About this episode

Ali Partovi discusses his experiences and insights on investing and identifying outlier talent as the CEO of Neo.

Ali Partovi is the Co-founder and CEO of Neo. Neo started in 2017 as a network for the top college students. Neo is a “people-first” investor, a thesis it developed missing out on early investments in PayPal and Google at three employees. Neo has since invested in the Seed rounds of Cursor and Kalshi, and Ali shares everything he’s learned about spotting outlier talent, how to hire the best people, how computer science is the best business education, and why the best entrepreneurs start young. Special thanks to Hadi Partovi, Fuzzy Khosrowshahi, Alan Shusterman, and Claire Shorall for their help brainstorming topics for Ali. Thank you to Numeral, Flex, and Amplitude for supporting this episode Numeral: The end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance https://www.numeral.com Flex: Get premium banking and a net 60 day credit card at 0% APY https://home.flex.one/referral/bananacapital Amplitude: AI analytics, all you have to do is ask https://www.amplitude.com Timestamps: (0:09) Neo’s two 10x funds (2:19) Missing PayPal led to Neo (9:32) Not investing in Google at 3 employees (11:31) Backing Facebook despite the idea (13:01) Starting Neo to help top college students (17:21) How…

People in this episode

Host: Turner Novak

Guest: Ali Partovi

Topics covered

• outlier talent
• investing
• entrepreneurship
• college students
• hiring
• computer science education

Keywords

• Neo
• outlier talent
• investing
• entrepreneurship
• computer science
• college students
• hiring

Sponsors

Numeral, Flex, Amplitude

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Neo, PayPal, Google, Facebook, Code.org, Cursor, Kalshi

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