Reasonably Happy
Reasonably Happy with Paul Ollinger
$50 Million Mistakes (w/ Ali Partovi)
0:00
-56:01

$50 Million Mistakes (w/ Ali Partovi)

The horrible error Ali committed in a meeting with Steve Jobs

Ali Partovi is an Iranian-American entrepreneur and angel investor. He is best known as a co-founder of Code.org, iLike, and LinkExchange. He was an early investor in Airbnb, Dropbox, Facebook, and Uber. Ali grew up in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war, attended Harvard, and sold his first startup, LinkExchange, in 1998.

On this episode, Ali and I discuss:

  • The GIANT MISTAKE he made in a meeting with Steve Jobs

  • The not-quite-as-terrible mistake he made when meeting with Jerry Yang of Yahoo!

  • The challenges of building a business on the Facebook platform

  • How being an immigrant shaped his career and worldview

Ali is currently the CEO of Neo, a mentorship community and venture fund he established in 2017.

Reasonably Happy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Discussion about this episode

User's avatar