Ali Partovi

Ali Partovi was born alongside his twin brother Hadi Partovi amid the White Revolution of Iran and the Iran-Iraq war. Both his parents were intellectuals. 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. Ali and Hadi began coding when they were ten on a Commodore 64 their father had brought from a seminar he had attended abroad. The family fled to the United States during the Iranian Revolution. Ali and Hadi both went on to acquire both Bachelor's and master's degrees in Computer Science from Harvard University, where they were members of Sigma Chi. == Career ==

LinkExchange Partovi joined Tony Hsieh and Sanjay Mandan in 1996 to co-partner in the establishment of the internet company LinkExchange. The three were later joined by Alfred Lin who served as CFO. Partovi says that he was recruited for his computer programming skills and his business management skills. At the time, LinkExchange reached 400,000 sites and about 21 million consumers. Partovi was one of the first people to recognize the paid search opportunity because he saw how badly small business owners wanted their businesses to show up on search results. In 1998, LinkExchange acquired Submit It!, started by college-dropout Scott Bannister, which helped owners submit URLs to search engines. iLike This online platform, meant to help users discover new artists spawned out of GarageBand. GarageBand was established in 1999 as a site where an independent artist could post their music, and other users would discover them. Partovi had bought the assets of GarageBand in 2002 and had saved it from bankruptcy. Neo From 1998 to 2017, Partovi backed tech companies including Facebook, Airbnb, Dropbox, Uber, and Zappos. Partovi stopped Angel Investing around this time as this new company includes a venture fund. The company identifies top Computer Science students and accelerates their careers by introducing them and investing in their startups. == Philanthropy ==

Partovi's philanthropy work is focused on computer science education. Code.org Partovi created Code.org in 2013 as a non-profit initiative to promote computer science, and the two brothers funded the initiative. Code.org launched a short video featuring Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, and others to inspire kids to learn how to code. This video garnered over 15 million views on YouTube. Code.org also established Hour of Code, a tutorial that introduces students to programming. == Personal life ==

Partovi grew up playing the piano with his brother and is an avid musician. As an immigrant himself, he is passionate about legislation affecting immigrant populations, including foreign and educational policies. He has spoken out about the restrictive consequences of the recent immigration bills passed in the United States. In his article, 'Immigrants are Humans,' Partovi states how he and other immigrants had been deported as 12-year-olds and how such policies do not help anybody and hurt America. As of 2019, Partovi has four children from two marriages. Partovi's cousins include Dara Khosrowshahi, Amir Khosrowshahi (co-founder of Nervana Systems), and Farzad "Fuzzy" Khosrowshahi (co-founder XL2Web which was acquired to become Google Sheets). == References ==