoot first aim later that works well when the consequences are smaller or when you can undo the mistakes. Cause then you correct them. It doesn't work wh…”
Partovi Predicts $10 Billion Public Company Axon Has 100x Growth Potential
“Axon's a ten billion dollar public company, but it still has 100 X growth potential.”
Partovi Personally Competed Against Steve Ballmer to Recruit Harvard and MIT Talent
“Even while I was at Tell Me, we were fighting, I was personally fighting Balmer on recruiting Harvard graduates and MIT graduates. I would call a student, He would call a student. I would call them back. He would call them back. And he knew that this was happe…”
Partovi: Steve Ballmer deserves far more credit for building Microsoft
“Steve Ballmer does not get anywhere near enough credit for having built Microsoft's into the powerhouse that it is right now.”
Partovi: Convincing elite engineers to join is harder than VC fundraising
“It is far easier for a VC to write a check with somebody else's money than to get a stellar engineer who has a hundred options, but can only pick one of them to basically say, you're going to be the company that I'm going to make my bet on.”
Stockpiling Cash Is a Bad Startup Strategy in High-Inflation Environments
“I don't think it's good to stockpile cash right now. A lot of people think, you know, in the old days, you'd say raise. You know, raise the largest amount you can when you can. That makes a lot of sense when inflation was zero and interest rates were zero. Whe…”
Partovi: Only 5% of people use calculus in daily life, compared to statistics
“Everybody uses statistics in their daily lives and maybe five percent of people use calculus in their daily lives.”
Partovi: Microsoft earnings grew fantastically under Steve Ballmer's CEO tenure
“The Steve years were not great for Microsoft's stock price. They were fantastic for Microsoft's earnings and earnings growth.”
Facebook Had Nine Employees When Accel Offered a $100 Million Valuation
“Facebook at this time was nine people. It was a nine person company. They were in a hundred different colleges and it was called the Facebook, not, it wasn't yet Facebook. And we met the day they got their term sheet from Excel you know, for the a hundred mill…”
Partovi Secured Early Facebook Advisor Equity at a $10 Million Valuation
“I ended up becoming an advisor, which was actually slightly better than investing because I ended up getting in at the, at a ten million dollar valuation rather than a hundred mil valuation”
Partovi: Startups conducting layoffs should cut deep and do it once
“I would definitely say that if you're cutting, cut deep and do it only once. Multiple rounds of cutting or like just dribbling it out destroys morale and it also destroys credibility.”
Partovi: Internal execution poses bigger risk to seed startups than macroeconomics
“If you're a series Seed startup. The doom and gloom that exists is you screwing up your own startup in the next 12 months. That's like the higher order chance of total failure is just your relationship with your co-founders. Do you find product market fit? Can…”
Partovi: Generative AI will enable higher-level programming commands
“So generative AI is going to make it possible to use much higher level commands than today's languages.”
Understanding Code Remains Essential to Verify AI-Generated Outputs
“Understanding the code is still important. Think if you use generative AI to write an essay, You still need to read that essay. You don't just say, please write me a blog post and then, okay, it's done. Ship it. You want to read it and confirm it's the thing t…”
Partovi: Code.org targets $10 to $20 cost per high school CS student
“If we're impacting students at the high school level, the cost for teaching computer science to a student should add up to roughly 10 dollars, 10 to 20 bucks, not hundreds or thousands of dollars.”
Partovi: Code.org has taught hundreds of millions of students computer science
“So code.org has taught hundreds of millions of students, computer science.”
Partovi: Only five U.S. states mandate high school computer science graduation
“There's five states in the US that require every student must learn computer science to graduate high school.”
Partovi: iLike scaled from two to 32 servers within hours of launch
“We planned to have two servers running this to judge interest, and basically within 30 minutes we realized two servers wasn't gonna be enough, so we immediately doubled it, and then we doubled it again, and then we doubled it again until our entire server farm…”
The other half of the tape: Hadi Partovi's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 22 times in 7 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 8Ali Partovi 5Drew Houston 4Emil Michael 3Dara Khosrowshahi 1Dan Lewis 1
Statements about Hadi 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 22
2023 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- Dara Khosrowshahi: How I Became CEO of Uber; Uber Eats vs DoorDash; The Postmates Acquisition | E994 · 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
- Emil Michael: How I Negotiated the $4B Uber-China Deal, Why DoorDash Caught Up to Uber | 20VC #941 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC: How I Lost a $125M Deal with Yahoo by Being Too Honest, The M&A Meeting with Steve Jobs That Did Not Go Well and How U2's Bono Saved The Day For One Tech Startup with Ali Partovi, CEO @ Neo
- Dropbox CEO Drew Houston: How to Pick a Co-Founder; Steve Jobs' Attempt to Buy Dropbox | 20VC #938 · 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 Hadi's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & Chairman of the Board, Code.org | 1 | 18 | 75% 3/4 | full record on 20VC → |
 MASTERS OF SCALELEDGER | Founder & Chairman of the Board, Code.org | 0 +1 | 1 | — | full record on Masters of Scale → |