From coding tests to billion-dollar startups, Ali Partovi’s eight-year experiment is paying off

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 handwritten 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 exemplifies Partovi’s approach at Neo, where he uses technical evaluations not as rigid assessments but as foundations for deeper conversations.

The moment was also the start of a relationship that could prove lucrative for both Partovi and Truell. Indeed, years later, backed first by Partovi, Truell co-founded Anysphere, maker of the popular AI-powered coding editor Cursor, which is now flirting with a $10 billion valuation and may become one of Neo’s most successful investments.

Like Y Combinator before it, Neo’s approach represents a fundamental rethinking of venture capital. Rather than betting on specific themes or teams, Partovi focuses on identifying exceptional individuals, often while they’re still in college, and nurturing their potential through mentorship before they’ve incorporated a company.

For those college students, Partovi — with his partners at Neo, Suzanne Xie and Emily Cohen – run a “Neo Scholars” program that provides a $20,000 grant to take a gap semester, no equity required. (Thirty people are chosen yearly.)

In 2022, for early-stage startups, Partovi additionally set up a more traditional accelerator program that offers funding and guidance to 20 companies each year.

“I try to coax them towards taking a bit more risk, going outside their comfort zone, aiming higher than whatever they are aiming for right now,” Partovi explained.

The strategy requires patience. Starting in Neo’s earliest days, Partovi personally traveled the country, interviewing students and administering coding tests to find “tomorrow’s changemakers,” in his words.

Others clearly think he’s pretty good at it, and no wonder. In addition to Anysphere and Kalshi, Neo scholars have gone on to found the coding assistant company, Cognition, which was recently valued at $4 billion; Pika Labs, which makes a text-to-video Generative AI tool and is currently valued at $700 million; and Chai Discovery, which hasn’t shared its post-money valuation but that raised $30 million from OpenAI and Thrive Capital last fall to fuel its multi-modal foundation model for molecular structure prediction.

“Last year, every one of OpenAI’s new grad hires was a Neo scholar,” Partovi proudly noted when we talked.

When evaluating potential superstars, Partovi largely focuses on three key qualities: technical ability, entrepreneurial inclination, and willingness to challenge the status quo.

Technical ability matters not because founders will code all day, but because “computer science really helps. It just helps you think,” Partovi explained, citing examples like Jeff Bezos, Reed Hastings, and Larry Ellison — all computer science students who became legendary business leaders.

Past entrepreneurial experience signals risk-taking propensity and a hunger to build products people love. The third quality — challenging the status quo — speaks to founders’ willingness to question fundamental assumptions.

Yet there’s a fourth quality Partovi considers perhaps most crucial: magnetism. Says Partovi: “I ask myself, if [this individual] started something, how likely would their smartest friends be to join them?” (This was particularly evident in Truell, whose “quiet confidence” convinced Partovi that “his smartest MIT friends would consider joining him.”)

As Neo’s reputation has grown, so has competition to get in. Applications to both Neo programs have doubled annually, according to Partovi, who added that while many venture firms would expand to accommodate demand, Neo made a deliberate choice to maintain selectivity over scale.

The philosophy extends to fund size. While VCs who can raise ever-larger funds typically do, Neo — which earlier this month closed on $320 million in fresh capital — only raised slightly more than the $235 million in capital commitments it collected in 2023. Meanwhile, Partovi’s personal stake in the newest fund increased significantly, with him putting more of his own money into this fund than all three previous Neo funds combined. (Others of Neo’s backers include Sheryl Sandberg, Bill Gates, and Reid Hoffman, who wrote one of the first checks to Neo back in 2017.)

While Partovi is cautious about discussing unrealized returns when prodded, Neo’s early funds are performing exceedingly well. The first fund is already between three and four times its value, said Partovi, with “potential room for it to double or triple again.” He said the second fund has more than doubled from the Anysphere investment alone.

As for a chilly exit market and how he advises founders to navigate it, Partovi said he instead encourages founders to build enduring value. “I [tell] people not to obsess about making money and obsess more about serving other humans,” he said.

“Build a product that’s so wonderful that other people just love it. Money is the result, not the goal.”

Pictured above, Partovi and his two partners at Neo, Suzanne Xie and Emily Cohen.