20VC: How I Lost a $125M Deal with Yahoo by Being Too Honest, The M&A Meeting with Steve Jobs That Did Not Go Well and How U2's Bono Saved The Day For One Tech Startup with Ali Partovi, CEO @ Neo

**Harry Stebbings** (0:00)
Welcome back, this is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And today we have a show that was literally four years in the making, but we made it happen, and it's a great one. So with that, I'm thrilled to welcome Ali Partovi, CEO at Neo, a mentorship community and communal VC fund that announced their new $150 million fund late last year on the back of early hits from Fund I, including Vanta and Kalshi. As an angel, Ali also made personal investments in, check this out, Dropbox, Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Convoy and more. Such an incredible angel portfolio there. And prior to investing, Ali founded two companies. The first, LinkExchange, which he sold to Microsoft for $265 million in 1998 And the second, I Like, which was acquired by MySpace in 2009 I'd also want to say a huge thank you to Tarik at Kalshi and Alfred Lin at Sequoia. Some fantastic question suggestions today. I really did so appreciate that. But before we move into the show today, from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. Now, there are three things for me that really stood out about why I love Squarespace. First, mobile optimized websites. All websites are optimized for mobile with Squarespace, so content automatically adjusts. So your site looks great no matter what device it's on. Pretty awesome. Second, email campaigns. Squarespace makes it super easy to grow and engage your audience with Squarespace email campaigns. Say what? No other provider needed? That is so great. And finally, SEO tools. Squarespace takes the guesswork out of SEO.
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You have now arrived at your destination.
Ali, my friend, I've been so looking forward to this one. I heard so many great things, especially from Alfred Lim before the show. So thank you so much for joining me today, Ali.

**Ali Partovi** (3:36)
My pleasure. It's such a pleasure to be here.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:38)
I would love to start here with a little bit of storytelling, though, in the way that, you know, bluntly, it was a different route into Venture. So tell me, how did you make your move from operating into the world of Venture and most recently come to found Neo?

**Ali Partovi** (3:49)
Yeah, so Neo is a, I call it a mentorship community. It's a diverse mentorship community and VC fund. Our mission is to identify America's most promising CS students and help them become tomorrow's tech leaders. I'd say I started Neo because I wish existed when I was a college student. And it's also what I wish existed when I was a young founder. When I was 24, the most important lesson I learned as a founder was the importance of people. I realized that the people we hired made the difference between success and failure. And the first five or 10 are most important because they hire the next 50 or 100 And in particular, I also learned the importance of betting on young people. It's funny you mentioned Alfred because at my first startup, Alfred was a part-time accountant. He was a friend of ours from college. In the first year or so, I was kind of anti-Alfred. The other co-founders knew him better. And they're like, this guy's brilliant. And I was like, why are we having somebody who is PhD student at Stanford at the time, part-time? My co-founders were suggesting we should make him our CFO. And I was like, what are you talking about? He's our age. We should have somebody older with more experience as our CFO. Why would we bet on somebody so young who's never done that before? And so for about a year, Alfred reported to me and I was trying to find someone with more experience to manage him. That was so wrong, such a mistake. It's because I didn't realize the importance of betting on young people and that talent is more important than experience. I mean, they're both important, but if you have to choose, I would always rather bet on a brilliant, hardworking young person and their potential to grow than somebody who has the resume and the experience but may not have the energy or the brilliance. And we made Alfred our CFO.