In Silicon Valley, where the same high-wattage names tend to dominate the headlines, Ali Partovi has long wielded outsized influence despite limited name recognition. The Iranian-born Harvard graduate built an impressive resume early on — joining the founding team of LinkExchange (acquired by Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million), co-founding iLike (sold to MySpace for a reported $20 million in 2009), and launching the educational nonprofit Code.org with his twin brother Hadi. Together, they also became early investors in tech giants like Facebook, Airbnb, and Dropbox.
While industry insiders have long viewed the Partovi brothers’ involvement in a startup as a strong signal, Ali’s star is only now rising more broadly beyond tech circles. This wider recognition stems from Neo, his eight-year-old venture firm that promised from the outset to revolutionize how exceptional talent is discovered — and is developing some fairly convincing proof points.
Among its bets, Neo was the first institution outside of Twitter to invest in the decentralized social network Bluesky, which was reportedly valued at $700 million in a January funding round, and Kalshi, an online prediction market whose surge in popularity began during last fall’s U.S. presidential election.
“This year, for the first time, I can conclusively say that we are discovering the future superstars before anyone else,” Partovi, known for being equal parts gracious and tenacious to the point of pushy, told this editor on Friday.
Neo’s relationship with Michael Truell helps to tell the story.
In 2017, Truell, then a freshman at MIT, was interning at Google when a fellow student suggested he meet with Partovi. During that hour-long sitdown, Partovi gave Truell a coding test that he completed in 15 minutes. The ask wasn’t unusual for Partovi. When investing with his brother, the two commonly ran teams through a tech interview as if they wanted to get a job at Google. But it exempli …