Hadi Partovi: How I Became an Advisor to Mark Zuckerberg; Lessons from Steve Ballmer | 20VC #961

Hadi, I'm so excited for this. I spoke to Alfred Lin, I spoke to your brother, I spoke to Emil Michael, I spoke to many others. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here, uh, and, and thank you for all the folks you talked to and the research you did before us talking.

I know. As I said, it's, it's so funny, 'cause I know so much about you and you know nothing about me. What a joyous asynchronous, uh, discussion we're gonna have. Uh, but I wanna start with, uh, a fantastic, uh, start, being how did you make your way into the world of startups first? And then most recently, skipping a few steps, uh, how did you come to found code.org?

I got into the world of startups first, honestly, s- starting my own or watching my brother start, uh, LinkExchange when, when we were 22 or so. He quit sort of the big company job to start LinkExchange with Tony Hsieh and Sanjay Madan, and Alfred Lin joined that startup then. And when I was 26, I think, I quit Microsoft to, to start my own startup, Tellme Networks, with my former enemies from Netscape. So I'd always had an ent- entrepreneurship in me, uh, but really it was when I turned 30 that I began investing in startups, advising startups, shifting into more angel investing. And the reason I started code.org is after, uh, a decade of working in tech myself and a decade of investing in companies, I realized every single company struggles with the challenge of hiring great talent, and it's not that there's not smart people in the world, it's that our school system isn't teaching the right courses to prepare people for a future of technology. And so I started code.org with the idea of changing the, the curriculum of schools globally so that education better prepares people for a future that's, that's really being invented through technology and software.

So we're gonna get to kind of the re-imagining of education. I do, I do wanna ask, in terms of kind of your education and the makings of Hadi, I believe we're all functions of our histories. When you look back, what are you running from, first, and then looking forward, what do you think you're running towards, Hadi?

When I look back and what am I running from? Uh, I grew up in Tehran, Iran. Uh, you know, my early childhood from when I was six years old was a childhood of revolution and war, the morality police, worrying about my mother getting arrested, uh, j- just for any random thing, worrying about bombs destroying our household ev- you know, every night we were in the basement while, while the, the neighborhood was getting bombed. And then when we came to the United States, our family as immigrants were poor. We couldn't afford a home. Uh, my mom and dad and my brother and I shared one bed, uh, and, you know-