Ali Partovi

Career

LinkExchange Partovi co-founded the internet advertising company LinkExchange in 1996 with Tony Hsieh and Sanjay Madan. Alfred Lin later joined as CFO. Microsoft acquired the company in 1998 for $265 million. At the time, LinkExchange placed ads on about 400,000 websites and reached about 21 million consumers.

Partovi has said he was among the first to recognize the commercial potential of paid search. He noted that small business owners were eager to appear in search results.

iLike iLike, an online platform for discovering new artists, grew 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 acquired the assets of GarageBand in 2002. When he and his brother attempted to re-invent the company, iLike was founded in 2006.

iLike built its application on the Facebook Platform, where it became the top music application, gathering millions of users within weeks of its debut. The application included a predecessor to the "like" button; according to The Washington Post, Facebook later built its own "like" button modeled after iLike's. The service let users make playlists and buy music downloads, merchandise, and concert tickets, iLike had a "post-once publish-everywhere" dashboard for artists.

iLike grew to be the largest music application across social networks, with 55 million users. He stopped angel investing around this time. In April 2025, Neo closed a $320 million fund. Partovi made the first investment in Cursor, The acquisition was completed in August 2026.

In 2026, Forbes ranked Partovi first among U.S.-based investors and second worldwide on its Midas Seed list of early-stage investors, and cited his early investment in Cursor. In April 2026, The Wall Street Journal reported that Neo had turned a $150 million fund raised in 2021 into $1.2 billion, a rare result for venture funds from that year.

Philanthropy Partovi's philanthropic work focuses on computer science education. He also served on the board of directors of FoodCorps, a school-food nonprofit.

Code.org Partovi created Code.org in 2013 as a non-profit initiative to promote computer science, and the two brothers funded the initiative. Partovi believes that everyone in the world should be able to read and write code, yet many American public schools do not offer computer science classes. 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. In his op-ed "Immigrants are Humans," Partovi wrote that he and other immigrants had been deported as 12-year-olds and that 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).